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Remembering CJ Fearnley

Friday, Dec 16th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On December 8, 2022, CJ Fearnley passed away after a short, serious illness. I’m heartbroken.

When I moved to Philadelphia in 2001, one of the first communities I got involved with was the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group (PLUG). I had just started dabbling in Linux with the help of my boyfriend at the time, and with the first meeting I ever attended being about Beowulf Linux clustering, I was quite out of my depth. Still, I stuck with it and slowly got familiar with the community, and the leader of the group, CJ Fearnley.


CJ Fearnley leading a PLUG meeting in 2015

CJ gave me my big break. During the dot com boom I dabbled in web development, but that quickly fizzled out along with everything else, and I ended up getting a job doing accounts payable work for a large corporation. It’s not the kind of job that one has a passion for, but it paid the bills, and I was able to keep an eye out for any contract tech work. That’s what caused me to be available when CJ was looking for junior folks to help with installing servers for his clients. I jumped at the opportunity and here and there I’d make myself available to pick up a server, drive it to the install location, haul it into the data center, or whatever closet it was living in. From there, I had my trusty Debian installation CD and would do the install and load up the default packages it needed. After a few months and an in-person which culminated in seeing Richard Stallman speak in Philadelphia, CJ offered me a full time job with his company, LinuxForce.

The first thing you need to know about working for CJ is that he’s very principled. His passion was for open source software and among his goals for running LinuxForce were spreading open source and Debian. He believed in the technology and he believed in the philosophy, and we was often uncompromising when it came to both, which is refreshing to see from someone running a company. And that company would never make him rich, but it did provide a living for himself and a small handful of employees like myself. He also believed in giving people a chance, particularly minorities in tech. He would always have me keep an eye out for smart folks with non-traditional backgrounds who might like a position where we could mentor them into success. His track record was great, several of the people he had on his payroll over the years have gone on to have remarkable careers in systems administration, and him giving them a start was key to that for all of us.

I spent six years at LinuxForce. Each day we’d spend 30-60 minutes syncing up with the latest client needs and plans for the day. This included division of labor, and frequently the opportunity for me to work on something new or otherwise sparked my interest.

When I began, I wasn’t sure what I wanted from my career, just that I had grown quite fond of Linux and open source in general, and wanted that to be a big part of my career. Early on, he asked me, “do you want to be a systems administrator or programmer?” and with the limited experience I had, I didn’t know how to answer, so his answer was to throw everything in my direction and see what stuck. I started out with Debian packaging, did a lot of programming in Perl, and then developed a fondness for systems administration. I found with systems administration I could have my hands in various technologies and still build things I was proud of, so that’s ultimately the direction I took under his mentorship.

CJ kept me on when I moved to San Francisco, and I worked a couple more years for him before I felt I had outgrown my role there and wanted to move on to something different and more challenging. What was his response when I mentioned I wanted to look for something new? Complete support, which I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone who knew him.

We kept in touch throughout my successive moves. When I visited Philly I’d often stop by a PLUG meeting, sometimes to even give a presentation on the latest thing I was working on, and we’d catch up after the meeting over pizza. The pandemic did a number on my personal relationships, and so has being a new parent, so the last time I saw CJ was in the summer of 2019 when I came by the PLUG meeting to give a presentation about Linux and open source on mainframes. We caught up as always, and I figured I’d catch up with him when I was in town again. That dragged on a bit with the pandemic, and before I knew it, I had a shocking email in my inbox explaining that he was suddenly quite ill and didn’t have long to live. I was able to get a quick message off to him expressing my care and thanks, and within a couple days he was gone. He was only 55.

Because of CJ’s influence, I was the first to jump at the opportunity to see a Buckminster Fuller exhibit that came to the SF MOMA. I went to more than a few events put on by the Long Now Foundation. In 2013, he came to my wedding with his partner Jeannie.


CJ and his partner Jeannie at our wedding in 2013

There are a lot of reasons this loss has hit me particularly hard, especially since it was so sudden, but I think the core of my despair comes from the fact that his mentorship was pivotal to me at a critical time. I learned a deep level of Linux systems administration that I think would have been difficult to gain elsewhere, especially as a woman in the field at the time. He was patient and thoughtful even when I struggled with things, and while no boss wants their employees to make mistakes, he fully adhered to failure being a part of learning, and stood by that when mistakes did occur. Tech stuff aside, he also taught me to be uncompromising and genuine, both of which have served me extremely well in my career. Losing a mentor and friend like CJ is devastating.

But he lived a full life following his passions and had the love and respect of participants from every community he was involved with. There are so many people who got their start in the Philadelphia Linux community who continue to thrive in the industry, and those I’ve spoken to since his passing have all credited him with helping them get their start. Whether it was attending PLUG meetings in high school or getting them set up with their first shell accounts, CJ was there to run meetings and help lead the way. And as one friend pointed out to me today, he “led from the trenches” which is a style of leadership I’ve come to embrace.


Audience at a PLUG meeting in 2013, including CJ in the foreground

In the small pond of the earliest Linux adopters, CJ was one of the kindest people I knew. His willingness to share his passions was the bedrock of the Linux community in Philadelphia. It’s going to be hard to move forward without him.

Thank you for everything, CJ.

Filed under: reflection

Aaron is 2!

Thursday, Dec 15th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Just after the pandemic began in 2020, we learned I was pregnant. It culminated in having beautiful little Aaron in December. Which means, he just turned two years old!

Aaron has been really into buses lately, so theme-wise it was nice to do one around buses for him. Unfortunately the buses that all the party goodies focus on are school buses, and while those are fine buses, they aren’t exactly what he shouts about when a public bus drives by. So I went a bit DIY with it, and printed off some drawn buses from AC Transit (Alameda County, CA), MUNI (San Francisco), and SEPTA (Philadelphia). Add in a Happy Birthday banner, some balloons, and a dozen little cutouts of an AC Transit bus that said “Aaron Shuttle” and we were all set!

Oh, and a cake! Just like other decorations, the only cake was school bus themed, so we just went with AC Transit colors and a little Aaron Shuttle decoration.


We still aren’t doing big social things, so it was a low-key little party with some close family friends who have cared for the boys in the past. He got a few little presents and was mostly just excited to see everyone and eat cake. Adam was a fan of the cake, too.

It was also a delight the following Monday when the person who does social media for AC Transit saw the cake I shared and wished him a Happy Birthday from the official AC Transit Twitter account.

Bonus: BART did too! And if there’s anything Aaron loves more than buses, it’s trains, particularly BART.

We’re in Philadelphia now for the holidays and are going to do a joint birthday party for both the boys (Adam was born at the beginning of January) while we’re in town visiting family and friends there. So we’ll have more cake soon!

Filed under: family, food, kids, life

Thanksgiving weekend adventures and more IBM s390x trinkets

Friday, Dec 9th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Thanksgiving weekend was a bit of a whirlwind. We had four days with no work and the boys at home, so my mission was to keep us all entertained during that whole time, including Thanksgiving when not much is open!

We ended up taking BART to San Francisco to go to a park. Aaron is really into buses right now, so the park I selected was the transbay terminal. At the bottom, lots of buses! But there’s also a magnificent park on the top floor that has lots of beautiful greenery to enjoy, and tables and chairs to enjoy a meal. We packed a picnic lunch of some of our favorite snack foods and while it wasn’t exactly a peaceful picnic with two little kids, it was effective and fun. While we were there we also took the little gondola ride from the street level up to the park. It strikes me as a bit of a silly thing thing, but we enjoyed it and the operator was really friendly and shared facts about the park.

Thanksgiving dinner itself was what has become our usual here in California, we picked up food to be heated up from a local diner about 90 minutes before dinner. It’s a pretty basic Thanksgiving dinner, but it’s easy and we all seem to enjoy it. This year our au pair joined us for dinner, along with one of her friends who didn’t have other plans for the day. It was a really nice evening.

Friday we went to the local Japanese Gardens before heading out to eat at our favorite local restaurant, and then made “rainbow challah” with some food coloring. After enjoying rainbow challah french toast, Saturday we kind of got back into our usual routine of outings and meals.

Sunday we made a gingerbread house! Which Aaron chomped on during construction, which I tried to stop him from at first, but then I just found it to be funny and appropriate, so the patching we had to do to compensate for the holes became part of the fun. That evening we also put up some blue and white lights for the holidays.

In other fun kiddo things, Aaron broke my glasses, and so I needed new glasses. I went a little throwback with these ones to get some sturdy solid-rim ones like I used to wear. They’re not exciting, but I’m hoping they hold up to a little abuse from the boys. I’ll also try to be a bit more careful.

In fun project-y things, I mentioned my SPARC project in a previous post, I haven’t made progress on that but I did find a lot of SLT/MST circuit boards on eBay and since I really like them for jewelry and they’re getting harder to find, I snatched them up.

Given my love for 3d-printed mainframe models, I also picked up an IBM postcard featuring a miniature IBM s/360 display that was built around the launch that makes my little models look even more like toys!

I am still struggling to find a balance between work, family, rest, and hobbies. I feel a bit sad when I’m not making things, but I also have discovered how tremendously important sleep is to being a fully present parent for our boys. I doubt there is a balance, but I do want to get to a place where I’m more satisfied with the decisions I’m making about my time.

Filed under: family, food, kids, life, mainframes

Holiday cards 2022!

Wednesday, Dec 7th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Every year I send out a big batch of winter-themed holiday cards to friends, acquaintances, and anyone who made there way to this blog post somehow.

Reading this? That means you!

Even if you’re outside the United States!

Even if we’ve never met!

Send me an email at lyz@princessleia.com with your postal mailing address and put “Holiday Card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately. Please do this even if I’ve sent you a card in the past, I won’t be reusing lists from previous years. I’m also starting late this year (oops!) so the window for sending cards will be brief, so please get me your postal address by December 10th.

Disclaimer: My family is Jewish and we celebrate Hanukkah, but the cards are non-religious, with some variation of “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” on them.

Filed under: holiday cards

Date at the BART HMC, local fall festivities, and my SPARC

Monday, Nov 28th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Several weeks ago a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) board meeting was held at the BART Hayward Maintenance Complex. I’d never been to a BART board meeting before, but the chance to visit the maintenance complex was too good to pass up, and I RSVPed for MJ and myself as soon as I saw it.

It’s pretty rare to have tours of this facility, and I don’t think they’d ever done a fully public event, so this was a really special opportunity. Several hundred people showed up, and we were whisked off from a public BART station over to the facility via a series of shuttle buses. I get the impression that they were surprised and impressed by the turnout, but they were able to easily absorb the crowd. The board meeting was kept short, and then the facility tour began! We walked down the long corridors of the facility seeing stations for repairing all kinds of things for the trains. Every so often we’d pause to hear from one of the folks who worked there, either giving some details about the work, or sharing the history that led to some of the work that’s happening now. It was fun and fascinating to get such a behind-the-scenes look at everything.


And I’m glad it was fun. It occurred to us halfway through this tour that we hadn’t really gone out to do something other than meals together, alone, in quite some time. Date morning at the BART HMC? Hah!

In November I also got sick again. It happened a few days after I finally got the bivalent COVID booster, and along with a cough that needed an inhaler, I also had an incredibly stubborn sinus headache. Pile on some recent struggles with depression that caused me to contact my doctor and up my dosage of antidepressants, it was a tough few weeks as I struggled through not feeling well and a couple weeks of drowsiness caused by the medication change.

Still, I have two little ones and they love to go out! We met up with some other families one gloomy weekend recently to check out a fancy new playground in a nearby town, complete with a few rides, including a small train that went around the park and a carousel. I’ve succeeded in bestowing my love of trains upon my boys, so it was a really enjoyable time for everyone.


Our town also had the Castro Valley Light Parade recently. Like so many things, it went on a two year hiatus during the pandemic. MJ and Adam went to it in 2019 while I was out at a hackathon for work, but it was my first time experiencing it. We decided to go after the boys had dinner, which seems to have been a bit of a mistake since the parade really does conclude after an hour or so and then it’s just the festival, which was less interesting to the boys. Still, at this age it was actually a fine amount of time to be out, especially since they got to eat some cupcakes and get light-up bracelets while we were there.

Finally, MJ had a friend of his in town recently who came with us to the light parade. She traditionally has visited a couple times a year, but both the pandemic and having kids have changed it somewhat. Thankfully, she is interested in getting to know the kids more, so it gave me the opportunity to send them off with her and MJ one Sunday morning while I got some peaceful alone time. I took the opportunity to dig into my Sun SPARC Ultra10 project again. I ordered a hard drive that should work and got it all set up, but I was disappointed to discover that a lot of tools had changed since the last time I set up a PXE boot server, and I found myself reading more documentation than expected once I sat down and got started. As a result, I couldn’t get much done and was left feeling a little disappointed. Since then, I’ve been able to dig a bit deeper into the options out there for DHCP and TFTP, and will probably end up with a solution that uses dnsmasq exclusively for the whole setup, and be much simpler than ones I’ve used in the past. Bonus, if this works out I can document and re-purpose it for use at Partimus, and that cheered me up a bit and made the process of learning a new generation of tools more compelling.

Which brings me back to my mood. Now that I have mostly gotten past the drowsiness and the worst of this depressive episode, I’m going to try pushing myself again to get back on track with hobbies, house projects, and some of the things I enjoy but haven’t had the energy to do. I don’t have very much time to myself these days, but I certainly could use the time I have more effectively, which in turn should bring me out of this slump. I hope.

Filed under: castro valley, events, family, kids, life, rails

Our doorbell

Wednesday, Nov 16th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s hard to believe we moved into this house nearly five years ago. In some ways, it feels like we’re still settling in, but I’m sure part of that has to do with how much our lives have changed since moving here and having kids. Plus, we’re still discovering new things about the house, like our doorbell.

The doorbell worked intermittently when we moved in, and as the months progressed it stopped working entirely. Given our workload and focus on new family, it ended up near the bottom of our list of priorities, and with babies in the house, the lack of a doorbell was actually a feature most of the time. Still, it was a little annoying when people would stop by, since the front door is far from where we spend most of our time so knocking is rarely effective. Halloween this year changed my priorities. These past two years were pandemic Halloweens where we just put candies out front on a decorated table, but this year we were back to answering our door. A working doorbell would be incredibly useful, so I grabbed MJ and we set about debugging it a few weeks ago.

We honestly thought it would be a very involved project. It was not. I even questioned the value of writing this post at all for fear of getting hopes up about this being a deeply technical, fascinating story. It’s not. But it was still pretty fun to dig into, especially since I knew nothing about how doorbells actually worked.

The actual chimes live above the stairs, which is tricky to get to, so we decided to start at the button. Plus, figuring out if there was power even going to the button seemed like a valuable use of our time. Good news: power was good!

So up to the chimes we went. Taking off the cover led us to discover a much more interesting device than we expected. Manufactured in 1994, it appears to be a an Emerson Rittenhouse Model C8846R 8-Note Electronic Door Chime. It’s fully electronic, and lo! There’s a battery in there! Maybe that’s all it will take to “fix” it? I swapped out the battery and… it kind of worked. Huh.

That’s when I dropped the model number into Google and discovered this glorious YouTube video: Servicing an Emerson Rittenhouse Model C8846R 8-Note Electronic Door Chime Base. As the video shares, there are no service manuals, wiring diagrams, or any technical information that can be found online about this, so the video was all I had! Thankfully, the solution was hilariously simple. About halfway through the video he does a close-up of the board and it clearly says, “Use with two 9 volt batteries”. Two! There are TWO batteries inside this thing!

So I climbed back up to the chimes and dug around behind them until I fished out the other battery so I could replace it. That was the solution all along!

Our 28-year old doorbell lives once again, just in time for Halloween. In the couple of days it took for us to ferret out the issue, MJ did a bit of research into what we’ll eventually replace it with that can be tied into our overall home automation strategy. But I can wait, this old doorbell and I are pals now.

Filed under: castro valley

Halloween 2022

Sunday, Nov 13th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

These past two years have been unusual for a lot of reasons, but Halloween was notable because it’s a holiday that is incredibly memorable and social for kids. The pandemic meant very muted celebrations, and either none, or limited, trick-or-treating. As things ease up this year and kids become fully vaccinated, we finally got a glimpse of what a normal Halloween could be for our boys, and we had a lot of fun.

First, I discovered hooks along the front of our house last year, presumably used for Christmas lights in the past, and so I took the opportunity this year to buy Halloween lights! Adam “helped” me install them and I also put some pumpkins and a little wreath by our front door.

We did some Halloween art!

We took an afternoon to go to a local pumpkin patch and mini-carnival with rides for the kiddos!

And the weekend that led up to Halloween itself, we did a bunch of little activities in our costumes. This year Aaron and I dressed up as Stitch and Lilo, while MJ and Adam dressed up as the Man with the Yellow Hat and Curious George. Our first outing was to a trunk-or-treat that is held at a park within walking distance of our house. That afternoon, we walked down to our local comic book store for a festival they were having.

Sunday we attended a pumpkin decorating and playground event with other local families.

And that afternoon we went home and did our own pumpkin carving!

We have Gromit, Shaun, and Timmy lawn ornaments that a few of the kids in the neighborhood enjoy visiting, so I thought it would be fun to do Shaun and Gromit on the pumpkins this year.

The stencils I used were made available in a couple promotions Aardman did, and are still available online:

On Halloween itself we spent a little time at the village for a big Halloween event, but it was unexpectedly (for us!) crowded, and a bit much even at this phase. Besides, the boys didn’t actually need much candy and it was nice enough to get a little taste of the event and walk back home. That evening we went trick-or-treating!

Once we wrapped up trick-or-treating, we all hung out downstairs to answer the door to give out more candy. The boys probably enjoyed that just as much as getting candy themselves, as the novelty of people coming to our house is still fresh. It was also fun for them to see lots of kids and costumes, and generally to be up “late” doing an activity that was outside the norm.

Looking forward to lots more “normal” Halloweens with the boys in our future. It’s always been my favorite holiday, but celebrating with kids is a whole different experience.

Filed under: castro valley, events, family, kids, life

Holidays, 41st birthday, and friends

Sunday, Oct 23rd, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The end of September was a bit of a whirlwind. The Jewish high holy days always land around that time, I have my birthday, and at work we’re winding down from the busiest time of the year (especially true this year!).

When we got back from Philadelphia, we immediately paused to observe Rosh Hashanah. We’re still not going to the synagogue for services, but the synagogue we’re still members of in San Francisco still had a virtual option this year available via YouTube. So we enjoyed services the evening before, and before services in the morning Aaron and I spent a little time at the nearby Japanese gardens before returning home for morning services.

That evening we all sat down and enjoyed some honey and apples!

Yom Kippur was similarly observed, but without the food since it’s a fasting holiday. The notable thing we did for Yom Kippur was taking the boys to Dublin on BART to have a nice pre-fast meal before sunset. It’s something we should repeat, as the boys really enjoyed the whole evening and Adam has since asked to go to dinner on the train multiple times.

The Jewish holiday that lands after Yom Kippur is Sukkot. It’s not one I’ve ever paid much attention to, but we decided it was a nice opportunity to visit a local-ish synagogue that was building a sukkah. The boys definitely enjoyed that too. Hopefully next year we’ll be able to properly observe it with a meal in the sukkah and more time with the community, but this was a nice introduction for the boys and me.

In the middle of all this was my 41st birthday. The day before I got my annual flu shot and was grateful for no ill effects. So that morning I did a run/walk of a 5K in the morning, which concluded with a ridiculously decadent pile of birthday pancakes.

We celebrated with the boys when they got up from their nap. To everyone’s delight, there was cake!

That evening, MJ and I spent the rare evening out by walking over to OCULTO, which opened during the pandemic but we had avoided until we eased up on our indoor dining restrictions for special occasions. It was a great dinner, and though the limited menu means we probably won’t go there too often, it’s nice to know that there’s a nice place we can go within walking distance of home.


We’re aiming to get our bivalent COVID vaccine booster in the coming weeks, something that we delayed due to our household finally succumbing to COVID in July. Still, we have loosened our restrictions somewhat and I’ve started visiting with friends again. My friend Jose was visiting from Peru a couple weeks ago and we met for lunch. He was one of the last people I saw before the pandemic lockdown because we both attended the Southern California Linux Expo in March of 2020. This past Friday I met up with my friend and fellow Partimus board member Grant, who I also hadn’t seen in over two years. We recently lost a former board member and Partimus volunteer, so the visit was tinged with shared loss, but it was still wonderful to catch-up. I hope to continue this in the coming weeks, I really have missed everyone.

Filed under: castro valley, events, family, food, kids, life

Open Mainframe Summit 2022

Wednesday, Oct 12th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On September 21st I headed to Philadelphia for my first in-person event since March 2020, the Open Mainframe Summit! The Linux Foundation kicked off this event in 2020, and it swiftly went virtual for two years. This means it was the first time this event had been in person too. Masks and either vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test were required to attend, which made me feel much safer about this being the first event I went back to. Kudos to the event team for holding firm on this requirement at this phase of the pandemic.

The day before the event I also had the pleasure of meeting with our VP, Meredith Stowell, who was in town for an Open Mainframe Project board meeting prior to the event. One of the things that I’ve found so valuable about my role and the teams that I’m on is not only how accessible our leadership chain is, but that they go out of their way to check in with individual contributors. I’ve worked on a lot of great teams, but it’s really transformational to work for an organization where you feel directly supported from the top down.

My participation in this event took several forms. Early on, I was part of the program committee that helped select the talks. I was also managing IBM’s sponsor presence for the third year in a row. While I always had a nice cohort of folks helping me put together materials and things for the virtual booth, it took a lot more logistical work to get everything there in-person. Finally, I gave a talk on the Linux Distributions Working Group with my group co-creator Sarah Julia Kriesch and also participated in a mentorship keynote panel.

As we led up to the event, I helped get a booth schedule put together for IBMers who I knew would be on-site to help, and made sure I had my Raspberry Pi 400 all loaded up with our sustainability demo to show off at the booth.

The morning of the event I loaded everything up into my backpack, a small suitcase, and the monitor tucked away in its box, and took the train down to the city. The background banner for the booth was all set up when I arrived and came out beautifully, and with a few extra pairs of hands helping out, we had the booth set up in no time.

And then the event kicked off! I won’t dive deep into technology here, since this is a more personal reflection, except to say that the technical sessions I was able to attend were top-notch and I think we did a really nice job selecting a diverse set of speakers, across various metrics. The keynotes felt approachable by everyone in the audience, which is hard to pull off for a technical conference, but the Linux Foundation does a really good job making sure various perspectives are captured in the community. Perhaps the most personally valuable one to me came from Cynthia Coupé who spoke on “Neurodivergency and the Mainframe: A Parallel Universe”. I have a loved one who recently received a neurodivergent diagnosis, and as I learn to support them I’ve learned a considerable amount about myself, and my own peculiarities. What I loved about her message though was that we need to be building inclusive spaces where we accept and celebrate our differences because of the different types of value we all can bring. I know I have a tendency to get hyper focused and excited about things, but it turns out that it has served me quite well in my career, as long as I had a team to support me and a community that’s forgiving of quirkiness.

The biggest take-away for me at this event was meeting people. This has always been true of in-person conferences, if all we went for was learning, we could arguably do that by viewing a carefully curated playlist of talks from YouTube. It was particularly important this time though. I joined IBM less than a year before the pandemic, which means most of my time spent in the mainframe space has been online. There are more people I hadn’t met in my immediate sphere than those I had, and it was a tremendous opportunity to connect on a personal level, and have some candid conversations that I otherwise have not had the opportunity for.

There were a lot of selfies.

A lot!

It was of course a pleasure meeting and doing a talk with Sarah. Her passion for openSUSE on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE inspires everyone around her, and she’s being doing a lot of great advocacy to our broader Linux and open source communities. I think our talk together went quite well, and it was nice to sync up with people there at the summit to discuss what some of our future plans should be.


With Sarah!

I also had a lovely time on the keynote mentorship panel on day 2. I have worked with Michael Friesenegger of SUSE extensively over the years, so it was a pleasure to finally meet in person and doubly-so to be on a panel with him. It was also nice hearing from people after the panel, so thanks to everyone who paused to chat with me about it.

In all, great event, and it’s invigorated me in a way that I forgot in-persons had the power to do. I have new ideas for the projects and working groups I’m part of, and excited about improvements we can make to create an even more exciting event next year.

Filed under: events, mainframes, philadelphia, tech

We finally made it back to Philly

Saturday, Oct 8th, 2022 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

We celebrated the arrival of 2020 with nearly one year old Adam and our extended family at my father-in-law’s house. There were hats and fireworks on TV and simply enjoying each other’s company. A couple days later we flew back to California and had no idea what 2020 would bring. Turns out, it would bring a pandemic that meant that we couldn’t return to Philadelphia and see our family for over two and a half years.

So, with an additional kid in tow, we were grateful to finally make our way back to our townhouse in Philadelphia in September.

The first hurdle was the flight with two little ones and all their stuff. We spent our spare moments for over a week making lists, getting everything ready, and packing for the trip. It was exhausting. I prepared myself for the worst on the flight, and while it’s tiring to entertain a couple kids awake and trapped in their plane seats for five hours, they were reasonably happy for most of the flight. I’m sure it helps that part of the travel prep was making sure they had lots of things to do, videos loaded on their phones, and way too many snacks.

Once we safely arrived, two hours late thanks to flight delays that are the norm now, we spent two weeks there. Our goals for the trip were to visit with as many friends and family as we could, and to “open up the house” which meant taking care of whatever came up, planned and unplanned, as we settled in. The tasks ended up being:

  • Get rid of the hole in the rough-in bathroom downstairs that allowed a mouse to get into the house
  • …and clean up after the mouse
  • Replace the garbage disposal, which inexplicably stopped working
  • Power wash the deck, and key spots on the house
  • Put up some gates to prevent the kids from falling down the stairs and/or leaving the house

We had a large gated play yard in the living room designed for life with a baby, so it was weird coming back with two kids, neither of whom is a baby anymore. The gated area was useful for keeping the toys contained, but that was about it. We also didn’t exactly have a plan for where little Aaron would sleep. We had always assumed that the boys would be sharing a room by now, but with Aaron’s poor sleep schedule, we haven’t made the leap. As a result, we shifted our plans several times, and Aaron ended up sleeping in a bathroom (it was safe!) for a few nights before we cleared out an unfinished room downstairs that we converted into a little room for him.

I also quickly discovered that our door-free home office is not optimal for serious business calls or virtual presentations with the kids playing above me. Which leads me to the fact that while MJ was handling the majority of the above tasks, I was working overtime for a launch event, virtual conference, and in-person conference, all of which I’d been preparing for over the past couple months. I was considerably more stressed and crunched for time than I would have liked on this trip, and I hope that next time we’re in town I can actually find some time to just sit and relax and enjoy our home.

The lack of downtime also reminded me how much I’ve changed since we bought the townhouse. The goal of the townhouse was always so we’d have a home base to easily come back to as we raised our family. MJ’s family in the neighborhood could see the kids grow up, visits to my family that’s spread up and down the east coast would be easier. But for the first several years of having the townhouse it was during our long child-free existence. We had projects, but the chore overhead was nothing like our home in California, which meant I had a lot more time to relax, catch up on some of my open source work, write, and read. The vast difference with this trip was shocking in a way I didn’t expect, and still haven’t quite come to terms with. For now, I am focusing on how much joy our little ones bring me, and in my moments of pause, I remind myself that this very young age is a season, and they won’t always be so in need of my constant attention. My work is personally fulfilling and many of my hobbies can wait.

Ultimately, the trip was successful by our simple metrics. We managed to see several family members, and shared a couple meals with friends. The townhouse is now in reasonable shape for our next visit, which is good because our next visit won’t be until the chilly weather around the winter holidays. I wish I had taken more pictures though, we really didn’t get enough, and the boys and their cousins won’t be young forever.

MJ and I also took the time for a date night at The Continental Midtown, and we met up with some other families at an au pair event at Washington Crossing, where the boys had a lot of fun running around.

I got to have my Philly food favorites: pizza, buffalo chicken cheesesteaks, hoagies, east coast Chinese food, and some really great Italian food.


East coast shrimp egg rolls and sweet & sour chicken, nothing like it in the west!

My beloved cannoli

Work-wise, I completed my virtual conference, with much success!

And then I spent time getting ready for the second week, when I went down to the city for the Open Mainframe Summit, which I’ll share more about at a later time. It was also a resounding success, and as a smaller event in a familiar city, it felt like the perfect way for me to ease my way back into conference travel. The key components of preparation were logistical, and making sure my Raspberry Pi 400 was up to the task.

In addition to the obvious, what I think I gained the most from this trip was a fullness of heart I hadn’t felt since before the pandemic. As an introvert, I would have imagined two and a half years at home would be bliss, but even I truly missed people. It was tiring seeing so many people, but I’m grateful we did this time, because it was so nice to reconnect. Now as the COVID threat starts to fade, I’m eager to get back to seeing more of my friends and family.

Filed under: family, kids, life, philadelphia, travel
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