Philadelphia area Linux Users Group Virtualization Roundtable Summary

Thursday, Aug 13th, 2009 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Tuesday night we hosted a Virtualization Roundtable at PLUG North meeting. To be honest, it started out as a bit of a filler event because we didn’t have a speaker, but upon mentioning the possibility the response I got was very positive. I started planning the event last month, gathered a few experts who I communicated with via email prior to the event to plan the basics and bounce questions off each other. Lee Marzke, our VMWare expert, was particularly helpful with planning, deploying a shared plone site for us to post our screenshots and notes on. Thanks Lee!

The announcement outlines the basics the event. Aside from experts on VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox, the plan was to have a guided discussion on virtualization basics, the benefits, challenges and downfalls of implementations with frequent breaks for general Q&A about virtualization.

The result? Success! Not only did we have a very impressive turn out of 25 people (our standard meeting for that PLUG chapter is about 10, our biggest meeting until Tuesday night was 14), the discussion was very lively and engaging and I’ve received several positive emails post-event saying that it was enjoyable and they intend to attend talks in the future.

Here are my notes from the event, for my own reference and in case someone else wants to run something similar:

1 hour is not nearly enough. We nudged past the 1.5 hour mark and it still was a bit rushed in places and didn’t cover everything I wanted to cover. Next time shoot for 2 hours and make sure the moderator is able to keep things on track.
Even though it’s a discussion, we did have a structure:

Introduction to virtualization, general questions, what are people attending interested in?
Introduction to VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox, demos and questions
General discussion – success stories, failures, standard dos and don’ts

Slides! The slides I wrote are very basic, giving me a visual focal point for introducing the roundtable, giving people an overview and in general driving home “this is an all level roundtable – speak up, participate, no question is dumb” etc. Our roundtable was so successful activity-wise that we stopped using the slides after the introduction, but if this wasn’t the case it would have been useful to have them to refocus the discussion.
I had intended to only devote 5 minutes each to a quick intro to VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox, but after questions were added and two of us ended up doing live demos, this turned into 10-15 minutes each! Oops, plan accordingly next time.
I’m confident that my choice of VMWare, Xen (.org – not Citrix) and VirtualBox for the showcased applications was spot on. On the surface they are competitive virtualization technologies, but upon closer inspection they really serve different segments of the market. It was fascinating during the discussion to see what different people were interested in, the modern hardware requirement and monetary investment in VMWare with all the bells and whistles certainly was of interest for some, while others cheered when I admitted that my first Xen server was hosted on a Pentium 3.
The roundtable format was great since it gave us the opportunity to invite free-form questions from people completely new to virtualization as well as welcome virtualization industry leaders like Mike Greb of Linode to offer their expertise.
The roundtable format was less great because you really need a good moderator guiding discussion and making sure all the vital points were hit upon. This was my first time hosting something like this, so I think there were a couple of tangents and I probably could have handled some of the transitions more gracefully. Oh, and going over by a half hour wasn’t fantastic, but people did still seem engaged and interested in talking even that late.
Have fun and be positive! I’m a huge believer that excitement is infectious. I totally geeked out over the usefulness of CLI Xen commands and the flexibility of the technology. Our VMWare expert was equally as excited and confident about the product he was presenting on.

Finally, a huge thanks to CoreDial for being such a great host (for a year now!), and this time a specific Thank You toKevin McAllister who took over being the CoreDial employee host this month from Danita Fries. He spent lots of time and effort finding and bringing in chairs for all the people who ended up showing up and squeezing into the conference room. Thanks Kevin! And thanks to everyone who attended and participated.

Filed under: philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Community Learning Project and Ubuntu US Teams

Thursday, Aug 13th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Ubuntu Community Learning Project

Due to my involvement in the Ubuntu Classroom project, I became involved with the Beginners Team Education Focus group earlier this year. The #ubuntu-classroom channel began hosting Beginners Team classes. From there the Ubuntu Community Learning Team was born.

Over the past several months the team has been working through licensing choices, Moodle deployment (theme still to be completed), governing and user infrastructure. We’ve begun working with teams within the community and have met with the Canonical Training folks to discuss materials and overlap of services.

Now, we need you! Martin Owens has also posted about it, so if you’re interested and haven’t yet, have a peek at that post as well as he outlines some of the skills we need. Essentially, we need brains! Your expertise in your given area of Ubuntu, as mentioned on our wiki page we have 5 categories:

We have a Moodle infrastructure deployed, but we’re also working with Classroom to host IRC-based sessions and we’d like to see course material (within Moodle or not) being worked on for live sessions that LoCo teams can give to their own users (on spreading Ubuntu, perhaps?) and to the public (Intro to Ubuntu classes? Server classes?). Martin’s also started developing Server courses and releasing them on his blog and linked to the Maintaining Ubuntu wiki page which will probably be incorporated into the Moodle infrastructure. I’ve volunteered to help start writing and the Ubuntu Pennsylvania team will be teaching some of the first Desktop classes.

Don’t think you can contribute to course development yourself? We also need expert reviewers and less experienced folks who can take a look at the coursework to give us feedback about how friendly it is to someone no familiar with the subject matter.

So, interested in finding out more and joining us? Browse our wiki for project details, or just drop by #ubuntu-learning on chat.freenode.net and ask us questions directly. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for people to join the team, simply drop a note to the Ubuntu Learning Mailing List or introduce yourself in #ubuntu-learning. Please don’t be shy about an introduction! We ask people to introduce themselves so we can get a better idea of what kind of talent we have and need within the project, whether your talent is “brilliant sysadmin and experienced teacher” or “student who is interested in testing our material” we need and welcome you!

Our next meeting is scheduled for 8pm EDT August 17th / 00:00 UTC August 18th in #ubuntu-meeting so please feel free to join us.

Ubuntu US Teams

Another project I’ve been working with lately is the US Teams project. This is the mentoring team for all the the US teams and this year we reorganized the project and elected a new board and mentors. I worked with Dan Trevino to launch our new US Teams Planet for aggregating the news feeds for teams in the US (it’s been a great way to see what other teams are up to!). And we tapped the Drupal talents of John Crawford to launch a new version of our website.

The latest team news? We’re now publishing articles on our new website! There is a lot of LoCo documentation out there, but it can sometimes be tricky to find really useful stuff. Having identified the vital resources, our articles have the following purpose:

Identify the documentation that we reference most for US Teams, write short articles highlighting where to find this documentation so it puts it on the radar of more people, and contributing back to the main documentation as we can
Come up with new ideas, write articles about it, contribute back to the main documentation
US News – approvals, sharing successful new ideas
US-specific tips about running a LoCo in this country

Thus far we’ve published two articles on the site: Joining a US LoCo Team and Congratulations New York!, and so far have we’ve snagged the talents of Dan Trevino and Amber Graner for at least 3 more articles in the pipeline. Have an idea for an article you’d like to read or write? Please let me know!

Our next team meeting is scheduled for August 26th 2009 – 10pm EDT, 9pm CDT, 8pm MDT, 7pm PDT in #ubuntu-us – join us then to discuss the project, or drop by #ubuntu-us any time to get help with your US-based LoCo, share experiences, request a mentor or just shoot the breeze with other folks in the US who participate in LoCo teams.

Filed under: plug, ubuntu planet

Sweet Home 3D

Tuesday, Aug 4th, 2009 by pleia2 | 12 Comments

This past weekend I flew to San Francisco to visit my boyfriend and help him start getting settled into the gorgeous new condo he recently purchased and I had yet to see.

Upon arrival, I felt like I’d been there before! This was partially due to the photos and raw floor plans he sent me, but was also was greatly helped by the Sweet Home 3D software that I used to help him plan the furniture layout prior to the move.

I’d never actually used any kind of floorplan software, and honestly I didn’t have high hopes when I went out looking for what I essentially wanted to be Google SketchUp, but runs in Linux while still being cross-platform. I was delighted when I discovered Sweet Home 3D and even happier when I found it was actively maintained (last release, version 2.0, was on June 6th of this year), was simple to install (I just used the Linux Installer which had bundled java), was relatively easy to use (even for me!), and had great documentation. The FAQ even answered all the questions I had. What a brilliant project!

So I set off turning the floor plans into a real model. It took a few hours, and I’m still no expert at use since this has a lot of features that I’ll probably never use and I didn’t do fancy things like add windows and flooring, but I ended up with a pretty decent, usable result at the end:

But this hardly does it justice, hop over to the Sweet Home 3D for some screen shots that show the full potential of the software.

Oh, and I had a lovely time on my trip, even if it was too short! Note to self: next time you fly across the country, stay for more than 48 hours! ;)

Nice view from the roof of the building :)

Filed under: computers, plug, travel, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Pennsylvania + FreeGeekPenn

Tuesday, Jul 28th, 2009 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

On Saturday morning I met up with fellow Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo members Kevin and Stephen over at FreeGeekPenn in Ephrata.

FreeGeekPenn’s mission statement:

FREE GEEK PENN is a non-profit organization that recycles used technology and provides computers, education and access to the internet to those in need in exchange for community service.

Our intention for meeting up with them was to see how our team could lend a hand in their operations.

I came bearing Ubuntu gifts and we were welcomed very warmly by the staff. We immediately were able to speak with one of the organization founders, Stephen Bailey, who was helpful and gracious, eventually giving us a full tour of the facility. He was joined by their resident “Linux Guy” Adam Markley.

Obviously our team was there to lend support on the Linux side of things, our discussion revolved around a few major topics, and avenues that our team could help with:

Intro to Ubuntu Classes
PCs being sent to Africa programs (possibly deploy Ubuntu rather than shipping them OS-less)
Desktop deployment (perhaps a bit premature, they outlined issues encountered the last time they tried this)

I’ve put together a wiki page detailing our possible collaboration options and notes about their past Linux deployment experience:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/CommunityOutreachTeam/FreeGeekPenn

It will be interesting to see where this collaboration goes. I think starting out with Ubuntu Classes, working with their systems-to-Africa program, and in general being available as free “Linux Experts” will do wonders for the acceptance of Ubuntu over there.

As a final note, they are in need of an experienced grant writer to work with them on funding, if you know of anyone please let them know (or let me know and I’ll put you in touch directly).

Filed under: computers, plug, ubuntu planet

PLUG Into Hive76

Monday, Jul 27th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

Last Tuesday Dan Toliaferro dropped by the Ubuntu Pennsylvania channel (#ubuntu-us-pa on irc.freenode.net) and asked if anyone would be interested in a new “Linux Night” in Philadelphia. We began discussion his venue, Hive76, a new hackerspace on Spring Garden Street. I proposed a collaboration with PLUG. He invited the folks from the Philly Linux Meetup.com group and myself down to their Open House night the following evening.

Wednesday night I headed down and had the pleasure of meeting Dan and several of the Hive76 members. I also was finally able to meet several of the Meetup.com Linux people. After an hour or so of casual discussion, Dan brought everyone who was attending and interested in organizing the Linux Night together to discuss the specifics.

It was a great discussion. The traditional PLUG meeting was of the format of: 1 hour of general Q&A, 1 hour of presentation per meeting. But Hive76 is a different sort of venue and culture, so we felt a looser format would be more appropriate. Plus, they have project space! The wild brainstorming began, and by the end of the night we were all pumped for our new “Linux Night” to be everything from laid back Q&A sessions to the building of Linux robots. It was also decided that this would become the new Meetup.com group monthly meetup, a collaboration I was hoping would occur.

Since that meeting, Dan, Adam Grossman, Khalil Hudson from Meetup and I have developed the details for the chapter. The result? In addition to a semi-private group wiki page where there is already brainstorming about the RISC board we want for the robot (grin), we have:

Announcement: [Hive 76 Discussion] PLUG Into Hive 76!

We will be hosting our meetings on the 4th Thursday of each month, our first meeting is scheduled for a month from now, on August 27th at 7PM.

Oh, and Dan gets credit for the amusing name :)

Filed under: computers, events, philadelphia, plug, ubuntu planet

Retiring from the trenches

Monday, Jul 27th, 2009 by pleia2 | 16 Comments

Over the past couple months I’ve found myself pondering the Women In F/OSS struggle and my place in it. For a long time I found it to be energizing, feeling like I was helping with the educating of people about the issue and engaging in discussions online, but I’ve hit a wall. I cringe at each Ubuntu Planet sexism post because I know the comments will be horrendous and upsetting. I’m not even posting this to the main Ubuntu Planet because of it, I’m tired of donning fire retardant clothing each time I stick my neck out on the issue (posting this in public at all is a risk, I considered not).

Essentially…

I’m tired of being told I’m “too sensitive” or have “no sense of humor” because I spoke up after something I saw made me feel uncomfortable, excluded, and nudged me closer to quitting F/OSS entirely.

I’m tired of answering the same questions over and over again, even if it is just carrying around and handing out a bag-o-links that address the pertinent issues.

I’m tired of hearing the fights and justifications for porn in slides at “professional” tech conferences.

I’m tired of having to defend the existence and usefulness of women in tech groups.

I’m tired of trying to convince people that sexism exists.

I’m sick of all of it, I’m tired of fighting.

But this battle is important, people need to stand up. Lucky for me, I personally can quit the discussion. We have some extraordinary women out there like Kirrily Robert, who gave a keynote at OSCON on the issue (and, even better, gave loads of suggestions on how to fix it and successful projects out there that break down the divide), Melissa Draper who is on the front lines of the sexism posts on the Ubuntu Planet, Mackenzie Morgan out there making blog posts and comments on the issue, and plenty of prominent men in the community standing with us through the mud-slinging like Matt Zimmerman and David Schlesinger. Thanks to all of you, and hundreds more who have taken a stand on the issues, even a single supportive comment on a blog helps!

I won’t be quitting the Women In FOSS scene entirely though. Rather than being in the trenches I’m going to scale back to the non-combatant role of support and encouragement. In addition to continuing to work with the Ubuntu Women initiatives to encourage and promote women in the community, it’s come to my attention that there are organizations in the world whose focus is getting girls involved in technology. I didn’t feel very encouraged in tech as a girl (and was sometimes actively discouraged) and so when I finally got hard core into it I was already several years older than my male geek counterparts, adding to my insecurity with tech. So I think these programs are going to be vital for the future, I think making girls feel confident and proficient with technology will do wonders for changing the industry and open source.

Hurrah for positivity, encouragement and support! It’s still work, but right now it’s so much more rewarding and far less draining.

Filed under: computers, reflection

Cough, Cars, Computers and other things that start with C?

Saturday, Jul 25th, 2009 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I’ve finally had some downtime from all these exciting weekend trips, it’s been quite nice and I’ve had lots of time to catch up on local stuff!

Last week I finally saw a doctor again about my never-ending cough. It started a few years ago, this lingering cough that lasted through the winter, usually went away in the spring, sounding like a horrible deep smokers cough (I’ve probably smoked 5 cigarettes in my entire life). It’s been constant since September now and I’ve just been reluctant to see a doctor about it because they always prescribe allergy medicine that doesn’t help and makes me dehydrated. Well, this time I got a stronger dose of allergy medication – and it’s not working great. It was suggested to me by Stephen’s wife that it might be a acid reflux related issue – which is something I’ll look into. In any event, I’ll give it a few more days on this allergy medicine until I call the doctor again, but I am determined to get to the bottom of it this time.

Blinker failed state inspection last week. This was not the news I was hoping for, and I was particularly disturbed to find out why my mechanic failed me – the windshield. It has a couple dings in it, which had been patched by the previous owner 3+ years ago, it passed inspection in NJ, passed in PA last year, but this year? He wouldn’t pass me, and claims that it shouldn’t have passed last year, sigh. $225 for the replacement windshield, which I got done Wednesday. When I left the shop I wished my mechanic a happy summer, and happy fall. I really hope I don’t need to bring my car in again for anything but oil changes for the rest of the year, it’s been an expensive car year!

This past weekend was pretty mellow. Saturday, after taking care of an on-site tech support request for a friend I ended up having the afternoon to myself to catch up on some project work. Sunday I had plans but they changed at last minute which gave me a rare free afternoon – which I took advantage to the fullest, got a lot of Ubuntu work done, got the ball rolling on some local events. Monday was a busy day at work, and at the end of it I decided to go offline for the evening. Shock. Horror! …but actually a wildly productive evening as I ignored IRC and email and got some much needed hacking done on my Xen server and some studying done that I’d been neglecting.

Following Monday’s productivity burst I decided that I really needed to make time to finish reading Tom Limoncelli’s Time Management for System Administrators which I downloaded from Safari a couple months ago. I have far too much going on to keep track of everything properly, the “The Scattered Notes System and The Ever-Growing To Do
List of Doom” were wearing me down! So far I’m totally sold on calendaring (I even use my calendar to remember what I did in the past!), but getting my to-do lists in order is going to take some serious work. What else was I going to blog about in this post? I forget!

Oh! My Disney movie collection. Before I was a Star Wars fan, before I was a Linux geek, I was nutty about Disney’s Full-Length Animated movies. My VHS collection is pretty extensive. VHS? Yes. I’ve kept a VCR around to watch them, but it’s getting more absurd every year (and so does the teasing!). At first I considered a technical solution of ripping them, but I encountered a few issues: 1. Expense: VCR to digital is either expensive in hardware or time, there are cheap solutions that require more knowledge than I have with hooking up a VCR through things and doing the ripping, and there are VHS to digital converters out there, but they are pricey. 2. Quality: I’ve watched these tapes a lot, not all of them are in the best condition. 3. Legal? I would like to argue that while I’m within fair use when I make digital copies for myself, but I don’t know. So last year I decided to take the plunge and start buying DVD versions of my Disney VHSs. It’s been a slow process, Disney DVDs are expensive new (most $20-30, but some are more!) and even used they’re rarely less than $15/each, and I paid $25 for a used copy of The Lion King. My collection is coming along though, about 66% complete! Hurrah!

What else… Gnome. I am not a fan of XFCE 4.6.0 that shipped with Jaunty. It’s got a couple annoying bugs (being a .0 release, this isn’t a surprise, I hear .2 is better). I was also terribly upset about the restructuring of the menu system without backwards compatibility or a replacement menu editor. There are some time-consuming ways to manually add items, but I don’t want to do it for the number of custom items I had for work. So for about 2 months I switched to Gnome on my desktop. I was quite used to and liked using Gnome on my mini9, and it has served me very well! I used it on my desktop for about 2 months before switching back to XFCE. The trouble? Memory usage mostly. Gnome still isn’t as bad as something like Windows Vista, but I am pretty abusive on my desktop, and the 2G of registered RAM on my system is expensive to upgrade, in Gnome I found myself frequently using all my ram and tapping into swap when engaged in large projects, no fun. Coming back to XFCE was refreshing, oh how I missed thee, and the entire exercise was quite interesting.

Last night I had a couple friends over for “movie night” – which means we geeked out over internet absurdities, drank some Dogfish Head 60 Minute Ale (I still have over a half a case in my fridge, what will I do with this all?), chowed down on pizza and watched Metalocalypse. Good times.

Finally, I’ve been running around for a lot this week doing geek-things. Wednesday was a visit to a hackerspace in Philly to discuss a PLUG collaboration, today was a visit to a computer non-profit in Ephrata to talk about how the Ubuntu Pennsylvania team can work with them, tonight is a meeting to plan a potential foss conference next summer, and am planning a virtualization rountable for PLUG… But I’ll blog about all that later :)

Filed under: life

Geeknic++ 2009

Thursday, Jul 16th, 2009 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

This past weekend I went to the Geeknic++ Northeast US over at Jenny Jump State Forest.

First, the obligatory fire and s’more photos! I ate like a half dozen s’mores, yum yum.

I headed out shortly after work on Friday and arrived at the group site around 7PM and scoped out the place before the rest of the campers arrived. The site was great, as was the whole campground. Sites were spread out so that campers weren’t on top of each other, the facilities were spaced out reasonably, and in spite of getting slightly lost upon entry, I was able to find the spot and then direct people via phone, twitter and SMS once they got to the campground (note to self: make sure everyone has my cellphone number next time!).

The campground was not too far from the Delaware Water Gap so the location itself was great too. We had folks come up from Philadelphia, from New Jersey, and a whole crew come down from the Long Island Linux Users Group who we worked with to plan everything. Plus, it was very close to I-80 so we had cellphone reception – which was good for me since I was sort of on-call this past weekend (emergencies only!).

The hits of the camping trip? Bears and Jonathan’s over-the-campfire grilled cheese maker, as seen in the photo below. We didn’t get to see any bears, of course, but the “Bear Country” signs on the tables and the bear-resistant food storage container made the ongoing theme of bear alerts and bear teleportation (well, we’re geeks!) pervade the weekend. The grilled cheese maker was a simple $10 grill tool that you put some cooking spray, a couple slices of bread and some cheese inside and roasted over the fire to make the most amazing grilled cheese sandwiches ever. We started eating them Friday night, and made several more on Saturday for lunch. Yum!

After lunch on Saturday, four of us got together and headed up the Summit Trail to check out the view from the summit of one of the hills (mountains?) that the forest was situated on. It was a fun hike, pretty easy and less than 3 miles so the 8 year old who came along for the hike was doing ok for most of it, even if he did fade a bit toward the end. Upon return to the campground we all chilled out for a bit and then made dinner early in preparation for the rain scheduled to hit in the early evening.

At 8PM we headed up to the United Astronomy Clubs of NJ’s Observatory there at Jenny Jump Forest. It was drizzling a bit at this point and of course far too cloudy to see out their telescope, but they host an astronomy club meeting every Saturday night there which is open to the public. About a dozen of us showed up for their interesting presentation on space colonization, and got to learn about the cool plans they have for a huge telescope they’re getting installed and a radio telescope they’re breaking ground for. It was a fascinating evening with those folks, and we couldn’t have planned a more on-theme event for a bunch of camping geeks.

The rain had started by the time the astronomy meeting had ended and we headed back to the campground to hide under our umbrellas and the makeshift shelter that a couple of the guys put up earlier in the evening (there was much teasing as they put it up with fishing line and spare rope, but it was quite a useful shelter when completed!). I turned in before 11, not sure how late others stayed up, but the campfire was built up enough before the rain that survived at least until people were heading off to bed. The rain lasted through most of the night, but by morning the sun had come out and started to dry all our wet tents (and some wet sleeping bags!).

Sunday morning we all packed up and headed our own ways. Total count for the event was 22 people! S’mores were enjoyed! No one was eaten by a bear! Geeknic++ success! Next year we might host it over a long weekend though, two nights and only one full day wasn’t enough :)

Check out more photos over at my flickr gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157621268144001/

And fellow camper Andrew also uploaded a whole bunch to his site:

http://ahotw.com/gallery/v/linux/2009-07-12-Geeknic/

Filed under: events, travel, ubuntu planet

Cantillons!

Tuesday, Jul 7th, 2009 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

I discovered Cantillon with Michael a couple years ago over at Union Jack’s Inn. Wow. I’ve since had it in bottles one other time, and last year I was able to snag it on tap during a lambic happy hour downtown at Zot.

Tonight I was up at my local place-to-buy-singles (grumble strange state laws) and hit the Cantillon take-out jackpot! They had 2 Cantillons chilled, and another case had just come in, which they opened for me while I was checking out.

Of the three, I’d only ever tried one before, the RosÃ© de Gambrinus. I’m very excited about the Vigneronne, which I might crack open with some fish later this week. The Bruocsella 1900 Grand Cru was the one they had just received in, I think I’ll be saving this for a special occasion.

Filed under: beer

To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars!

Monday, Jul 6th, 2009 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I spent the long holiday weekend in San Francisco with MJ. So I’ll start there, for those of you not hovering over twitter MJ and I started dating this weekend :)

.
MJ and me after fireworks on the 4th

We’ve been close friends for years, and in spite of the distance this progression in our relationship makes me very happy.

But on the trip itself! I started work an hour early on Thursday so I could skip out at 3PM and drive to the airport, I flew out on a non-stop 5:55PM flight arriving in SFO around 9PM. MJ was clued into into the fact that flowers and food are the direct route to my heart, he had a vase of beautiful, mostly pink, flowers for me back at his place. And the next morning? Breakfast at The Crepe House on Polk, where we split a delicious crepe entrÃ©e and an amazing fruity dessert crepe.

From there it was off to the Asian Art Museum to check out their Lords of the Samurai exhibit. The exhibit was fantastic, and after we spent some time on the 3rd floor exploring the beautiful Indian and Persian exhibits they had. From there we headed out to Yerba Buena Gardens and explored the surrounding area. The garden itself is stunning, must have a picnic there someday!

Dinner was at MJ’s favorite local sushi bar, where he knows the sushi chef and got us an amazing assortment of exciting rolls and some spicy mussels that I fell in love with, finishing off the meal with some fried green tea ice cream. Yum yum!

Saturday was the 4th of July. The day began down at the Ferry Building Marketplace where we had lunch at DELICA rf1 Japanese delicatessen (hm, a lot of Japanese on this trip). It was beautiful out and we were able to grab a spot outside where we could take in the beautiful view of the bay, watching the ferries come in. Wow, I miss the ocean so much. After lunch it was over to Ciao Bella Gelato for some gelato. Um, wow, yum! I’ve been having so much good gelato lately.

Later, we decided to head down to Pier 39 for the 4th of July festivities. The place was quite crowded by the time we got off the super crowded bus down to the pier, but not so bad to be too uncomfortable. We snagged some take-out dinner of fried calamari and shrimp and clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl at Sabella & Latorre’s on Fisherman’s Wharf.

From there we found a great spot to stand and watch the 9:30PM fireworks display, and were even able to peer across the bay and watch a bit of the Sausalito fireworks.

The fireworks wrapped up and we wandered around the wharf for a bit before heading up to to Ghirardelli Square for some yummy ice cream sundaes. From there we walked back to the apartment to pick up the car and drive over the Golden Gate to see a view of the city at night from there. Beautiful view, terribly romantic :) We didn’t get back until quite late.

Sunday morning I headed back to The Crepe House, because I really couldn’t get enough of that place, and I had arranged to meet up with, Megan Gruber, a girl I knew from High School and who recently found me on Facebook. We hadn’t really talked much in the past decade, and I think since leaving Maine she’s only the second person I’ve seen from those days (my close elementary-middle-high school friend Leslie being the other). It was fun meeting up, swapping stories about what we’ve been up to and what we’re doing now. Eventually we parted ways and headed back.

Sunday night I caught the very very sad redeye back to Philadelphia, with a layover in Las Vegas where I won $2.25 in slots ($12 in, $14.25 back – woo!), and touched down at PHL shortly after 6AM. Luckily MJ was able to snag me first class tickets on my way home (thank you!) so sleeping for much of the second leg of the trip was possible and I was able to work today. Tonight I got to have snuggly and playtime with my kitties, who my friends Jon and Crissi stopped by to check on Saturday, I sure missed them, but I’m missing MJ and San Francisco already.

Filed under: events, life, travel

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