That morning he was more lethargic than usual, and after peeing on the floor at the top of the stairs, he flopped down onto the tile floor. Accidents were becoming a bit more frequent for him, but not this far from his litter box, and I don’t think I’d ever see him rest on the cold tile floor before. Something was wrong. We called his vet and got him at 9:40AM appointment, I went with MJ to take him in. It was quickly apparent that he was quite sick, as the vet who had been treating him for his various age-related ailments wanted to put him on oxygen and suspected there was fluid in his lungs.

A few hours later we heard that they had indeed drained fluid from his lungs, and started on a regional search for a veterinary cardiologist who could see him quickly. It turns out there aren’t many around here right now, and our best bet in the short term would be a facility with a radiologist with a keen eye for heart problems. Our vet made some recommendations, but her predictions were still quite dire, with all his health issues, even with treatment for heart failure best case was that he only had a few more months. They kept him under observation for the rest of the day, and then gave us even more troubling news, when they took him off the oxygen treatment, he still wasn’t breathing well on his own, and they were transferring him to an emergency veterinary hospital.

On the drive over I sat in the back seat with him, and even I could tell that his breathing was labored. By the time we got across town, the emergency vet said she was surprised he had made it, and they immediately put him on oxygen before delivering the final blow to us: based on her experience, there was about a 50% chance he would pass away on his own overnight while they waited for the specialist to look at his heart. If he made it through the night, he might have a month left to live. It was time to make the decision of whether to euthanize. We agonized over it, but ultimately decided it was time, and we went home to pick up the boys.

And so that evening we said goodbye to our beloved Caligula. We brought his cat bed and one of his favorite toys. He was on oxygen as we crowded into the small exam room to give him final kisses and pets, and explained it all very clearly and directly to the boys. He passed away quietly with all of us there with him.

I was absolutely heartbroken as we left the vet that night and came home to our cat-free home. It’s taken me over a week to even write this.

We had him cremated. I picked up the ashes on Wednesday, and with that my heart broke all over again.

This grief will take some time to work through. He’d been my daily companion for most of my adult life, we’d been through so much together. I love you, Caligula. I miss you dearly.

In these two weeks before I go into the hospital I’m taking time to finish up personal and house projects, write (hello!), and do as much as we can to prepare for the new little one. One of the first things I tackled was finally getting a little bit of art put up in my bathroom. I searched around a lot for something that resonated and came up empty. That’s when I realized that I should just go all in Me and use one of my green streetcar photos (the bathroom is green and purple). It came out better than I expected, I’m really pleased.

We also had some much-needed electrical work done in the kitchen and FINALLY managed to get a vendor to provide a quote for the composite fence we want. Both are big to do list items house-wise, so while boring, it does feel nice to have them move along. The crib is also set up in my home office where it will live while I’m on maternity leave.

I’ve been working to figure out Thanksgiving and Hanukkah plans. We’re going to order a Thanksgiving dinner, but we’re still a bit uncertain as to where from, and stores are already starting to sell out of things and I need to decide soon. Hanukkah will happen after the birth, but I want to be ready with wrapped presents and everything is set up before we go into the hospital, since I know I’ll be too tired and sore to do it after.

Thankfully, the cool weather and rain have started to roll in for the winter. We’ve had clear skies here for a few weeks, but the fire risk has remained high so we’ve had to stay vigilant, with an eye on the air quality. The changing weather should pave the way for the conclusion of fire season, and we’ve been finally able to shut off the air conditioning!

I was also able to bring Caligula into the vet this week. We’re still waiting on some test results, but we’re already seeing some real concerns as he approaches his 17th birthday next month. But one of the hidden benefits of all of us being home bound with this pandemic is that we don’t have any trips interrupting our time with him right now, he never likes it when we’re away for a while.

Speaking of the pandemic, things are getting bad again. We’re sitting here at the beginning of the holiday season (Happy Diwali!) and cases are already rising fast nation-wide. Our county, along with most of California, was quickly thrust back into a more restrictive tier with little notice to try to stem the looming crisis, and hospitals are preparing for a large inrush of patients. It’s a scary time to be preparing for a hospital visit that I can’t avoid. Giving birth is not elective, and it’s quite time-based! Maternity wards are traditionally separate from the rest of the hospital for security and medical safety, and the sanctity of that area will never be compromised, but I do still worry about being in a hospital during what could very well be the worst phase of this pandemic. I think the biggest risk is that I will need emergency care related to the birth after we’re discharged. I hope I can get it if I need it.

The other big news this November has been the election in the US. The Trump administration has caused a considerable amount of heartache, fear, and straight up loss of rights for so many of my loved ones. Living in a state that a sitting president is openly vindictive against has been a roller coaster. Even my own family has been impacted with the rise in anti-Semitic sentiment and crimes nationwide. When MJ and I had a Jewish wedding seven years ago, I happily agreed to raise our children Jewish. I would make the same choice again, but given the political climate today I would have a lot more to consider if I were making the decision again. It’s been a long time since I naive enough to believe we lived in a post-racial society, but living in a coastal bubble with diverse neighbors and doing a lot of international travel for the past decade has wildly skewed my perceptions. As I watched the progressive changes made during the Obama administration to increase access to health care for everyone and extend rights for my LGBTQ+ loved ones, I believed we were moving toward a better future in a unified way. So I was naive enough to believe that. I do still believe the pockets of bigotry are shrinking, and I have hope for the future, but they are tempered with a large dose of reality from these past four years. It was with that optimism that MJ and I went to the polls on November 3rd.

The next several days were nerve-wracking as the initial numbers showed a close race, but with Biden solidly leading at this point, even with impending legal challenges, I feel much better. Biden wasn’t my first choice, and I won’t be shy about voicing my opinion when they inevitably get things wrong, but the freedom to do so is one of the things I love about the United States. Ultimately we have a lot of work to do and we have to be prepared for the long haul. But at least we’ll have a politician who wants to do right by all the American people and won’t be aggressive to states and departments he doesn’t like. I hope to see my sons grow up in a kinder, safer world than we live in today.

Having him there with us was a real treat. The first few days he was a little nervous and uncertain about such a big place, compared to the condo, and all the stairs. We kept his litter box and food upstairs and he spent a lot of his time up there, making the guest room his own and enjoying the carpets upstairs. As the visit progressed he got comfortable with the whole townhouse and rekindled his love for fireplaces each evening with us, I even got him a blanket to sleep on in front of it. He also enjoyed the deck, even though it was pretty cold out throughout the trip.

The length and timing of our trip, partially influenced by coming in few days early to speak at an open source event, meant that we had to split our celebration of Hanukkah between coasts. The first night was spent in San Francisco before MJ flew out, and we spent the rest in Philadelphia. Splitting the nights like that certainly drew attention to the fact that our menorahs are accidentally identical.

Final night of Hanukkah, in Philadelphia

Going in a bit early also meant we had to change our plans for The Last Jedi. I had some great tickets at the Metreon in San Francisco, purchased when tickets were released, but I had to give them up and switch to a theater near the townhouse in Philadelphia. I would have liked to see it in a fancy IMAX, but seeing it at all on opening night was the bigger priority for me. The day after coming in MJ and I made our way over to Philadelphia Mills to see it. The movie didn’t disappoint!

Unfortunately, what did disappoint was my health. I’d had a cough that was troublesome for several weeks, but that allowed a sinus infection to creep in without me noticing. Even worse, it manifested in my eyes. After a particularly bad day and night with teary, gooey eyes, I had MJ bring me to the local urgent care, where they gave me some medicine and diagnosed the sinus infection. Thankfully I was still able to work, even if the sinus pain was incredibly unpleasant at times. The weather didn’t help though. It snowed enough to shovel in our neighborhood three times while we were there, and the whole northeast was hit by an incredible cold spell that plunged temperatures into the single digits. I got to use my waterproof winter boots and snow shovel for the first time, which was only novel for about five minutes into shoveling. Still, we didn’t have much that took us out during the worst of the snow, and I do actually enjoy the snow once I’m warned up and don’t have to drive in it.

While we were in town we decided to get some work done on the townhouse. We’d been meaning to add some final security features and get proper WiFi access points installed on each floor. This required several days of low-voltage work which cut into the ceiling on all three floors. There was drywall dust everywhere, and Caligula enjoyed rolling in it. The patch work was top-notch though and it was a real relief to finally have it all completed after Christmas. During this work we also re-ran some cabling behind the TV, which allowed for us to more properly install the PlayStation 4 that we picked up during our visit, thanks to holiday sales. A water softener was also installed while we were there. The shower door in the master bathroom was the most obvious sign of hard water day to day in the townhouse, so I cleaned it after the water softener was put in and was very happy when it stayed clear for the rest of our visit.

Not all was great with the townhouse on this trip though. Just before New Years I noticed a telltale moisture stain on the ceiling of the master bedroom. MJ immediately climbed up to the attic and discovered frost covering the ceiling. I won’t go into details here, but it’ll suffice to say some improperly completed work earlier in the year, exacerbated by the extremely cold weather, caused it. The holiday delayed response, but a restoration company was called in on January 2nd and Caligula and I had to stay longer to oversee the fleet of dryers and dehumidifiers brought in to dry it out. It was stressful, but the extra time in town did give me time to sync up with a couple friends, and see The Last Jedi again. I also got to pull out my model train for the final few days there and get it running smoothly with the root beer smelling smoke!

When it was finally time for us to leave several days later, the attic was dry and Caligula and I were delivered to the airport by a friend on Sunday evening. This time he wasn’t a great passenger. The poor critter vomited in his carrier at the gate, causing me to rush off to the restroom to clean up before the flight. He also meowed a lot during the flight itself. I think my mistake was taking an evening flight. He slept through most of our daytime flight in December, but the evening is when he likes to be awake. Being stuffed under the seat of a plane for five hours wasn’t to his liking. The flight was also pretty turbulent, which I’m sure didn’t help.

Still, we got across the country OK and MJ picked us up on the San Francisco side. Caligula immediately settled back into his familiar condo home, camping out on his Lion King blanket for the next couple of days. Our next trip back east will be sans cat, but I now expect it to be some time in late March. We have tickets to see City Hall station in New York City then, so I’m trying to figure out how to best schedule our visit.

We spent Tuesday through Friday at home between Dublin and Los Angeles. I was able to catch up with a bunch of work post-travel and went into the office on Wednesday, as I do when I’m in town. I ducked out of my office a little early to head over to the Microsoft office in San Francisco. It was just before MesosCon and I wanted to meet up with my fellow DevOps track lead to make sure we were all set. We enjoyed some coffee and went back to to the office to hack on a few things before evening crept up and I had to make my way home. It was fun, I’m not much of an office person but I do enjoy visiting other people’s offices to work now and then.

The condo has been hot this month. Thankfully we missed the record-breaking 100+ temperatures, but even when it’s 85 degrees outside, our 11th floor unit gets very little breeze and it heats up quickly. A small standing A/C unit helps a little, but it’s mostly for taking the edge off the worst of the heat. The heat got even worse one night when our old toaster oven caught on fire. I quickly learned how much of a pain it is to clean up after a dry chemical fire extinguisher, but no damage was done. We picked up a new toaster oven after I got back from LA, and Caligula was pretty excited because he got to enjoy the toaster oven box until I put it away.

I returned from LA just in time for MJ to head out of town the next day for work, just a few days before Rosh Hashanah. But I did have him back in time to celebrate together on Thursday the 21st. We typically go to the evening services and the daytime services on Rosh Hashanah and this year was no different. The daytime services concluded with a Tashlich at Crissy Field, near the Golden Gate Bridge and it was a beautiful day for it.

I also attempted to make a round challah! It was more square than round, but I also did an experiment to make it with honey and it turned out really nice and moist. So next year I know to still make it with honey, but work harder on actually making it round.

The day after a bunch of standing and walking for Rosh Hashanah, I decided I needed to see a doctor about my ankle. While I was at Newgrange in Dublin I twisted it pretty badly. Walking on it in Los Angeles through tar pits and two conferences didn’t do me any favors. I think standing on it during services was the last straw, it was hurting that day I went to the doctor more than it had when I first injured myself three weeks before. That trip to the doctor led me to get x-rays, and x-rays hinted at a break which sent me to an orthopedist the following Monday. Of course that meant I spent the whole weekend worried about whether I’d broken my foot. Ugh.

Thankfully there was no break, but I did get to discover the open source Aeskulap DICOM Viewer and so I got to see pictures of my bones! I was instructed to rest my ankle, since I had clearly done more damage to it. It kept me working from home all week, except for a local conference on Wednesday where I was giving a talk. Fortunately, the talk was only fifteen minutes long and after spending a bit of time at our booth, I was able to grab a ride back home for some more ice and Aleve.

The talk was a shortened version of my Day 2 Operations talk. Given the 15 minutes I had, I was able to take a more playful spin as I explored four myths around operations and containers:

1. Containers will solve all your problems! (they solve a lot of problems, but create new ones)
2. Green fields! (no, you still often have complicated legacy infrastructure)
3. Everything is already automated! (it’s not, but most things have APIs now to hook into existing tooling, nice!)
4. No more planning! (easier to deploy, but make time to add in logging, metrics, maintenance plans)

I enjoyed the 15 minute format, it felt a bit rushed, but it also caused me to yank out a lot of slides that were “here’s a list of technologies that do this” and focus more on the overall message. Though I always do feel weird telling ops folks they still need logging and metrics in this world of containers, the message is always well-received as they bring it back to their workplaces to argue for the time to build better a more maintainable system. Slides here.

Thanks to Rachel Dines for taking a photo during my talk! source

I wish I had been able to spend more time at the conference though, it was the Sysdig Camp-Con-World-Fest-Summit and there were a number of generalist container and metrics talks that would have been interesting to see. It was nice to meet up with fellow speakers at a speaker dinner at The Slanted Door in Ferry Building the Monday before the event though, we even got to eat clouds for dessert! Alas, foot-wise I needed to take care of myself.

That night I had to cancel some of my other plans as well, but I did pay for a ticket to see Ellen Pao speak on Resetting Silicon Valley so that made my priority list. In spite of my sore ankle, I’m glad I went. Stories of systematic sexism are never easy to hear, but I really enjoyed hearing about Project Include and their 87 Recommendations for companies looking to increase diversity and inclusiveness. The interview with Pao gave me hope for the future of diversity and inclusiveness, as not only projects like these are popping up, but there’s a much stronger understanding of and push back against the now acknowledged problems of sexism, racism, ageism and more in Silicon Valley.

Friday was my 36th birthday! The chaos of travel lately and the evening of my birthday landing on Yom Kippur made it so my birthday was considerably more low key than it’s been in previous years. We skipped a proposed getaway up to Tahoe in favor of a much-needed weekend at home, and went across the street to Fogo de Chao for a wonderful, filling birthday meal before the sun set and we were off to Kol Nidre services and into a day long fast. My best friend did send me flowers though, which was an incredibly sweet surprise. I also accepted the free dessert offered at Fogo, having been interested in their grilled pineapple dessert for some time but usually too full at the end of my meal to even think about dessert. They decorated accordingly!

Yesterday morning I met up with my friend Laura for breakfast. She’s in town for the huge Oracle conference that’s been under construction at Moscone for several days. One of my colleagues is speaking at the conference, but I’m off to Orlando tonight to help out with the Mesosphere booth at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. We only get to catch up in person a couple times a year, and now that my role is on the developer advocacy side, I have a ton to learn from her experiences doing this professionally for several years. She shared tips about working with a budget, “on call” rotations for covering social media, Slack and other community-driven resources and goal setting. In spite of doing this on a volunteer basis for various communities over the years, there’s a lot to learn once you’re in a position when you’re being paid to help engage a community, even if you’re passionate and excited about your work. I have much to think about after our conversation and I look forward to sharing it with the rest of my team.

Grace Hopper will take up the rest of my week. On Friday after the event concludes I’ll be staying with some friends for the night, one of whom is another developer advocate who I met through the Ubuntu community. No doubt we’ll have lots to talk about and catch up on. I’m flying home Saturday night, and staying in San Francisco for just under two weeks before I’m off again. Next adventure? All Things Open, MesosCon in Prague, various Meetups in Germany and then CubaConf. I’ve got my month cut out for me! I’m also pleased to have booked our trip back to Philadelphia over Thanksgiving and gotten kitty care worked out for that. It’ll be nice to have some family time and get back to the townhouse for a week or so.

I kept busy on the home front while he traveled, including the meetups and another trip to the California Academy of Sciences I talked about here.

The morning following the Redis meetup at work I had to spend a couple hours taking Caligula to the cardiologist. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but he has high calcium levels according to a few blood tests. They are high enough that they need to be treated before it does damage, so the first order of business is finding out what is wrong. During the diagnostic tests they found an abnormality with his heart. We still don’t know why his calcium levels are high, but we’ve ruled out some of the major issues and now his primary doctor wants to craft a treat-the-symptom plan. But first, she wanted him to see a cardiologist, since typical treatments like SubQ fluids and steroids can impact the heart. Our regular veterinary practice doesn’t have a cardiologist in their rotation, so he was off to SFVS, a hospital we got very familiar with as Simcoe went there routinely for care during her last few years with us, and so we were back again!

In spite of friendliness at home, Caligula is never very charming when he visits the vet. Thankfully, he was on his best behavior this time. The physical exam went fine, and since he was being so chill they figured they wouldn’t have to sedate him for further tests. Great! He was whisked away into the back for an ultrasound preformed by the cardiologist, as well to get his blood pressure checked. The result? He has been diagnosed with mild hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HMC). Right now it’s only noticeable as part of his heart being abnormally thick, but he’s asymptomatic and the only advice was to keep an eye on it with annual checkups. Calcium treatment-wise he gave the green light for any treatment his primary vet orders. Hooray!

With that, and then the rest of my work day, behind me, that Wednesday evening was spent doing an Ubuntu Hour and a Debian Dinner. I hadn’t done either one in over a year. Declining turnout and disappointing attendance at a 16.04 release party last June let me to shift it to the back burner commitment-wise. I wasn’t sure I’d pick it back up again at all. A small BALUG meeting where we talked about the latest Debian release and desire to connect with some Ubuntu folks following some big changes this year (discontinuation of the Ubuntu phone/tablet, shuttering of the Unity project) inspired me to take some time to plan another one. We had 7 people come out across the two back-to-back events, including a couple new folks. This is a high average for these events and I had fun, so I was glad I took the time.

After the meetup I set aside a few minutes to meet one of my neighbors who was giving away an 80 bottle wine rack that seemed like it would suit our condo nicely. Indeed it does! He helped me bring it down and I put it together over the weekend. It’s a massive improvement over the pile of boxes in the corner that the wine had been in previously. I did catalog all our wines (both here in and Pennsylvania) in a spreadsheet recently, but I still had to dig through a bunch of boxes to find the one I wanted.

Aside from setting up the wine rack, I had a pretty chill weekend. I wrote a letter, read a lot. Before he left, MJ raided the Yahoo! company store and picked me up a soft, fluffy purple blanket. It’s perfect for snuggling up and enjoying some reading or TV. It’s also Caligula approved. Sunday was spent in Santa Clara for a conference I write about here. I then took Monday off to make up for the day, something I’m quite proud of myself for doing self-care wise, as I’m prone to work way too much.

During my quick jaunt down to Los Angeles last week I made a quick stop in the tiny Orange County Zoo with my friend Nathan after lunch. It’s a park that specializes in local animals, so the big draws of the zoo included a bear, a bobcat, and various large eagles. It was a pretty hot day, so most of the animals were sleeping through it, but even that was pretty adorable. The bear took advantage of the weather to take a bath, and the opossum sleeping in an Amazon box was pretty much my favorite thing ever. We also took a ride on the super cute, 1:3 scale Irvine Park Railroad before heading back to my hotel to get some work done and prep a demo cluster before the evening Meetup.

My 8:30AM flight home on Thursday morning was early, but the John Wayne airport is small and the trip was uneventful. Finally reunited on Thursday morning, MJ and I immediately ran off to our respective offices for a couple busy work days. Thursday I also had a new monitor delivered at home, an Acer GN276HL bid 27-inch. Both my current 22″ monitors were fine, but they only have VGA and DVI outputs. My current work laptop, which I use while working from home half the time, is the first laptop I’ve had that lacks a VGA port. I played around with DVI-to-HDMI and VGA-to-HDMI but there was an annoying amount of fiddling every time I plugged it in because the auto-detection wasn’t great. As a result, over the past 6 months I’ve left my second monitor dark as I just used my laptop screen at home, on my desk, but it wasn’t optimal. While this monitor doesn’t have crazy impressive resolution like my one at work, the price was right and so far it’s working great.

MJ and I spent the together and playing it pretty low-key this past weekend. Saturday I spent much of the day reading and watching a couple episodes of a show MJ and I watch together. The only event of the day was brunch at the Delancey Street Restaurant, which we’d never been to but was quite good. That was how we found out about the closures of the Muni Metro on weekends and late evenings for a month while they test the new light rail cars. We picked it up at the Embarcadero with dozens of folks headed to the Giants game. A beautiful day, I walked home from the restaurant, stopping at Philz for a coffee to balance out the couple of sour beers (Duchesse de Bourgogne and Petrus Aged Pale) I had with my crab cake Benedict.

Yesterday MJ and I met up with my cousin Keith who is in town for work. We drove down to Sutro’s at Cliff House for a late lunch, then took a drive through Golden Gate Park, then up to Twin Peaks. Unfortunately the fog was obscuring the breathtaking views that can usually be seen from there, but we got a picture together anyway. It was a good afternoon. It had been twelve years since we’d seen each other, and with my big family spread out all over the world this was the first time in our lives we were able to really spend any significant time talking.

Sunday evening was spent tackling some triage on our media and backup servers we keep here at home. Both seemed to have some issues with disks in their RAID arrays and one may have a failing SSD, which stores the operating system. There are some gremlins, but we’ve made some decisions about how we want to move forward. Now to order some drives!

And now another work week! This evening a bunch of us from the office are making our way down to AT&T Park to see a Giants game, which should be pretty fun, it should be a beautiful evening for it.

At work I have started to be the community team representative for the Bay Area Apache Mesos User Group meetups. Marketing has long handled logistics of these events, so my role has been more along the lines of welcoming attendees and playing MC so that the speakers feel welcome and the event runs smoothly.

On June 28th my first opportunity to speak at one of these events came up as I had to quickly fill in for a colleague who couldn’t make it into town for it. The event was on Microservices and SMACK Stack on Azure (strictly speaking, SMACK is: Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Akka, Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka, but like the LAMP stack you can swap out like components). Continuing a partnership that also included some internal collaboration that week, we partnered with several folks from Microsoft for this public event.

Prior to the meetup I worked with Patrick Brennan, who was our on-site Mesosphere liaison working with the team at Microsoft, to discuss preparations for the demo at the meetup. Since he was all set up with Azure already and my own time was limited, he tossed up a cluster I could use for the demos and then we made sure we had all the access controls in place to run the demo. I then collaborated with speakers Rob Bagby and Julien Stroheker who work on the Azure team over at Microsoft to put together an agenda where I’d lay the foundation for their talks by introducing DC/OS and doing a quick demo of the SMACK stack running on Azure. I’m quite happy to say that even with limited time to prepare, and my own lack of experience with Azure, everything came together. The ability to run DC/OS anywhere you want is something that makes me so proud to work on it so I can share the power of that flexibility with others.

Following my 20 minute primer and demo, Rob gave us a live tour of the Azure UI to demonstrate the mechanisms for using DC/OS on it. He including tips from the Learn DC/OS on ACS collection of documentation that he maintains, which I had only recently learned about and is incredibly valuable if you’re looking to run DC/OS with the Azure Container Service (ACS). His talk was followed by one from Julien, who is one of many folks working in the DC/OS community to come up with open source tooling to get DC/OS to do their bidding on specific platforms (cloud, on premises). In his case, he’s built a proof of concept DC/OS autoscaler for clouds, right now supporting Azure. The PoC code can be found on GitHub: julienstroheker/dcos-autoscaler.

Julien Stroheker sharing autoscaling

One of the most rewarding things about my job right now is seeing community-based efforts like this being created and shared. Just last week we held an office hours where we spoke to Flach Jauffrey and Benjamin Vouillaume who have written boot2dcos, which they’re using to turn employee desktops that are unused at night into DC/OS agents to process workloads. When employees leave for the evening, the machines are shut down, PXE booted to load up a Linux image and DC/OS and get to work. Very cool stuff.

But, as much as I enjoy it, enough about work! I took my first formal vacation day since I started in January the day after the meetup to spend the day with David, who was in San Francisco for a few days. His visit was one stop of several during a trip around the country by train that took just over two weeks. I admit that I’m a bit jealous of the ambition of his train trip. My own single cross country train adventure in May was just three and a half days, and went one direction. He did an entire clockwise loop that took him down south, through Texas and the southwest, up through California and then on to the Empire Builder, a route that goes further north than the California Zephyr that I took. Jealousy around his time on trains aside, I was very happy that he included a stop in San Francisco during his journey.

The day we spent together began in Union Square where we got him a transit card so we could get around the city all day. We also got an obligatory photo together next to the Powell Street cable cars. He had been to San Francisco many times, so we forewent the cable car ride and focused on spending the day at places he hadn’t seen yet. First on our list was Japantown! I love sushi and promised I’d give him a tour of my favorites so I could try to convince him to enjoy sushi. Alas, I’m quite sure I failed. He ate it, but even with my expertly crafted varietal mix of sweet, spicy, fishy and less so, it seems my dear friend is just not into sushi. I did enjoy trying though. While we were there we also stopped by Chocolate Chair, which is one of the many liquid nitrogen-driven ice cream shops that have been popping up. Their most recent claim to fame is Dragon’s Breath (SFGATE article here), which are colorful, flavored cereal puff balls that are infused with liquid nitrogen so that when you eat them fog very amusingly comes out your nose and mouth. Dragon! David bravely partook, I helped myself to a few, but mostly enjoyed my own very delicious bowl of strawberry ice cream.

The rest of the afternoon was spent over at the California Academy of Sciences. It’s one of my favorite science museums, and with it right there in Golden Gate Park and proximity to the MUNI Metro line, it’s a convenient and delightfully San Francisco place to visit to get a bunch of experiences at once. We hit the highlights of the museum: the living roof, the huge rain forest domed environment, the planetarium, the penguins, a bit of the aquarium. They also have a great Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs exhibit right now that I really enjoyed. When the museum closed at 5 a quick walk took us to the metro line that took us back downtown, where our adventures concluded with a lovely Mexican dinner at Tropisueño, and cupcakes over at the Metreon. Well-fed and a bit tired, his next train awaited him across the bay, so I saw him off on a ferry that would take him to the train station where he’d catch the Coast Starlight north. A sad farewell for me, for sure, but he had another week of train adventures ahead.

More photos from our touristing day in San Francisco here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157685698889625

As I mentioned, MJ had a friend in town that week too, a childhood friend who comes in a couple times a year and stays with us. When in town she works from an office out here, and then her and MJ do dinners and weekends together. I met up with them for a couple meals (including an evening at Kabul Afghan Cuisine down in Sunnyvale, must go back!), but mostly kept myself busy on my own. MJ and I did get to enjoy a dinner alone together on Friday, going over to my favorite local restaurant, Anchor & Hope, which we hadn’t been to together in some time. The food is great, the beer list is one of my favorites in the city, it’s just a block from home and in general it’s a comfortable place because we’re so familiar with it. A perfect place for a dinner together to reconnect and relax.

On Saturday, July 1st I wandered up to Berkeley to do what ends up being a quarterly trip to pick up the latest pile of comic books for the series I’m reading. As I may have written before, I’ve always enjoyed graphic novels and had an interest in comic books, but cost prevented any serious following as a youth, and it was only since Marvel came out with the Princess Leia series a couple years ago, and several other Star Wars titles, that I really started getting into them as an adult. Today I’m following the Wonder Woman reboot (rebirth), a selection of the Star Wars titles, and then I pick up a few here and there as they come up (a Lost in Space series last year, American Gods this year). A friend of mine also clued me into the six DC/Looney Tunes crossover comics that turned out to be really great. I was able to find a few of them while up there shopping too, and then went to eBay to grab the remaining ones. I drifted from the comic book store in downtown Berkeley over to the one closer to Rockridge, picked up a couple more books, and then I was hungry! That’s how I ended up with my solo lunch at Zachary’s Chicago Pizza in Oakland. It was delicious, and if you’re going to have a lunch by yourself, you might as well make it a giant plate of dough, cheese and tomatoes.

The next day Caligula got his second Golden Gate Park visit! It was fun for the four of us to get out. Plus, with how excited my normally lazy cat gets as soon as he goes to the park, it was nice to have three of us there to take turns walking him around where ever he wanted to go.

Soon, all friends had departed and our city was our own again. I promised MJ some quiet time during the long 4th of July weekend, so we decided not to make plans for the holiday. But we did make plans to go up to Richmond to visit the Golden State Model Railroad Museum. On our way up to Richmond we stopped at our favorite BBQ place, so we were happy and full by the time we saw the trains.

I had just recently learned about the museum from a friend at a Linux meetup and it’s run by the East Bay Model Engineers Society (EBMES). The members of the society maintain all the track layouts and then open the museum to the public on Sundays when they have trains running. It seems like a really interesting way of being a model train hobbiest, the building that houses it is big and I’m sure very few people have the space to make very much in their own homes, especially here in California where basements are rare and houses themselves tend to be smaller than elsewhere in the country.

It was a lot of fun talking to one of the members there. We told him of our recent Amtrak journey and geeked out a bit over the best passenger routes around California, even day trips that can be pretty interesting. He was right in my head when he mentioned you could take Amtrak up to Sacramento for the day and go to the train museum there (I still haven’t been!).

Getting to see all the trains running and people fiddling them got me an even more firm understanding of the scales. I had been considering N scale because I won’t have a lot of space (planning on putting my layout in my office, once I have one), but once I saw people working on them up close I think I’m going to go with HO scale. It’s the most popular (though N has been catching up), and it’s big enough to show nice details and not feel like I’m going to break a tiny delicate thing. It’s also small enough that I think I can enjoy a cute layout without taking up massive amounts of space. It was also interesting to learn how separate-worlds the different scale groups are, these people get super specialized in their scales and don’t really answer questions about the other scales. There also seems to be a friendly rivalry between them all. I also met a little girl who was super excited about all the geek stuff I was wearing, which was super sweet, and I hope convinced her that adults can sport train engine earrings and wear Star Wars t-shirts forever.

The visit was inspiring too. I’m somewhat tempted to buy a couple kits to start playing with things before I have space for it, just because I’m excited. Resisting for now though, I shall have space soon enough (within the year, I hope!) and I have enough other projects for other hobbies to keep me busy in the meantime.

A lot more photos from the museum here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157683695335350/

While we were up in Richmond we also saw signs for the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front NHP museum. I had no idea it existed, it’s a little warehouse building not too far from the model railway museum. The museum starts with the focus on Rosie the Riveter and the changing roles of women as WWII progressed, but also touched upon general life at home in the US during and just after the war, the internment camps for Japanese-Americans and more. The displays were bright and interesting, and well organized. Unfortunately we got there pretty late in the afternoon so we had to skim through the exhibits pretty quickly. I’d like to go back at some point to view it properly, there’s also a short movie that goes along with the exhibits that plays regularly throughout the day and they do events there, so it might be worth looking at a calendar for when we can make time to go up again.

More photos from our visit to this museum here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157682967715334

I mentioned in my last general update post that I’d started doing a bit more work with Partimus lately. Last Friday MJ departed on a week and a half long business trip and so on Saturday I made plans to meet up with our executive director at one of the low-income housing facilities in the tenderloin, just beyond Union Square. For the first hour I worked on debugging an issue with guest sessions failing to log in. It was an issue we’d seen across all the locations that we service and ended up being impossible to diagnose remotely with the tools we had. Sitting there digging through logs and doing tests finally led me to figure out what was going on, the details of which I shared here. Essentially the command to remove the temporary guest users was failing due to a stuck lock file so the system was adding a guest user every time someone logged in until it couldn’t make any more (it hit UID 999). I wrote a script to remove the lock file and delete stray users that any of our volunteers can run if this happens again, but I’ll bake a more permanent solution into a custom Lubuntu ISO I hope to help build soon.

However, the main goal of this visit was to take a look at the PXE boot server that one of our volunteers built. It’s been tested and works for installing 32-bit Lubuntu, but we want 64-bit and in general need to do an audit and document what this server does so we can improve it, and replicate it on other sites as needed. This introduced me to the basement of the building, where lots of spiders live. I get along with spiders, but there was also no internet access or cell signal down there, so I brought along my handy portable hard drive (one of my best investments ever!) and cloned the drive so I could work on it at home. I won’t get to it this weekend, but I hope to carve out some time next Sunday to start digging into it.

I’ve been staying incredibly busy with work this week and would love to write about that now too, but that will have wait until another blog post. It’s 10PM and need to get to bed soon. I need be on the road by 7:45AM tomorrow morning to get down to Santa Clara for the Cloud+Data Next conference. I’ll be giving a Day 2 Operations talk in the early afternoon. It’s a talk that I was uncertain about before I gave it the first time, but it’s really grown on me, and I’m really proud of the improvements I’ve been putting into it. Wish me luck tomorrow!

He’s been a very different cat since the loss of Simcoe. We always thought that she was the one following him around for snuggles, and I’m sure that was the case, but he’s been spending a lot more time snuggling me, on the couch, under the covers in bed. His unhappiness being left without humans is a big change too, he really doesn’t like being left all alone. We had no idea. Plus, recently we’ve also had to contend with some health uncertainty with him. His calcium levels have been running high, and I had to drop him off at the vet a couple weeks ago for a day of tests to see if we could get to the bottom of it. Alas, we haven’t, but a lot of major things (like leukemia) have been ruled out and so we just have to move on to symptom treatment once he sees a cardiologist about a potentially enlarged heart, which could influence his treatment plan.

I’ve spent a little time since my return on getting up to speed with the latest work Partimus is doing. We’re now in six low-income residences in San Francisco with over a dozen machines, many of which are high end systems donated recently by a local company. We also have a new imaging server created by one of our volunteers, which I hope to find time to have a look at and see about adding the 64-bit Lubuntu image to, as well as documenting the configuration so that it can be replicated at other sites. I spent some time this weekend updating Partimus.org so that the information on the site is more up to date and cleaned out some of the old materials we had floating around. I also did some curious digging into our foundation documents and discovered, as I had suspected, that 2017 marks the 10th anniversary of Partimus being incorporated as a 501(c)(3). I wrote a blog post about it here: Partimus celebrates 10 years.

Last Saturday MJ and I headed up to Napa before he headed off for a work trip on Sunday. The day began with furniture shopping though. Our sofa bed recently broke, and it’s growing increasingly creaky as a couch. It’s unusable as a bed at this point, and for a guest staying with us this week we’ve had to get an air mattress. A new couch is needed! We ended up in Concord at a leather store browsing some potential candidates. I think we found one we want, we just need to figure out what color we’re going to go with. I also got some great ideas for furniture in my future office, there is a really nice Dreamsations chair-and-a-half that lives as a big comfy chair, but folds out into a comfortable twin size bed.

After the furniture shopping it was up to Rutherford Hill Winery to pick up our wine club wines for the quarter. It was hot, possibly the hottest day of the season with the highs brushing up against 100. It was 98 outside as we cooled off in the wine tasting room. I spent a few minutes outside taking pictures of flowers and the view, but even this west coast dry heat is hot when the temperatures soar that high.

It was then off to a late lunch at the Bouchon Bistro just south of Rutherford, in Yountville. We went there during our first trip to Napa last spring, but it was a whirlwind weekend trip where we tried to squeeze the best of the valley in all at once. This time Bouchon was a destination for us. With 3:30PM reservations, we arrived at the tail end of brunch, with staff setting the tables for dinner. Our food selections were very dinner-like though. We kicked off the meal with caviar with some toasted bread, and I had a White Apron beer by Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Boonville. Next up were the entrees, MJ picked the winner with a dish of gnudi with fresh truffles, and I went with what was pretty much a lobster macaroni and cheese, also delicious but not quite as exceptional. By the time desserts rolled around, we were getting full, but desserts of chocolate brownie “bouchons” and fruit with meringue were a bit too amazing to resist. After the meal, our journey home took us over the Golden Gate bridge for a nice evening in before MJ’s trip.

More photos from our jaunt up to Napa here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157685503327645

While on the topic of food… I made eggs! I’m not much of a cook, I lack the patience and interest required to pull off more than just the basics. As a result, until a few weeks ago all I had ever made egg-wise was scrambled and hard boiled eggs. Unfortunately or me, my favorite eggs are over easy. I finally decided that I should learn how to make them without ruining them, it can’t be that hard, right? I fired up YouTube and piled on the patience. It turns out patience was what I’d been missing in past attempts. I hover over the eggs and then try to flip them much too soon, what I need to do is let them cook a whole lot before flipping is easy, and then I just need to let them cook for a few moments longer to finish cooking the whites. At 35 years old it may seem terribly amusing to onlookers that I just figured this all out, but I really don’t cook. It’s a big deal for me. Over easy eggs forever!

Sadly, after Napa, food was the last thing on my mind. The day MJ left was the day my stomach decided to ruin my week. I went to the gym mid-day, seeking some air conditioning in what had turned into quite the warm weekend in San Francisco too. Unfortunately the gym lacked air conditioning, but the fans did their job and I had a good workout. That afternoon I felt incredibly tired (just the gym, right?) and by Sunday night I was feeling queasy. Monday morning I had a full on stomach bug, complete with a mild fever. The fever went away and I was feeling better by Tuesday evening, I thought maybe the heat wave had just hit me the wrong way and I started rehydrating. Wednesday night I was hit with the second wave of illness which kept me up for much of the night. I went into work Thursday morning, but left mid-day to see a doctor, who gave me a prescription to treat the nausea that wasn’t allowing me to keep any food or liquids. Pile on some over-the-counter meds for other symptoms and gallons of re-hydration liquids, and you have my Thursday afternoon and Friday. Fortunately I was well enough to work from home (bed), though the slight fever did return Friday afternoon (ok, maybe I wasn’t well enough to be working, even from bed). Friday night and into Saturday I continued my attempts to hydrate and eat bland foods, but a massive headache swept in, that I kept in the realm of tolerable only through regular doses of Advil. I spent the day in yesterday, but I managed to go out to dinner last night with MJ and a visiting friend, though I was cautious and didn’t eat very much.

While I thought I was feeling better on Tuesday I snuck downstairs to a Bay Area Linux Users Group meeting just a block from home. I figured if I wasn’t feeling well I could just leave midway through, and I wanted to attend to talk about the latest Debian release (9.0, code name Stretch)! So attend I did, bringing along Debian stickers and my Stretch toy. It was a small dinner, but lots of nice conversations about Debian, recent changes with Ubuntu, and even some model trains after I geeked out about my new interest and subsequently learned about the Golden State Model Railroad Museum, must go!

With MJ back in town, Friday morning we went to the eye doctor to pick up new glasses! I’ve spent the past several years with Flexon frames, they’re super light and resistant to abuse due to their ability to bend. I switched things up this time and went with Airlock frames, which are in the family of rimless glasses. It’s quite the departure for me, and I don’t like change, particularly when it has to do with how I look. But I had also just gotten a whole new haircut that went shorter than I’d previously gone, so apparently I’ve been in a change mood. I think it worked out, I’m happy with both the glasses and the haircut!

Today I’m feeling better. The headache isn’t bad enough to require treatment today, and I’m trying to take it easy. I did spend about 90 minutes getting some fresh air while MJ was out with his friend. I walked a couple blocks up to Market street to check out the Pride parade. Once I grew tired of the crowds I walked up Market to Ferry Building to pick up a small lunch, champiñones (mushroom) empanada and dulce de leche alfajor at El Porteño. From there I took a few pictures of street cars before wandering back home.

More photos from my brief glimpse of the pride parade here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157683422410420

The month winds down this week. I’m helping to host a Meetup at work on Wednesday and taking Thursday off to spend with a friend who’s in town visiting, we shall do all the San Francisco things! Then we have a much-needed a four day weekend for the 4th of July.

Young Caligula, gardening in Pennsylvania

Fast forward to today. Caligula has been living in a high rise in downtown San Francisco for over seven years! We haven’t brought him out during all this time. I’d loosely mention taking Caligula out to a park here and there, but Simcoe didn’t like being left alone and she’d often react badly when we brought Caligula home from the vet (hissing, growling, for days!). And I figured she still wouldn’t be interested in coming along for the outdoor adventures. Now that we have just Caligula, it was time to revisit outdoor adventure plans. This past weekend we brought him to Golden Gate Park, where we found a quiet patch of grass not too close to anyone else and enjoyed some food (picked up from a Mexican food truck) as Caligula wandered around on a short leash.

We weren’t sure what to expect. I’d never brought him to a public park before, and I’m sure the car ride over wasn’t his favorite thing, but he loved it. My often lazy cat spent the hour and a half there wandering around our blanket, and then dragging me around so he could explore further.

Caligula in Golden Gate Park

Eventually we rounded off our day as the wind picked up and it got a bit cooler, but I’m really happy that he had such a nice time. I know I’ve been pretty down since losing Simcoe, and I think he’s really missed having his snuggle buddy. It was a good way to cheer all of us up.

I’ve mentioned that 2017 has been a tricky year for me, but I’ve started to feel better. Instead of spending so much non-work, non-traveling work watching TV, I’ve transitioned back into reading. My interest in other hobbies has picked up too, I’ve started moving away from so much computer work and decided to get more serious about my interest in model trains. When I was in Philadelphia last time I picked up a starter train set at a toy show, and I’ve now started to refresh my memory on some of the other basics. I subscribed to Model Railroader magazine, and am now somewhat overwhelmed with how much opportunity there is to learn and explore. I’m also struck by the fact that hobby-wise I’ve mostly focused on digital and outward-focused projects. This will be one of the first that gets me back to hardware, but it quickly occurred to me that it can be pulled into a bunch of the electronics projects I’ve idly wondered about over the years. Arduinos and sound-activated controls for a model railroad set? It’s totally going to be a thing!

Increasing the scale, we decided to go back to Philadelphia over the week of Memorial Day. As we were musing about travel, my interest in trains distracted me into talking about cross-country railroad trips and MJ seriously suggested we finally do it for this trip. After geeking out over routes for a couple hours, MJ secured tickets for us on the California Zephyr which we’ll take the entire length, from Emeryville to Chicago in one of the bedroom compartments. From there we’re taking a Capitol Limited to Washington DC in a Roomette and then on to the Northeast Regional to Phliadelphia in Business Class seats. How long does this trip take, you ask? We’re leaving from San Francisco’s temporary TransBay Terminal at 7:50AM on Friday the 26th and arriving in Philadelphia at 5:15PM on Monday the 29th. From there we’re taking the SEPTA regional rail from 30th street station in Philadelphia up Trevose, where the train drops us just over a mile from our townhouse. So it takes a long time and train is not cheaper. Traveling how we are, in the bedroom and roomette is actually considerably more than flying. For us, it’s all about the experience. I’ve not seen much of the center of the country, there are beautiful places I’m missing out on. Taking a train through over the course of a few days is a pretty exciting proposal, I’m really looking forward to it.

With all this train stuff, I realized over the past year how much more adventurous I’ve gotten with rail-based public transit. I’m slowly starting to default to it where it makes sense time-wise, and sad about missed opportunities to take it in the past.

I also recently finished reading Train by Tom Zoellner. He takes several journeys on train lines all around the world, and weaves a tale that blends his experience on these routes, conversations he has with fellow train passengers and a hefty dose of history about each line, and those which are naturally related to it in some way. It was a beautifully written book, and made me even more excited about our cross-country journey! I recently finished the audiobook for Ringworld. I read the book years ago, but never really got into the series. I decided this time around to buy the series as audiobooks and start making my way through them. I got an audiobook of If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran which has so far been incredibly engaging. Back to the pages, I’ve been reading Madeleine L’Engle’s The Arm of the Starfish and my second book by Brene Brown, I thought it was just me, but it isn’t.

But OK, I’m not just spending lots of wholesome time reading. The new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) came out several weeks ago and I’ve been doing my best not to binge watch. I slowly made my way up to 1105, the episode that has my name in the credits because of the Kickstarter campaign. I then went through the next few pretty quickly, they’re just so good! And MST3K has been an important part of my life since I discovered it in the late 90s on the SciFi channel. I don’t remember how I found it, I must have just stumbled upon it in my general watching of the SciFi channel. It’s what made me join my first IRC server to chat with fellow fans. It was there that I met my ex-husband who introduced me to Linux, and dove into IRC client scripting and creating websites. Later I helped a pile of fellow fans run an MST3K fan site, which was tricky after the show stopped airing, but gave me my first experience scouring the internet for stories, which I later used in my work on the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

I had my doubts about a reboot of the series, on the one hand we had many of the original cast and crew members participating, but on the other they suddenly had big names and cameos being announced as part of the project, and there was a real risk of the show getting more serious than I would enjoy. Thankfully, my fears were not realized. The show is just as silly and campy as it ever was. They didn’t let a budget or big names go to their head, it has the feel and jokes that I came to expect from MST3K.

At home things are chugging along. As I write this on an early Friday morning before work Caligula is in super snuggle mode and is curled up against me. He’s been like this since we lost Simcoe. We think he’s lonely, as my trip to SLC this week didn’t leave him the happiest (MJ was at work all day). There is a temptation to get him a new kitten friend, but every time I think about it I get sad and realize I’m not ready for it. Plus with all my travel lately I don’t really have the time to train a new kitten, who will have claws.

Speaking locally, this past month we’ve seen the closing of two Italian establishments in our area. A.G. Ferrari has closed all bay area locations. It’s a shame, that was my go-to spot for fresh Parmesan cheese and Italian bread. Umbria, my favorite Italian restaurant in the city, and conveniently on our block, has closed. We made our way down there on their final night, finding ourselves in the midst of other random diners, as well as family and friends wishing the owner a fond farewell. There were speeches, stories, hugs, and tears, which we were included us in. Thankfully this is not the end of the story for them! They’re moving up to Glen Ellen in Sonoma, with progress being tracked on their #WheresGiulio website. We’ll have to visit when they finally open, but I’ll really miss having such a great local place.

We’ve also been carving out bits of our weekend to actually catch up on boring adult things. Our dining area has always been a den of chaos, and I’ve finally started tackling that by picking up a new piece of Ikea furniture so we have a place to pack things into. The chaos still mostly exists, but it’s starting to be tamed and some things are now put away, hooray!

I think this weekend will be a stay in one. I have a ton to do here before I depart for two weeks. And a busy work week is on the horizon with attendance at DevXCon on Monday and a journey (ferry + car service) up to Napa on Wednesday to speak at a conference on Thursday. Then the rise-with-the-sun trek over to the TransBay terminal Friday morning to catch that train across the country. It’s all exciting stuff though, I wouldn’t trade next week for a boring one even if I could.

With my Helion mentee!

This past week I went to the second meetup, this time over at Walmart Labs, just a quick walk from the Sunnyvale Caltrain station. For this meetup I was on a mainstage panel where discussions covered improvements to OpenStack in the Kilo release (including the continued rise of third party testing, which I was able to speak to), the new Big Tent approach to OpenStack project adoption and how baremetal is starting to change the OpenStack landscape. I was also able to meet some of the really smart people working at Walmart Labs, and learned that all of walmart.com is running on top of OpenStack (this article from March talks about it and they’ll be doing a session on it at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Vancouver).

Panel at Walmart Labs

In other professional news, the work I did in Oman earlier this year continues to bear fruit. On April 20th issue #313 of the Sultan Qaboos University Horizon newsletter was published with my interview, (8M PDF here). They were kind enough to send me a few paper copies which I received on Friday. The interview touched upon key points that I spoke on during my presentation back in February, focusing on personal and business reasons for open source contributions.

Personally, MJ and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary with a fantastic meal at Murray Circle Restaurant where we sat on the porch and enjoyed our dinner with a nighttime view of the Golden Gate Bridge. We also recently agreed to start a diet together, largely going back to our pre-wedding diet that we both managed to lose a lot of weight on. Health-wise I continue to go out running, but running isn’t enough to help me to lose weight. I’m largely replacing starches with vegetables and reducing the sugar in my diet. Finally, we’ve been hacking our way through a massive joint to do list that’s been haunting us for several months now. Most of the tasks are home-based, from things like painting we need to get done to storage clean-outs. I don’t love that we have so much to do (don’t other adults get to have fun on weekends?), but finally having it organized and a plan for tackling it has reduced my stress incredibly.

2nd anniversary dinner

We do actually get to have fun on weekends, Saturday at least. We’ve continued to take Saturdays off together to attend services, have a nice lunch together and spend some time relaxing, whether that’s catching up on some shows together or visiting a local museum. Last weekend we had the opportunity of finally going to the Cable Car Museum here in San Francisco. Given my love for all things rail, it’s astonishing that I never made it up there before. The core of the museum is the above-ground, in-building housing for the four cables that run the three cable car lines, and then exhibits are built around it. It’s a fantastic little museum, and entrance is free.

I also picked up some beautifully 3d printed cable car earrings and matching necklace produced by Freeform Ind. I loved their stuff so much that I found their shop online and picked up some other local landmark jewelry.

More photos from our trip to the Cable Car Museum are available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157652325687332

We’ve had some computer fun lately. MJ has finally ordered a replacement 1U server for the old one that he has co-located in Fremont. Burn-in testing happened this weekend but there are some more harddrive-related pieces that we’re still waiting on to get it finished up. We’re aiming for getting it installed at the datacenter in June. I also replaced the old Pentium 4 that I’ve been using as a monitoring server and backups machine. It was getting quite old and unusable as a second desktop, even when restricted to following social media accounts and watching videos here and there. It’s now been replaced with a refurbished HP DC6200 from 2011, which has an i3 processor and I bumped it up to 8G of RAM that I had laying around from when I maxed out my primary desktop with 16G. So far so good, I moved over the harddrive from the old machine and it’s been running great.

HP DC6200

In the time between work and other things, I’ve been watching The Good Wife on my own and Star Trek: Voyager with MJ. Also, hanging out with my darling kitties. One evening I got this epic picture of Caligula:

This week I’m hosting an Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner where we’re celebrate the release of Debian 8 “Jessie”. I’ve purchased Jessie (cowgirl from Toy Story 2 and 3) party hats to mark the occasion. At the break of dawn on Sunday I’ll be boarding a plane to go to the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. I’ve never been to Vancouver, so I’m spending Sunday there and staying until late on the following Saturday night, so I hope to have time to see some of the city. After this trip, I’m staying home until July! Thank goodness, I can definitely use the down time to work on my book.

Still, she doesn’t enjoy the quarterly vet visits. We took her in on December 6th and she was determined to stay in her carrier and not look at me.

“I’m mad at you”

We’re keeping up with subcutaneous fluid injections every other day to keep her hydrated, and it has been keeping her pretty stable. This latest round of tests did show a slight decrease in her weight from 9.94lbs to 9.74lbs.

Her BUN level remained steady, and CRE rose a bit from 3.8 to 4.2.

BUN: 59 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE: 4.2 (normal range: .6-2.4)

Her calcium levels also came back a little high, so we scheduled some fasted blood work for this past weekend. We took the opportunity to also bring Caligula in for his annual exam.

Caligula is doing well, he just turned 11 years old and our only concern was some staining on his iris, which the vet took a look at and confirmed was just pigmentation changes that are common with aging. His blood work looks good, though also shows some slightly elevated calcium levels.

Simcoe was taken in the back with the carrier, Caligula got the leash

We still have one follow-up call with Simcoe’s vet to chat about the calcium levels, but the vet on duty who delivered the results didn’t seem concerned since they’ve been elevated for some time and are just slightly above normal.

The only other current struggle is supplies. Following some quality control issues with one of the manufacturers, the Lactated Ringer’s solution we give subcutaneously went through a period of severe shortage (article here). The market seems to be recovering, but we’re now navigating a world with different bag manufacturers and canceled out of stock orders from our pharmacy. Hoping 2015 will be a better year with regard to this shortage, it wasn’t only kitties who were impacted by this problem!