A few weeks ago MJ and I flew to Philadelphia to do some visiting with family and so I could speak at LOPSA-East. The timing worked out well since it was also the week of our first anniversary and we got married in Pennsylvania.
We had a wonderful dinner on our anniversary at the same restaurant that we took our family to prior to the wedding.
Our wedding cake came from Bredenbeck’s Bakery in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia and they offer a free anniversary cake in order to curb the “freeze top of cake” tradition. We picked up ours on Monday afternoon and fortunately we were staying in an Extended Stay hotel for most of our stay so we had a refrigerator (and even a big knife, fork and plates!) so we could enjoy the cake over a few days, yum!
As always, it was really nice to be able to catch up with some family and friends while we were in town. It was quite a busy trip though. I’m hoping we can schedule a proper vacation some time this year instead of only having “short trips attached to a conference.” As fun as they can be, I could really use a beach.
Well, a warm beach. We have beaches in northern California. On Saturday on our way home from FeltonLUG where I gave a presentation on Ubuntu 14.04 we took the long route home and were able to enjoy the scenes of Route 1 up the coast. California is truly my favorite place, it is always nice to take a coastal drive for the beautiful reminder.
Finally, it’s not all been roses over here. I’ve been pretty sick on and off since just prior to my trip to Montreal in April for PyCon. I had to take a couple of days off of work, missed the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta last week after an emergency room visit (thankfully we mostly ruled out appendicitis) and have generally been trying to take it easy. Next Tuesday I go in for more diagnostic tests that will hopefully determine what is causing my abdominal pain. In the meantime, small meals and plenty of liquids are getting me through with minimal pain.
Running has taken a back seat since getting sick, but I’m hoping I can get back to it once I get a diagnosis and work out some kind of treatment plan that can factor in cardio workouts again. Being in constant pain (even dull pain) is also exhausting. Every day I’ve had to carefully plan out my work schedule so I can get a full 8 hours in, be cautious about how much personal work I’m doing and cut back on going out so not to get too exhausted and make things worse. Also, as much as I enjoyed catching up with Once Upon a Time and binge watching the first season of The Paradise, I’m now terribly bored of this whole “taking it easy” thing. There’s a reason I work so much!