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My past month of warriors, bread and a baby giraffe

Since returning from the honeymoon a month ago our lives have continued to be very busy, catching up with work and projects while we were gone and catching up with all other life stuff we postponed while we were preparing for the wedding.

Because we have been so overwhelmed, I gave Instacart a try and had some groceries delivered from Safeway and Whole Foods. It went well and the couple hours it saved was a huge relief. Not sure if I’ll stick with them or try other grocery delivery services, but it’s great to know that it’s available when we simply don’t have the time on weekends to get the major shopping trips completed.

About a week after returning home, I met up with Grant Bowman and Christian Einfeldt for a Partimus board meeting. It was great to be able to catch up with everything and make some small, concrete plans for moving forward that took into account our busy schedules. I was also able to work with James Howard on a blog post for the Partimus blog about some work they were doing while MJ and I were getting married on April 28th: CACS laptop install day wrap-up

With the release of Ubuntu 13.04, I participated in Ubuntu Open Week with a session on the Ubuntu Women Project. I also was able to work with the Xubuntu docs folks to upload the 13.04 version of our documentation to docs.xubuntu.org/1304/ and install a new splash page at docs.xubuntu.org itself where we will keep all of the documentation for current stable releases. I don’t have much to do with Debian these days, but the release of Debian 7.0 while we were gone got me to upgrade most of my servers a couple weeks ago and it went pretty smoothly. I’ve also been working with the Canonical community team to launch community.ubuntu.com a couple weeks ago, which meant lots of content review and scouring for images to include on the site.

Over Memorial Day Weekend we had a lot of errands to catch up on, one of which was finally purchasing a proper bedroom set. We’ve been casually looking for quite some time and ended up coming back to one we saw at a furniture store in Berkeley a couple years ago. Unfortunately the delivery date is 8-12 weeks out for the set with the combination we ordered, so we’ll be waiting some time. On Memorial Day itself we managed to get over to the Asian Art Museum for the last day of their amazing Terracotta Warriors exhibit.

More photos from the exhibit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633750560814/

The week wrapped up with a bread experiment! One of our wedding guests bought us a bread maker, which I’ve so far used to make some white bread and then experimented with making challah fully in the bread machine, which of course makes it come out as a square rather than a traditional braided loaf. So that Friday evening I decided to try making the proper loaf. I used this recipe to start it out in the bread maker (so it would do all the kneading and rising work) and then took it out and braided it. Braiding wasn’t actually as difficult as I had feared, and I had a nice braided loaf to put in the oven:

I think I somehow didn’t let it rise enough, so it rose a lot in the oven and caused some unevenness with how it looked with the egg coating, but it came out tasting and looking pretty much like proper challah, if a bit on the thick side. I’ll give it another try this Friday.

The next day I went to the San Francisco Zoo to visit their newest arrival, a baby giraffe!

She was huge! 5’10” at birth and weighing 130 lbs, these animals are formidable creatures from birth. I was delighted to have the opportunity to not only see her when she was just a little over a week old, but also catch a few minutes of her nursing.

While I was at the zoo I also got to visit the other baby at the zoo – their tiger Jillian! I’ve been to see her a couple of times already, but this was my first time seeing her out in the yard. Got some super-zoomed photos of her snuggling mom, and then a few more of her playing in the yard.

More zoo photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633882815260/

Other miscellaneous things: Went to a BerkeleyLUG meeting recently while we happened to be in the area and needed some lunch (hooray pizza!). After months of not going to the theater, saw Star Trek Into Darkness and The Great Gatsby within a week of each other (still need to see Iron Man 3!). Went to a “State of the Stack” OpenStack meetup where I got to meet Randy Bias, but didn’t talk to anyone else because I’m too shy (d’oh). I have been meeting folks for dinner more recently, as much as I don’t like to believe it, getting out of the house after work really helps break up my day and leads to more productivity in the later evening. Tonight I spent the evening at an Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner.

Finally, I’ve sorted out much of my travel schedule for the next few months. In a couple weeks I’m flying to New York City for the OpenStack CI/Infra Bootcamp with my colleagues. At the end of July MJ and I are heading to Boston for a wedding. And finally in early August we’ll be going to Philadelphia where I’ll be speaking at FOSSCON on Open Source Systems Administration, specifically looking at how we do it in the OpenStack project.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 12th, 2013 at 9:19 pm and is filed under animals, food, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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