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The Adventures of 2025

I feel like my life turned a corner in 2025. The kids became more slightly self-sufficient, I can step away for a shower or curl up and read a book while they’re otherwise occupied, which has been really helpful to my mental health. Speaking of which, I explored some things about myself and what I need with a therapist, and that has started to help me find my place as a mother who is also committed to her career and hobbies. I had several high-profile successes at work, which really propelled what was already shaping up to be a busy year, and I have a lot to be proud of.

We had the usual cuts, bruises, illnesses and infections throughout the year and a couple trips to urgent care. This included my own struggle with tendentious in my right elbow, which is finally getting better. Nothing major health-wise though, which I’m really grateful for. Aaron has started going to public school with Adam, entering Transitional Kindergarten as Adam went to 1st grade. I’m happy to say that’s going well too, I even joked the other day that the only one who cried on the first day of school was me.

In August we expanded our family by one fluffy member by adopting Zara the cat. She’s been an excellent addition to the family, and even if having a pet does add to the daily chores, it’s totally worth it to have a fluffy friend living with us again.

We also said goodbye one car and added two minivans to our family, finally retiring MJ’s 2000 Alero and replacing the family cars both here and in Philly with a pair of nearly identical Kia Carnivals.

Over the summer we spent six weeks in Philadelphia visiting with family and took a little side vacation up to New England to explore Boston and visit with my sister and my nephew, coming home with a trailer behind us so I could get my other sister out of her ancient storage unit.

At work, 2025 was the year IBM launched the IBM z17 mainframe. I participated in a bunch of launch activities, including writing A Tour Inside the IBM z17 where I get to put on my hardware enthusiast hat and dig through technical manuals to discover gems about the release to share. For the IBM LinuxONE 5 launch the following month I joined my Linux peers at the Red Hat Summit where we hosted a popular IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade. That’s also where we announced the launch of our hosted GitHub Actions service for IBM Z and Power, which I’d been working on for more than a year.

In the fall I took my IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade on the road with a stop at IBM TechXchange, where I was able to showcase it at the booth, and do a TON of open source stuff. Bonus, I was asked to help with an unboxing of a mainframe live on the expo hall floor, which was a ton of fun. It’s pretty rare that someone like me on the software side gets the opportunity to physically handle a mainframe!

At GitHub Universe and Ohio LinuxFest I had the opportunity to meet up with a bunch of my open source pals, so while work travel was somewhat limited this year, I took full advantage of the opportunities that did arise.

It wasn’t my biggest speaking year either, but it was the right amount for the number of other things I had going on, especially around the launches.

It was a busy year, but for the first time in a while it was busy in a way that felt really rewarding. With kids who can now do a lot for themselves (and no more diapers!), a lot more of our energy could be put toward crafting and enjoying time together doing things we love.

In 2026 as the boys start getting involved in more organized activities, I think we might calm down some of our weekend adventures to give us all some time to rest, but we’ll see! We do love going on adventures.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2026 at 12:16 pm and is filed under EOY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.