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Summer joy through the clouds

Monday, Sep 16th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Depression is something I feel like that even I fail to fully understand until I’m in the depths of it. I have to very carefully manage my priorities, because some days I just hit a wall and I need to make sure I get to work and that life-sustaining basics are done for myself and our family. There are things that help, like exposure to sunlight, going out, and staying hydrated, but they only recharge my battery a couple percent and then I’m down again. I don’t want to feel this way, I want to be happy and present and engaged. But I can’t just snap out of it. I just need to do my best every day, and ride it out.

Fortunately, I have a great life, so personal hardship doesn’t make it worse. I also don’t have depression that’s debilitating enough to keep me from work and from the care of myself or loved ones. I am grateful for this, I know how lucky I am. It’s very hard some days, but it’s still possible to cope, even if I’m not feeling like my best self. And keeping our lives activity-filled on weekends does help keep my mind off how I’m feeling.

Retail therapy and seeing something to completion also help a little, perhaps unfortunately, but it did mean that finally getting a couch ordered and delivered for my office was a high point. We’ve actually done this before, but the couch was moved into the family room and we really like having it there, so we ordered an identical one to replace the one in my office. It’s actually a sofa bed, but it’s not a traditional one with a thin mattress, it’s the Serta Ainsley (Monroe on Wayfair) and it’s quite comfortable both as a couch and a bed. Since my home office doubles as a guest room, it’s nice to finally have it back, plus it’s a comfy spot to work from when the mood strikes.

We’ve been getting out around town lately, and the end of August brought one of our favorite events, Castro Valley Cruise Night! People bring their antique, vintage, and tricked out cars from all around the area to simply cruise down the boulevard. It’s just a couple blocks from home, so it makes for a very easy event for us to attend. A few booths from local law enforcement and emergency services are set up to meet the community, big speakers for music are set up midtown, and the community really shows up with folding chairs and snacks to hang out and enjoy the cars. It’s one of those events where we really feel community, and it’s energizing and makes me proud of our diverse little town. After doing some walking, we ended up at our favorite sushi place for dinner, and then got to enjoy the rest of the sunset and walk home and keep the boys out too late, oops. But we all had fun.

Last weekend we made it back over to the Chabot Space & Science Center for their first Friday event, and this month it was Science Fiction themed! We’re members, so it was a free event for us, but it would have been worth the price of admission. We were delighted to discover that the Sacramento Astromech Builders brought a couple droids that responded to activity, so the boys and I had a great time engaging with them. They also had face and arm painting of space designs, which Aaron was eager to get, and then Adam was too once he saw how great Aaron’s turned out. Since the event ran from 6-10PM we got to peek into the telescopes before and after sunset. Before sunset we went to their two smaller, older telescopes to see a couple stars, which were just pinpoints of light. After sunset we went over to their biggest telescope and saw the Ring Nebula! Aaron especially really seemed to enjoy that it looks a bit like a doughnut.


I didn’t realize until I got home that I was also wearing R2-D2 socks!


Aaron sits for some arm art

That Saturday marked the Castro Valley Fall Festival, which, yes, is held at the end of summer. It was warm out, but thankfully not overwhelmingly so, and we were able to enjoy a couple of hours there. I bought a couple local themed t-shirts from an artist there and we had some good food truck snacks. One booth had watercolor paining that the boys enjoyed, and there was a petting zoo! Aaron got a pony ride while Adam spent some time with older kids on a climbing structure.



Every Sunday morning the day has begun with the boys in swim classes. We actually started when we were in Philadelphia back in June and did them through July, then took a break in August as we settled back into school routines here in California. They’re held at a gym that’s about a 10 minute drive or 20 minute walk and single stop BART train ride. So far we’ve done both, and the boys definitely prefer the BART ride when it’s warm enough to take a stroll through parking lots and down sidewalks in their bathing suits and towels.

I’m happy to say that as of yesterday, they both graduated the first level of swim survival classes! Next Sunday they’ll have their first “Minnow” lessons, having completed the “Starfish” level. Luckily for us, they had openings in the same time slot, so it won’t be a big change for any of us.

We’ve also been putting some thought into what other activities to sign them up for. I feel like this is one of those things that really blind-sided me as a parent. I vaguely of knew about extracurricular activities, but it takes a lot of work on the part of the parents, and there’s a lot of pressure to sign your kid up for the “right” one. I’ve watched with a bit of shock how hard it is to get into some activities and the lengths people go to in order to get on the right lists and programs. Then I discovered that ones that are almost as good seem to have open availability. I obviously want our kids to be served well by the programs they’re in, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about parenthood it’s that the needs and values of the whole family need to always be factored in when making decisions about what we commit to. We’ll see what fits the criteria for us in the coming months.

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

IBM Telum II at Hot Chips

Thursday, Sep 12th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in 2021 the IBM Telum processor, the heart of the IBM z16 mainframe, was unveiled at Hot Chips (video here). I watched the recording when it came out, absolutely glued to each little detail that was presented, even the ones I didn’t fully understand (after all, I’m not that much of a processor expert). Over the coming weeks, articles like this one from AnandTech would come out, diving deeper into the cache redesign: Did IBM Just Preview The Future of Caches? by Dr. Ian Cutress. Very cool stuff.

The truth is, every new mainframe has a new chip, and all of them have impressive new features that are innovative and exciting, but this is the first time in a long time that there was such a detailed technical splash with a named chip. What a roll out!

When I learned that Hot Chips would once again be hosted at Stanford, just across the bay from me, I jumped at the opportunity to attend for the next announcement: IBM Telum II

I was a little nervous about the event because of how deeply technical the sessions were on the hardware side, but I quickly found my stride. Since I haven’t kept up very closely on processor design, it was interesting to learn about Intel’s Lunar Lake processor, including the work they’ve done toward power reduction. But I’d say the general theme of the day was hardware accelerated AI on the processor. Telum II fit right in and Chris Berry gave a great presentation.

Now it’s time for me to geek out about it. As you can see, some of the big numbers that make this chip distinctive:

  • A new built-in low-latency data processing unit (DPU) for accelerated IO
  • 8 high-performance cores running at 5.5GHz
  • 40% increase in on-chip cache capacity
  • A new AI accelerator, the compute power of each accelerator is expected to be improved by 4x over Telum, reaching 24 trillion operations per second (TOPS)

See more on the full announcement from IBM and on the IBM Telum page.

This time there was a second announcement too, the IBM Spyre Accelerator PCIe attached card. If you’re at all familiar with mainframes, you know that the PCIe drawers make up a nice chunk of the system, with cards to handle various functions that are separate from the compute drawer, which houses the processors and memory. Having a dedicated AI accelerator card was a logical step forward, so I was really excited to be there for its debut.

Again from the announcement linked above, “The Spyre Accelerator will contain 32 AI accelerator cores that will share a similar architecture to the AI accelerator integrated into the Telum II chip.”

After the talk, I got to meet up with the other IBMers who were in attendance, which gave me the opportunity to meet Chris and Christian, who had spoken at the last Hot Chips.

At this event I also got to meet a couple folks from Chips and Cheese who were covering the event, and wrote an article that came out last week, Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy, which was referenced in a recent Hackaday article Mainframe Chip Has 360MB Of On-Chip Cache and led to a few of my non-mainframe friends seeing it.

They also set up an interview with Susan Eickoff and Christian Jacobi, during which Susan shared view into development, beginning with how far out they have to plan (5+ years), a lead time that means its predecessor hasn’t even been released yet. I love these interviews because they give a public view into why certain things were designed in a specific way, which the community doesn’t often get to hear about from IBM. I wish we did more of these behind-the-scenes things at industry events that are so close to the tech community, there’s so much fascinating innovation happening at IBM and I still run into people who are surprised when they learn about it.

As I made my way around the event, I saw some more fascinating talks, but also got to meet a bunch of people. I spoke to a professor at Stanford and some of his students about open source and hardware architectures. I met Lori Servin of the RISC-V Foundation and got to geek out a bit over the talks I’ve been giving about porting open source software to various architectures.

I also got to spend a few minutes with Dr. Ian Cutress, who wrote the article on caches that I read three years ago (linked above).

In all, it was a great event and I’m grateful that I could attend. The following day I watched the live stream from home to check out what companies like Meta and Tesla are doing, plus a keynote from Victor Peng, President of AMD who spoke on our future of AI pervasiveness. It was a real stretch for me on a technical level, there are things I simply don’t understand and appreciate about chip design, but what I could follow (or quickly look up) made the event quite the learning experience.

Filed under: events, mainframes, tech, work

Our first visit to the Western Railway Museum

Saturday, Aug 31st, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve wanted to go to the Western Railway Museum for years. They do a ton of restoration work and have various rolling stock that you have the opportunity to ride on if you visit the museum. Most recently, they bought one of the old BART cars that were recently retired and are adding it to the collection. We decided to finally go up on August 17th because they had also advertised a classic car festival in their parking lot for that day, and since we missed our local one in June, it seemed like a good opportunity to do classic cars and a railway museum! Unfortunately upon our arrival we learned that the car festival part of the day was a total bust, there were two cars. Hah! We see more than that just driving around our town on a random Saturday! But hey, there was still a railway museum.

We got a family membership because with six of us it was actually cheaper than buying train ride tickets for all of us, and we definitely wanted to do that too. The museum has a small indoor section near the admissions and gift shop area that we didn’t take a very close look at since the boys were eager to get outside to see all the trains. The first barn you get to has a bunch of old street cars and trams in it, some of which you can climb into, which was a lot of fun.


We then took a quick ride in the San Francisco Municipal Railway 178 car, now affectionately known as the “Iron Monster“.

Once we concluded that journey, we got to go on the much longer, 5-mile trip, on their Key System 187 interurban train. The cool thing about this one (aside from it being a “slinky train”) is that these cars were used from from 1939 to 1958 to go across the Bay Bridge and in East Bay streets. The Bay Bridge routes are handled by buses now, but I do kinda of long for those rail days and it was a delight to finally ride in one of them. It was also funny to ride past cow pastures and wind farms in an interurban train, quite a different life than it had during service times! And probably surprising to anyone driving down the road when one is making a crossing over active roads.

As we were leaving, someone else on at the museum saw Adam’s BART shirt and noted that one of the control panels that was unceremoniously sitting near the entrance was from the BART system, so we enjoyed looking at all those knobs and switches.

I wish we could have stayed longer, but I was conscious of not keeping everyone out too late and we needed to get lunch. Next time I think we’ll bring a picnic lunch which will give us more time to check out the extra barn tours (one of which has that BART train in it!) and also visit their switch garden where you can play with some of the railway switches, which I know the boys will LOVE (me too).

Filed under: family, kids, life, rails

California summer adventures with my sister and nephew

Friday, Aug 30th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A couple weeks ago my sister Annette and my 12 year old nephew flew into town for a visit. We saw them over Thanksgiving, but that was at the townhouse in Philadelphia so it had been a full five years since they last came to our place in California. So much has changed! The family room they stayed in last time is now fully furnished and full of toys, so this time they stayed in my home office, which doubles as a guest room.

We went on a lot of adventures. Possibly too many. The first day they were here we spent a lot of time on public transit making our way around San Francisco. We took BART up in the late morning and then immediately took a historic street car over to Fisherman’s Wharf where we finally got to ride the SkyStar Wheel (Ferris wheel). From there they did a little tourist shopping before we headed up to Ghirardelli Square.

Someone remind me never to go to Ghirardelli Square for ice cream on a summer weekend again. It was never a calm experience, but now it’s pure chaos. It’s loud, you hover over a table to find seating, and it’s quite the opposite of relaxing. We did eventually find a table to enjoy our ice cream, but I think Aaron was a little tired at this point so I had to sit with him for a while to calm down after he had a huge tantrum over not getting to finish the brownie on the sundae (it was offered to him multiple times!). Honestly, next time I might just take visiting friends and family to the Factory Store in San Leandro, it has a lovely little ice cream cafe that is enjoyable to eat in.

Once Aaron had calmed down and everyone used the restrooms the next thing on our agenda was riding on a cable car. We hopped on a bus and made our way down Van Ness to pick up the California Street cable car at the end. Unfortunately that’s when we learned that the cable cars had shut down for the day due to the Vice President visiting for a campaign fundraiser that happened to be taking place at a hotel located on the cable car lines. Thanks, Secret Service. Taking a peek at the time, we made a diversion to a nearby Grubstake Diner that MJ had heard good things about. It didn’t disappoint! The bus ride to Civic Center there did disappoint though. It’s not the best part of town, the bus was late, and I think that particular adventure was a lot for my sheltered Maine relatives, hah! Still, it got us safely to BART and all three of the kids fell asleep on the train ride home.

Sunday I wanted to be a bit more chill since everyone was tired, so we had a quiet morning at home together, and then decided to head up to Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland to finally visit the Chabot Space & Science Center. It was amazing!

The gems of the center are definitely the telescopes, and we’ll be back for some of their telescope events in the near future. It was fun checking out the exhibits, and there was a lot of interactive and play stuff there too, which will be nice to take more time with when we go there with just the boys.

They also have a planetarium that does shows all day, and I love planetariums. It’s also a gentle introduction to a theater environment for our rambunctious kiddos, and just like our planetarium experiment in Philadelphia back in July, this one went pretty well.

On Monday I worked from the San Francisco office and then Gaby was kind enough to shepherd everyone from Castro Valley into San Francisco on BART before concluding her day with the boys and heading home. This was when we fixed our missed cable car opportunity! We waited at the Powell Street turnaround for a while, and then caught a cable car back down to Fisherman’s Wharf. We had a nice walk and discovered the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Visitor Center that has a surprisingly extensive exhibit about the history of the area, and everyone really seemed to enjoy it. From there my sister picked up some more tourist goodies and then we got on a street car to head home. Mission accomplished!

On Tuesday afternoon once Adam finished school I packed up my work laptop and we made our way over to the Oakland Zoo. I settled in near the bison paddock for a couple hours to finish work while Gaby and Annette took the boys around the zoo. I met up with them around closing to go on some rides in the area just outside the zoo.

We let everyone have a chill, local Wednesday and Thursday while I worked from my home office, and then took Friday off for some final adventures! In the course of the week, I discovered that going swimming was on their California list, but the beaches are far and not really swim-friendly, so I asked a local friend what she recommended and that’s how we ended up spending the afternoon at the Don Castro Swim Lagoon. It was perfect! I can’t believe we hadn’t been before! Admission for the six of us was a total of $15 and they have life guards and a very clean facility. It’s still beach-like, but it’s all man-made and effectively a big pool, which you notice when you swim out to the deeper parts since you can touch the concrete bottom of the “pool” out there. We had snacks at the beach and wrapped up around 4PM to clean up and eventually meet MJ for dinner. MJ was picking up the family car in Dublin, so we all hopped on BART and then caught a bus to meet him at Lazy Dog right on time to eat.

Our final adventure was on Saturday, to a railway museum that I’ll write about soon. They headed out on an overnight flight back to Maine on Saturday night. It was nice having them visit and seeing the boys bond over adventures, video games, and even chill TV time. I also enjoyed having some quiet time with my sister to catch up on family stuff and how she’s doing in general. We live such different lives so far apart, it can be tricky to stay connected, but these visits every year or so certainly help.

Filed under: animals, castro valley, family, kids, life, rails, san francisco

Concluding summer vacation in California

Tuesday, Aug 20th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’m glad to be back at home in California. Spending 8 weeks over the summer in Philadelphia was an adventure, but I love our walkable town, the support network here (small as it is), and being back where all my stuff is here in California. Being home also means I’m back to healthier routines, including walking more, and getting out of the funk I was in during the tail end of our visit.

We came back about a week and a half before school started back up, with Aaron going back to his pre-school and Adam entering Kindergarten on August 7th. It gave us time for our au pair, Gaby, to take them out on some local adventures around town, over to the seed library at the Hayward Public Library, and to San Francisco. That Friday I drove them over to the Oakland Zoo where I settled in to work for the afternoon while they enjoyed the critters, and caught up with them at the end of the day to visit with their final remaining elephant, and then go on some rides outside the zoo once the main zoo closed.

We also got all the cars washed (an at-home car wash for our 2000 Alero, thanks boys!) and even jump-started one of them, since we’d been gone so long.

That first weekend back we went back to all our old routines. Saturday morning Farmer’s Market, we went to a book sale at the library and then a garage sale, had lunch at our favorite cafe. On Sunday I took them out for donuts and then we made our way over to the hardware store to pick up a couple plants and some soil to complete the dream Adam had all summer: planting a garden. I had gone out to Home Depot earlier in the week to pick up a garden box that was on clearance, and we assembled it, but quickly discovered that we didn’t have quite enough soil to fill it. Later in the week Gaby helped him with planting some seeds, which I’m happy to say have started sprouting.


Buying soil!

Freshly assembled garden box

Unfortunately it wasn’t all fun, MJ had an accident at the end of July that severely damaged his shoulder (thankfully no breaks) and that’s still healing, but he has been in a lot of pain for several weeks. Plus, he’s had to work doctors appointments and restricted driving ability into his schedule, which hasn’t been easy. A lot more childcare has shifted to me, but at least we’re back in California where I have some additional help around the house overall, so I’ve been able to manage the extra load, mostly.

Still, life kept moving along! While working with Adam on his planting adventure, and coming home after 8 weeks away, I realized how much our yard had gone to the weeds. It was bad. And honestly I don’t have the time or inclination to manage it, as much as I’ve tried. We ended up hiring a gardening service that pulled out all the mulch and weeds from the front, replaced a whole section along our front walkway with white rocks, and completed some weeding and tree trimming in the back. It’s still mulch, but it looks a lot better, and our neighbors certainly seem to appreciate it, and so do I.


Front garden before and after

The start of the school year was rather anticlimactic. Due to the arrangement of classes this year, Adam has the same teacher and classroom as he did in TK, so there wasn’t much to prepare him for, and Aaron went back to the same preschool. They both enjoy school right now, so there were also no tears. Aside from me coming close after we dropped them off, Kindergarten is a big step! Plus, it was nice to see us all get back to our routines, I certainly enjoyed being back in my home office here. Now we just need to get back to all our big home projects, the first of which is doing some furniture shuffling. But first, my sister and nephew came into town, and added on a few more adventures to the tail end of our summer!

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

Library fun, critters, and a final Philly train ride

Monday, Aug 5th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Over all we had a good summer in Philadelphia, but a round of COVID, canceled Florida trip, a sunburn, and a few days of MJ coping with an injury definitely made for some challenges. I joked with a friend that “we had a phenomenal Instagram summer!” because of all the activities and fun we had exploring. The challenges were real challenges though, and since we’re both still working full time while we’re there, it adds up. I’m going to leave these challenges in the past though, and focus on the fun!

I mentioned that the boys had been earning badges from the local library through a free program to inspire kids to do challenges and activities. They each earned four badges, and it was a lot of fun for all of us. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy the library programs from the Bucks County library system, but their branches are incredibly kid-friendly and the play areas are more extensive than what I see in most of the San Francisco bay area. My sister in law Irina suggested it’s because there are more outdoor activities year-around in California, so there’s less of a need for a library on rainy or frigid days, and she may be right. The culture here in California generally seems to be more catered to adults and mature kids than young ones.

The Bensalem library definitely ramped up things for the summer, and Aaron particularly enjoyed a presentation from the Center for Aquatic Sciences where he got to pet a horseshoe crab.

In the evenings we also got really into some Lego builds. Aaron even helped out a little, but would mostly work on his creative Duplo creations while Adam and I focused on building a train, a firehouse, and a fire helicopter. I think we’re going to end up with a little Lego City there.

Seeing family is also obviously a big part of why we were there over the summer, so it was nice to head downtown one evening to have dinner with MJ’s cousin Lauren and her husband. I had met her husband once before, but only MJ could attend their wedding due to a bunch of unexpected circumstances last year. So it was our first time seeing them as a married couple. We met at Emmy Squared Pizza where I got the “Angel” pizza consisting of Truffleist mushroom cream, ricotta, mushrooms, and it was spectacular! I’m still dreaming of this pizza. And it was also great as leftovers. I think our only complaint would be that something went a little wrong with our order and we waited almost an hour for the adult food to come out, which made the boys a bit antsy as the evening wound down and they had finished their meal. It was nice to have the extra time to catch up though, and Adam got his wish of getting to see the sun set on the Philadelphia skyline so we could enjoy the beautiful nighttime lights of the city. He’s definitely my kid, I love those nighttime city skylines too.

In other family news, our regular visits with Irina and little Sam were a highlight of our trip. Sam and Aaron are roughly the same age, so it was nice for Aaron to have a summer buddy. One evening we were able to go over to their house to have pizza and catch up, and Aaron was absolutely enamored with her dog Maya, and both the boys enjoyed spending time with Olive the cat.

Animal-wise, our neighbors were rabbit-sitting, so one evening we went over there to catch up and get the latest neighborhood gossip while the boys got to play with the rabbit. Predictably, all of this has lead to a string of requests to get a pet. I really would love to, but we have a lot on our plate right now, and our extended visits to Philly definitely make having a pet tricky. We’ll see, I haven’t been pet-free in decades, and while the loss of Caligula still stings, the pull of getting another cat is getting stronger.

During our visit I also was able to sneak out one afternoon to meet with Kris, a former colleague from my Tyco days. We’ve loosely kept in touch via Facebook, but we hadn’t seen each other in over a decade. Some of my posts throughout the summer clued her in to the fact that we weren’t too far away from each other. It was a great to reconnect, and we’ve penciled in doing something more involved with the boys next time we’re in town.

The final Friday before we left we made our way back to the Churchville Nature Center for a moth-themed presentation and camp fire. It ran quite late, and I think the boys were on the young side to appreciate a lot of the introductory lecture, but they got to walk around outside at night, see some bugs, hear a screech owl, and finally roast a couple marshmallows over a camp fire. I did a lot of camping as a kid, but it’s hasn’t been something we’ve done yet, so it occurred to me that the boys hadn’t really experienced a camp fire before. What an oversight! There’s a campground not too far from here, maybe next summer we’ll spend more time in California and do a weekend adventure in a tent.


Our last day in town we did some final clothes shopping (tax-free in Pennsylvania!) and then turned picking up the rental car that we’d be taking to the airport the next day into one final adventure with a train ride to the rental car center at the airport. The plan had been for MJ and Adam to go down alone while Aaron and I went on our own adventures around town, but apparently there’s nothing more fun than taking a train, so we all went.

Some of my low-key stress around packing and preparing to leave bubbled up during our train ride, but I did my best to be present and enjoy the journey with everyone. I mostly succeeded until Avis was over an hour late with our rental and we had to sit at the rental car center trying to keep the boys entertained. I should have brought more snacks. Then the stress carried into Sunday as we closed up the house and began our journey home. I hope this gets easier as the kids get older, but I also need to keep working on strategies to manage this family travel stress, I hate that the conclusion of our visit is so tainted by such an elevated stress level when there were so many great moments throughout the summer.

Filed under: animals, family, food, kids, life, philadelphia, rails, travel

Bringing the boys to New York City

Monday, Jul 29th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

One of the things on our list for this summer in Philadelphia was making a side trip up to New York City. I’ve always enjoyed my visits to NYC, and it’s become increasingly clear that the boys love cities, it was time to finally introduce them to one of the greatest ones!

We parked in Trenton, NJ and took NJ Transit up to Penn Station. From there it was a cross-town bus over to the ferry terminal.

And then the ferry to Brooklyn!

In Brooklyn we met up with MJ’s cousin Arielle, her husband, and her 5 month old son. I hadn’t seen his cousin in years, and this was my first time meeting her husband and the baby. It was really nice to catch up and given the environment, the boys even did OK, even if Adam didn’t want to eat.

After lunch they showed us nearby Domino Park which had a bunch of huge factory artifacts from an old Domino Sugar factory that used to operate in that location, but has since turned into a riverside playground and recreation area. I love this. It was a great spot and on a warm summer day it was the perfect spot to let the kids run around for a bit and then stop for ice cream.


We then took the ferry back to Manhattan and a bus over to Grand Central Station. Grand Central has a small annex and transit gift shop, so in addition to showing the boys around the beautiful station, we got to stop and shop at a gift shop I knew they’d enjoy. And let’s be honest, I love that gift shop too. The boys got an articulated bus (slinky bus!) toy, which they are enamored with. Upon our exit I was able to geek out with the cashier a bit who fell in love with my SEPTA t-shirt.

It was then off to a couple subways to go back to Penn Station to get a train home.

At least, that was the plan.

Once we got to Penn Station we found that all the trains going south were shut down due to electrical problems on the tracks that Amtrak maintains. They were re-routing people on buses and other non-rail options, but we were quite restricted in what we could do with the boys and no car seats. We decided to leave the station and grab dinner at a nearby diner, hoping the situation would improve by the time we finished. It didn’t, but we only had to wait another hour before the trains began running around 8:30PM. It made for a very late night for the boys, but I think lack of communication from NJ Transit was the most annoying part. They announced the wrong track for the next train at least three times, causing a mad dash of hundreds of people down to platforms where there were no trains. When they finally announced the correct train and track, we were in a mob of hundreds going to that train, which we almost didn’t get on because the front cars were standing room only and we couldn’t ask our exhausted kiddos to stand for the 90 minute train ride home. Thankfully it was a long train and by going down to almost the end we found a spot with available seats.

It wasn’t an easy day, the summer heat really got to me and I was feeling a little nauseous and light-headed mid-day as we were swiftly walking to catch one of the buses. I was exhausted by the time we all collapsed on the train. It also felt like we didn’t do much, since most of the day was spent on public transit. But I was quick to remind myself that the boys love public transit, and all that time spent on buses, subways, trains, and ferries was The Activity as far as the boys were concerned. I think the next trip we take to the city should be a bit more targeted though: we take the train do to lunch and some tourist spot, then go home. Lack of planning because we wanted to be flexible led to a bit of stress and frustration that I would have loved to avoid. But we enjoyed ourselves enough that there will be a next time!

Filed under: family, kids, life, travel

Please Touch Museum and trolleys in Philadelphia

Wednesday, Jul 24th, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last Saturday we headed down to Philadelphia for some weekend adventures.

Our first stop was finally visiting the Please Touch Museum. It’s a Philly classic in terms of children’s museums. We also discovered when making the plan to head down that it’s now located in Fairmount Park, having moved in 2008 from the location on 21st Street near the Franklin Institute, where I remember it being. The building it’s housed in now is Memorial Hall, the last major building left from the 1876 Centennial Exposition. The move seems to be a good one for museum goers, since there’s tons of free parking, and it was also great for us because it was right near Girard Ave and we also wanted to see the vintage trolleys that had recently returned to service.

Aaron had an absolute blast at the museum. At three years old, basically everything was perfect for him, and I’m sure he could have spent days there if we let him. Adam was a bit more reserved, but once he became comfortable he was able to enjoy some of the exhibits.

As expected, the transit-related exhibits were the most popular for both of them.

Aaron also enjoyed the play kitchen where he could “cook” things retrieved from the little grocery store in the area next to the cooking area. And after lunch Aaron got to enjoy a water area that I basically had to pry him away from once we were ready to move on.

The carousel at the museum was also a delight, Aaron and I rode on it a few times so he could switch animals.

We wrapped up at the museum in the late afternoon, and then drove a bit closer to Girard Ave so we could conclude our day by taking a ride on the Rt 15 trolley. Just like San Francisco, Philadelphia runs a vintage streetcar line, but this one had been shut down since 2020 and underwent a series of refurbishments and repairs. They just returned in June of this year! I’ve visited it before, years ago, but the boys never had the opportunity to ride on it and we wanted to remedy that.


Aaron adorably brought his trolley plushie along for the ride.

I think they enjoyed it, but they also had their eyes on buses and kept asking to take one of them too. So we took the trolley to the Broad Street stop, and took a look at the transit app to see our bus options. We lucked out, and a bus was subbing on the same line and would take us right back to where we parked! So we took Rt 15 back, this time on a bus.

The bus ride concluded our visit to the city, and both boys fell asleep in the car as we drove back home, so we clearly tired them out. A quick stop for dinner on the way home wrapped the day. It’ll probably be our last time down to Philadelphia proper this visit, so I’m glad we were able to experience a full, fun day.

Filed under: family, kids, philadelphia, rails

Science and Sesame Place

Tuesday, Jul 23rd, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last year we learned about the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) Passport Program which offers benefits across dozens of science and technology centers nationwide, including free admission. This has been particularly useful when we travel to Philadelphia, since it means there are several museums nearby that we can get into for free. A couple weeks ago we used it to go to The Franklin Institute on a Friday that we both took off from work.

I’ll start off by saying we were a little disappointed by a couple things: The Giant Heart that you walk through was closed for a massive renovation of the body exhibit and the Electricity exhibit was closed for the body renovation too… because the electricity exhibit is being retired in favor of an expanded body exhibit. We’ve done the heart and we’ll be back in the future, but the retirement of the electricity section of the museum is particularly gutting. I’ve been fascinated with electrical science and engineering as long as I can remember, and exhibits like the one at TFI were inspirational as a youth. It’s really sad to see it go away, especially at The [Benjamin] Franklin Institute, named after a founding father who is possibly most famous for his experiments with electricity. Ultimately, I hope the next generation of electrical engineers finds another way to gain inspiration, and this isn’t some sort of trend among science museums. The train exhibit was also closed, but we knew about that going in, it’s coming back in November.

But on to our visit! We may have gotten in for free, but then we did the paid add-on to see the Art of the Brick exhibit. It was worth it. Various pieces of Lego art were displayed around the gallery, including recreations of classical art, people and animals and dinosaurs, and a couple Philadelphia-specific builds, including The Liberty Bell and the statue of Benjamin Franklin that’s in the lobby of the institute itself.


The conclusion had a large area where the boys could free play with Lego.

The boys loved the displays, but also had a blast building Lego cars that they could then race down a little ramp they had set up. The exit was through the gift shop, where a final Lego set followed us home.

We grabbed some lunch at the on-site cafe before making our way around the rest of the museum. We went to a live show about combustion, which I was really proud of the boys for being so engaged with. We also went to our first planetarium show. We’d held off going because we hadn’t really brought the boys into dark places where they had to be quiet, and I knew it would be a challenge for both of them. It was. Aaron and I almost had to leave because as much as he loves space, he also loves talking and asking questions, and really struggled with staying quiet when he wanted to ask 100 questions about stars. Still, he managed to quiet down and we made it through. We’ll do more in the future!


Walking to the planetarium

The hands-on nature of the museum was a hit with the boys just like last time, and of course MJ and I enjoyed it too, I’m really glad we went.

The planetarium was also a nice segue into using our telescope on Sunday. The boys always want to use MJ’s old telescope, but it’s been really hot all summer, and with the sun setting so late, we haven’t wanted to keep them up late enough to really appreciate it. But one night the moon was looking particularly lovely and it wasn’t so hot, so I was able to get it set up for a peek. Adam was finally able to see the moon through it, and so did my phone! It needs to be cleaned, and astrophotography with a 30+ year old telescope and a smart phone is not optimal, but I was still impressed with how it came out.

On Saturday we did a make-up swim lesson in the morning and then went to a BBQ at a relative’s house in the late afternoon. It was family we hadn’t yet seen on this visit, so it was nice to finally get the opportunity. They have kids too, so there were lots of interesting new things to play with while the adults enjoyed catching up. At the end Aaron even got to play on their trampoline.

Sunday we went to Sesame Place with Irina and Sammy. It’s only 15 minutes from our place here, so it’s been on our radar for a long time, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s next to a mall and I always thought it was an inexpensive Philadelphia-local little park. Turns out, it’s bigger and more impressive than I expected, but also quite expensive. It was bought by Sea World a few years back, and I’ve heard the prices have gone up as a result, and a lot of changes (good and bad) were made.

The first thing we noticed is that they were short-staffed, which is ridiculous on a Sunday in the middle of summer with what they charge for admission. We got on “Big Bird’s Bus Tour” after stashing our stuff in an expensive locker. From there we tried a water ride but failed because that turned out to have an hour+ wait because they only had a single life guard managing the bottom of the ride so only one slide was open. Several other water slides were closed entirely. The “Little Bird’s Bay” splash area was open, so we had fun getting soaked there and cooling off a bit before going to lunch.

Getting lunch was a disaster. It took a half hour for Adam and I to get a couple mini pizzas we ordered from the wildly chaotic lunch shop we went to, and then the bagged apple slices we got with his meal were super gross and slimy and I had to exchange them for something else. By the time we rejoined MJ, Aaron, Irina, and Sammy, they had finished half their meal and had a story of their own to tell about their poor experience. Even worse, they don’t allow outside food, so your only option is to leave the park and drive somewhere, or eat at these mediocre, expensive, on-site eateries. Boo. Irina then had to leave for Sammy’s nap, having only enjoyed a couple rides, though they did get to go on the carousel on the way out.

After lunch MJ, Adam, Aaron, and I ventured on. We decided to skip the huge Count’s Court water area in favor of some dry rides, figuring we’d come back toward the end for that. We did three rides over in Elmo’s World, I took the boys on “Peek-a-Bug,” all four of us did “Flyin’ Fish” and Aaron and I enjoyed going on “Blast Off” which is ride that goes up and drops you, but he LOVED it! Then everything was shut down. Storm clouds were rolling in and a thunderstorm threat made operations unsafe.

At this point, Adam was mad at me for skipping Count’s Court, since he really, really wanted to do more water stuff. As hundreds of people left the park, we had to think about what to do. It wasn’t raining yet, and chance of precipitation was 50-70%, so chances are it would rain and the rides wouldn’t resume. We decided to stay for the 3PM parade. The parade is definitely a highlight of the experience there! The kids seemed to enjoy it, and so did I.

After the parade we made one final lap, but with everything still closed we decided to leave. The gift shop is a real treat, I might even go back because it’s outside the park and open to the public. We got to the car with perfect timing as the rain suddenly began, and it was quite the storm, the entire drive home it was pouring.

In spite of the disappointments, I think we all managed to have fun and we learned a lot for the next time we visit. A friend of mine (who was actually there on Sunday and we missed because I didn’t see his text!) swears by getting a cabana as a home base for the day, and the season passes that include quicker access to rides. We’ll think about that next year. The water stuff is tricky unless we both go in with the kids, especially at Count’s Court because the boys are still a bit little to be without a parent right next to them in 3 ft water, and they flee in different directions when they get excited about water. Next summer should be better for that, and we’ll just both plan on going on the water stuff. For lunch we may even consider going off-site, since it likely would take just as long as trying to get it on-site and we’d get better food.

Filed under: family, kids, life, philadelphia

Accidental Philly staycation

Monday, Jul 22nd, 2024 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

As I wrote in my last post, a COVID infection sweeping through our house meant we had to cancel our trip to Florida. I thought about canceling my time off at work too, but I had already shifted my schedule around at work, and I needed a vacation, so I kept it. Plus, our au pair (Gaby) was still working, having taken vacation herself in early June, so I could rely on her for primary care-taking of the kids.

This meant I had some time to catch up on some reading and writing, even using my typewriters a bit! I was able to take long showers, leisurely get ready for my day, and enjoy hot coffee, all of which tends to take a backseat most days as I’m rushing around with work and kid stuff. I was on primary duty for all errands and picking up food, since MJ was still recovering from COVID, so it wasn’t all carefree time, but those were made easier by not having to rush around to squeeze them in before/after work. I also cleared out some of the garage of stuff we wanted to donate, going back all the way to 2016, including an ancient laser printer after learning that Staples does electronic recycling.

Taking this time for myself and projects was incredibly valuable. I’m reminded yet again that when I slow down and take a little time for myself, I become a much better partner, mother, friend, everything. I’m more patient and thoughtful and everything becomes easier, even the really hard stuff.

But all that was just half my day! The rest of my day was spent enjoying quality time with the boys.

On Monday morning we went to a local playground, and then to a nearby library that we’d never been to after we saw their sign advertising story time at 10:30AM. There, Gaby took Aaron to the story time with all the other kids while Adam and I explored the library, played a game, and found a couple video games to check out.

Tuesday we went over to the nearby Churchville Nature Center where we got a membership. I’d been trying to find something for us to do that was the right mix of local (not just generic kid stuff), not too far away, and that the boys would love. A nature center checked all the boxes, and this was a great one. We began indoors at several exhibits they have in their main building, including several live snakes and tortoises, along with a bunch of stuffed animals that were local and from across North America.

From there we went outside, where it was hot (it’s been hot all summer) but nice and shaded in their nature path.

Finally the gem of our visit: the butterflies! This is the one paid area of the center, and it was totally worth it. They help the butterflies through their breeding cycle by protecting them from the elements and keeping their chrysalises safe in enclosed little tents until they emerge.

On Wednesday we made our way out to our local library for play and story time, and then an outdoor chalk and bubbles event. Aaron enjoyed the story time with the other kids while Gaby and Adam explored the rest of the library. Once it was time to go outdoors, Aaron was the grand master artist just like he is in our driveway at home as he drew all over the entrance sidewalk to the library.

Most kids went Adam’s route and played with bubbles, which was a lot of fun, even in the hot weather.

On Thursday I got a sunburn. It wasn’t intentional, I just wasn’t diligent about reapplying sunscreen while playing in a pool for four hours. Said pool was at our friend’s place in New Jersey, and I’d been trying to get over to see them all summer, but they also have two little kids and getting good schedule alignment was difficult. We finally made it though! It was wonderful to catch up with my friends, but the boys also loved the pool. They’ve been doing swimming lessons this summer, but they hadn’t really had free-play time in a pool. As expected, they loved it, and my friends were prepared for having a couple new-to-swimming kiddos in the pool by blocking off the deep end.

I’m still tremendously disappointed that we couldn’t visit our family in Florida this summer, but this week with the boys has been one for the record books. Taking it slow, enjoying local adventures and time with friends. Growing up is not all about the big adventures, and neither is life. I only wish we could do more of this.

Filed under: family, kids, life, philadelphia
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