On September 29th I turned 43 years old. It was actually kind of a bummer, because the boys and I were dreadfully sick with a cold that included fevers. In the days around it, they missed school and everyone slept poorly. We couldn’t go out to swim class, a movie at the theater with Adam’s school, or to the fancy challah baking class Adam and I signed up for.
Thankfully, we didn’t have grand plans for my birthday, and instead I was simply welcomed with a beautifully themed cake as we celebrated with just the immediate family and our former au pair who dropped by with flowers. And no candles, because no one wants someone with a cold blowing on a cake, regardless of the infection status of everyone else.
My birthday present was quite the treat though, tickets to Niles Canyon Railway on their steam train! For two weeks in the future, which was good, because there was no way we were going out on my birthday.
On Tuesday of that week was the culmination of a TON of work: IBM Z Day. I wasn’t a track lead this year, but I put together the developer journey and consulted on several sessions, and I gave a talk in the Academic Symposium with Matt Germonprez of the CHAOSS project about the importance of open source software. I think the session went well, and thankfully I was feeling well enough for it.
On Wednesday night Rosh Hashanah began! I made honey cake with the boys, but unfortunately our bread maker broke and the new one didn’t arrive until Thursday so we couldn’t make round challah before the holiday. We participated in evening services virtually after the boys went to bed, and the next morning I took the boys out to the park to run around for a bit before morning services at 10:30AM, which we also joined virtually. The bread maker also arrived, and while strictly not appropriate to bake challah on Rosh Hashanah, we did anyway. A round challah! Which came out pretty decently. Plus, being able to bake the round challah together helped get over some of the disappointment of missing the fancy challah baking event the weekend before.
In the late afternoon, we cut up a bunch of fruit and figured out how to extract the seeds from a pomegranate to enjoy some fruit and honey.
Happy New Year! We’d like to finally attend services in-person again next year, but things just didn’t come together for it this year, especially with everyone being so sick in the days leading up to it.
If I’m honest, it was a lot for one week. I really wish we hadn’t gotten sick, but with little ones in school it’s tricky to avoid it, as we’d also discover two weeks later when we all got sick again. Oof!