I arrived at the Philadelphia airport late Saturday morning following the Ubuntu Developers Summit. The flight out of Dallas at 6-something AM after the UDS wrap-up the night before was a challenge, but I made it. I ended up sleeping the entire flight in a feat of airplane sleeping success that still amazes me, I don’t typically have trouble napping, but sleeping for a whole flight? Wow! I met MJ at the airport, as we scheduled our flights to come in on the same morning, he was staying for the week of Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately he ended up with a cold during his visit, but we had a nice time otherwise. We talked about some plans with regard to my move out to San Francisco in February (moving week is the week of Feb 14th). Thanksgiving was spent with his family, less than half of whom I’d met prior to this. There was turkey and football and all the predictable trimmings, and I was terribly shy as I always am in “meet the family” situations (ok, and in a lot of situations!). I also spent some time tagging along as he visited some local friends over the weekend.
I hate saying goodbye after visits, he flew out Sunday after Thanksgiving with only tentative plans to visit again before the move. Luckily those plans are no longer tentative, he’s flying out again for New Years :) To cheer me up after seeing him off Sunday night I ended up doing some shopping and swung by the brand new LA Fitness in Pottstown. I walked out with a membership. I got my first gym membership in 2006 with LA Fitness when I was working for Tyco. When I took the job with LinuxForce and no longer had a local LA Fitness to visit I ended up with a membership at the local YMCA. Given my transient state home-wise last year I ended up canceling that membership once my year-long commitment was satisfied, so I’ve been without a gym membership for over a year. I’d been playing with the idea of getting a membership at a local “cheap and in a shopping center” gym for a while but never went through with it (no pools? *pout*). The building of this new LA Fitness within 10 easy minutes of where I live was exciting, I’ve put on weight since the divorce and I’m really not feeling great about it. Plus I felt terribly out of shape and getting out to the gym gives me a place to go after work where I can be around people. Plus they have a pool! Win all around!
Monday I ended up with MJ’s cold, woke up with a terrible sore throat and terrible congestion. By Wednesday I was in the midst of cold coma – I’m so glad I work from home, otherwise I would have missed work over this, pretty much every day that week was spent either working or sleeping. I spent the weekend recovering too, I didn’t actually start feeling much better until last Tuesday and even now have a worse than normal cough lingering. I hate colds.
Last Tuesday was PLUG North and a great Nagios presentation by Andrew Libby. After which I had my first meal with others where I actually felt like a human again (did I mention it was a bad cold?). Wednesday evening was the first Ubuntu Women meeting on IRC since UDS, notes here. The team has a lot to work through but we’re moving forward on selecting a leader for the next 6 months (not me, with a move across the country coming up I don’t have time!). I spent the rest of this week catching up on a million project things I didn’t get to during the week of Thanksgiving or while I was sick. I still haven’t fully caught up (if I owe you an email, sorry! I will try to get to them all soon).
Saturday I attended the Northeast USA indoor “holiday geeknic” – which means we all went to the local Pinball Parlour and played pinball with a bunch of people for a couple hours and then headed out to dinner.
Sunday was spent at home doing some more catch up, some shopping and cleaning and by doing experiments on cats. One consideration with this move is cat transport, as they’re both coming with me to California (of course!). The options were: carry-on, checked luggage or cargo. My experiment was a vet-approved test to see how they’d behave after taking a small dosage of an anti-anxiety medication. How’d they do? Failed. The medication was a mild sedative so they had some trouble walking (poor kitties!) but when I packed them up in their carrier and drove them around for a couple hours they had no trouble meowing frequently. I think my cats are just too vocal to be good airplane cabin companions. The checked luggage option ended up being expensive and not fantastic, plus the temperature restrictions were troublesome for flying out of Philly in Feburary. Cargo? Sounds scary right? Turns out that Delta has pretty reasonable rates for pets as cargo, they could fly on a Delta flight we choose the same day we fly out, and their service seems safe and attentive to pets. Cargo it is!
MJ has been awesome through all this move planning, which is great because while I am good at being calm and patient about most things, moving gets under my skin. As I start to inventory the things I own, it’s so tempting to get out a big garbage can (or donation bag) and start purging “stuff I don’t really need” because I can’t be bothered to move it. His reassurance that storage space is available and he’ll help me handle the details of shipping has been quite soothing on my troubled mind. I’m trying not to worry about it. There are a lot of things I still need to sort through – getting health insurance out in CA (my current plan only covers PA), details related to selling my car, getting all kinds of other little things wrapped up here in PA. I have a very nice, almost new (a year old) queen size mattress and box spring I’d like to get rid of during the week of the move (so I can sleep on it until then!) and I need to get rid of my ancient dresser (falling apart a bit, but has a nice huge mirror), and a couple old CRT TVs, all of which will end up at Good Will unless I find better homes for them. Ugh, I am getting tired just writing about the move, how terrible is that?
The gym membership is working out better than I expected so far, upon emerging from my cold I’ve been going pretty frequently. A couple times late last week, hit the pool on Monday, got a really nice, impressively long cardio workout done yesterday. Good news is it turns out that in spite of the weight I’ve put on, I’m not actually as out of shape as I thought. I’ll keep it up, getting out of the apartment to hit the gym is making me feel great.
Plans for the rest of the month… more of the same. I decorated and got a little fake tree decorated with lights, but Christmas won’t be a big holiday for me this year, instead I’ll be celebrating New Years more. More move planning, more catching up on project work. There are also some things I’d like to do before moving away from Philadelphia, so I’ll see what (and who!) I can squeeze in for visits in the next couple months. I’m also flying my mother down to visit in the middle of January for a long weekend, which will be the first time she’s been to a place I’ve lived since leaving home.
And now it’s past my bedtime. Haven’t been sleeping great this past week or so (very unusual for me, I’m an expert sleeper!) so here’s hoping tonight is better.
Thursday, Dec 17th, 2009 at 7:39
Moving in the week of February the 14th? How romantic….. intentional or coincidental?
When you are settle on SF, will you be attending the “San Francisco’s International Beer Festival 2010”?
Had a look at a youtube video of this years, and it looked amazing!
Thursday, Dec 17th, 2009 at 15:47
It sounds like the decision is already made with regard to cat travel, but did you look into Pet Airways?
Thursday, Dec 17th, 2009 at 15:50
@RoboNuggie Regarding the timing – a bit of both, MJ is unavailable early in February and so it had to be that week or later, and I didn’t want it to be later :) And I didn’t know about that beer Festival, I might have to check it out, thanks!
@katie We actually looked into that, but the airports they service are very limited. I think it ended up being that we’d have to fly them out of one of the NYC airports and to LAX – which means 3 hours of driving to drop them off, and something like 4-5 hours of driving on the California side to pick them up. Plus it was pretty expensive.
Thursday, Jan 22nd, 2015 at 0:16
I hate saying goodbye after visit too :)