• Archives

  • Categories:

  • Other profiles

Mainframes in Poughkeepsie

Friday, Aug 2nd, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last month I had the pleasure of visiting the mainframe mothership: the IBM offices in Poughkeepsie, New York. A number of folks I work with day to day are based there, there’s a test and assembly facility, and they have a client center where they show off technology, including mainframes!

There’s also an Amtrak station in Poughkeepsie, making the train a solid option coming from the townhouse in Philadelphia. My day started super early as I called a car to take me to the Amtrak station in Trenton. During that ride I learned that my driver was a Philly Linux member long ago, and he happened to mention MJ casually in the conversation. What a small world! We connected on LinkedIn. My 5:43AM train out of Trenton took me to Penn Station in NYC, where I switched to the line that would take me up to Poughkeepsie, putting me in town at 8:45AM, where my colleague Matthew Cousens picked me up.

Matt showed me around the office and let me use his office as a home base for the day as I flitted off to various meetings with folks. The first was with an IBM employee who didn’t actually work with us, my friend and colleague from HPE and OpenStack-land, Matthew Treinish! He lives not too far away and it was nice to have coffee and catch up before he headed back to work.

Around noon I rejoined current colleage Matt and we went to lunch and chatted about how I’m settling into my new role. I’m one of the few people on my team that was hired externally, so it’s always nice to get a chunk of time from team mates as I adjust to IBM culture and get familiar with all the tooling and processes.

After lunch he took me over the the test and assembly facility where they had a little museum set up.

Front and center was an IBM System/360. The s/360 is the granddaddy of all the mainframe stuff I do today and this was the first time I’d ever seen one in person!

But tucked away in the back was something that was perhaps even more impressive from a historical perspective: an early prototype of Herman Hollerith’s tabulator. Anyone familiar with computer history will know that Hollerith’s census machines play a key role in the birth of computing. What I learned from reading Building IBM is that IBM itself traces its roots back to these machines, since Hollerith was the founder of the Tabulating Machine Company, one of the companies that was merged into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911, and renamed IBM in 1924.

First Punched Card Processor

Early prototype built by Herman Hollerith in the late 1880s for the first electrical punched card tabulator.

Back over in the client center, I got to meet some mainframe shells – including one that was just too tempting to pass up a photo of. It actually turned out to be a useful prop when I was at OSCON a couple weeks ago and people asked me how big a mainframe was. “Well, I’ll show you a picture!”

In the early afternoon I met up with Jeff Bisti and Frank De Gilio to record an episode of Terminal Talk. It’s a mainframe-centric podcast, and I’ve been listening to the show since I learned about it a couple months ago when they did an open source on the mainframe edition of the show. It was an honor to be proposed as a guest on the show, especially given how new I am to all this territory, but that was actually the point of me coming in. I’m coming in from a traditional Linux Sysadmin on x86 machines background, so I bring a completely different perspective than the traditional mainframe crowd. The episode was released a few days ago: Elizabeth Joseph – Hyper Protect

After the podcast, it was time to head over to the little raised floor data center they have set up for customer tours. It has all the networking to keep it running, several storage servers, including arrays with spinning and solid state media, and a few robot-driven trap drives. In the fancy bit of the datacenter they have a z14 hooked up to an IBM DS8880 (hybrid storage) that you can poke at, which is the machine Esmeralda Quintana gave a tour of in this video, so it was fun to finally see it in person. I also got to touch the quantum computer (IBM Q)! Which I learned is the only quantum computer in the world running actual external workloads. So cool.

Before I left, I took the advice of Anthony Giorgio and stopped by Ross Mauri’s office to visit a clock.

But not just any clock, in a plaque at the base of it, the history of the clock is told:

INTERNATIONAL TIME RECORDING CO. MASTER CLOCK

This clock was manufactured in Endicott, New York, by the International Time Recording Company, one of the three companies that originally formed IBM. It stood in the anteroom of Thomas J. Watson Sr.’s Office at 50 Broad Street in New York City until 1930, when it was moved to IBM’s new headquarters at 270 Broadway. In 1938 it was moved to the executive floor of 590 Madison Avenue. The clock was moved to the Kenyon House in Poughkeepsie (then the laboratory for IBM’s computer development efforts) in the late 1940’s where it continued in operation until 1994.

This clock is weight driven with a mercury compensated pendulum for precision timekeeping. The weights are wound by an electric motor.

After a couple more meetings, I had to say goodbye to catch my 4:15PM train. The three hour train ride each way made it a pretty long day, and I made this visit a bit on a whim since I was spending time in Philadelphia anyway, but I’m really glad I did. It’s totally worth doing every once in a while.

More photos from my visit here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157710022012742

Filed under: computers, mainframes, tech, travel, work

The 4th in Philly

Wednesday, Jul 31st, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

In what’s becoming an annual tradition, we spent the 4th of July in Philadelphia. This was little Adam’s second visit to Philadelphia, but the first time traveling there with our au pair, and of course his first 4th of July!

The trip out was a bit exhausting. We decided to take an overnight flight, thinking Adam would sleep through it like he has in the past. Alas, our almost 6 month old was no newborn, and the excitement of the airport and flight meant that he was awake during a good chunk of the flight. We’ll be adjusting future trips accordingly, only daytime flights from now on!

We spent nearly two weeks there visiting with family and friends, enjoying thunderstorms, and eating far too many desserts. I blame breastfeeding on my new insatiable sweet tooth, but Philadelphia rose to the challenge, between diners with full dessert cases and traditional bakeries our home was full of desserts the whole visit.

The trip began with the realization that little Adam’s bedroom is the sunniest room of the house. We didn’t notice during our visit in March, but with the sun coming up around 5:30AM in July, we were the proud parents of a baby who decided that he’d wake up at 5:30AM. Not only was that far too early, but it was the opposite direction of jet lag, and made for a particularly fussy first day. Cue emergency curtain shopping. I hit Amazon to grab the same blackout curtains I use in my home office in California, and MJ ran out to the hardware store to buy some tension rods until we could get around to properly install the curtains at a later date. Thankfully, that solved the problem!

The first week we were there I also got settled in to my work routine, which I discovered is easier on the east coast. I live on the western edge of where our team sits timezone-wise, so being on the east coast allowed me to have earlier meetings with my European team mates and no trouble joining calls that would otherwise land at 6AM California time. On July 3rd I went down to University City in Philadelphia to give my first presentation representing my new role as a Developer Advocate at IBM. I was joined by a colleague who made the trek down from New York and could answer questions I couldn’t about my topic of “Linux on Mainframes: Past, Present and Future”. Being an east coast audience, there were actually people there who had worked on mainframes and who had great questions about the state of Linux on them today. It was also a fun talk to prepare for and deliver. The intersection of history and computing is my sweet spot, and the open-source-before-it-had-a-name details I was able to dig up is fascinating stuff. Slides here: Linux_on_Mainframes-PLUG-July_2019.pdf (2.1M). I also made a visit up to the Poughkeepsie office for work during this trip, but I’ll be writing about that later.


Thanks to @LRW3bb for taking a photo during my presentation! (source)

We spent the 4th of July out to dinner with the family. The next day I had off from work and had the delightful chore of taking the car into the shop for it’s annual tune-up. That afternoon I took Adam to Build-A-Bear to get him a couple bears to celebrate turning 6 months old (as if I needed an excuse).

Over the weekend we took a drive over the river to New Jersey to meet up with our friends Mike, Jess and their kiddos. We had a great lunch together and then stroll around the mall as we waited for the thunderstorms to relax some so we wouldn’t get soaked on the walk to the car. Dinners are trickier now though, we traditionally would have dinner out with our friends Tim and Colleen while in town, but Adam’s 7:30PM bed time precludes us from doing that now unless we have his grandparents over to baby sit. So we just changed our plans some, Tim and Colleen came over to our house and joined us for a pizza night one night just as Adam was getting ready to go to sleep. The following week my friend Crissi came over for a few hours in the evening, during which we enjoyed some delivered food and then she helped me with my measurements and on dress suggestions so I could custom order some new clothes. I can’t begin to say how grateful I was for this visit from her, I hadn’t been feeling great about myself since the pregnancy, but being able to order some dresses that actually fit me and are flattering to my new shape is a huge help.

Our trip concluded by re-packing up to head to Florida to attend the wedding of one of MJ’s cousins. It was a bit of a stressful transition, I had packed for the Florida trip 2 weeks earlier when we left California, but I missed a few things and we had to scramble a bit to get everything we needed. Still, I think going to Florida directly from Philadelphia instead of coming back to California was the right move.

Our next family trip back east will likely be at the end of September, and attached to another wedding! This time for one of my cousins in upstate New York. But for now I’m enjoying not having to pack up the kiddo into an airplane for the next couple months.

Filed under: family, life, philadelphia, travel

Life and my return to work

Thursday, Jul 25th, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s been a couple months since I’ve been able to sit down and do a proper blog post about generic life stuff. That’s entirely due to how exhausting life is now. I have to wake up much earlier than I used to due to Adam’s immutable schedule (why don’t kids sleep in?) and in my new job I have meetings starting around 8AM Pacific anyway. I schedule 9 hours for work each day so I have the space to be flexible when an appointment pops up on my calendar. After work I get my 2.5 hours of quality time with Adam until he goes to bed, then there’s chores and dinner before I can finally go to bed myself, which frequently doesn’t happen until 11PM. Weekends aren’t much better since the kiddo needs a lot of attention and it’s also when I get caught up on the big chores like laundry and mail.

In a lot of ways, I’m really lucky. Having an au pair sharing our home with us means we don’t need to run around and get Adam ready for day care and deal with getting him there and back. Working from home a good chunk of the time when I’m not traveling gives me a considerable amount of flexibility with my schedule, and actually allows me to work more than if I had a daily commute. We have the financial freedom to get prepared meals for dinner, so I only really need to bother with breakfast and lunch, which are easy. We have a service come in to clean the house every other week, so while I do have a bunch of chores to keep the house running day to day, cleaning toilets isn’t one of them.

But what severely lacking is personal time. The only reading and TV watching I do now is while I’m expressing breast milk, which is 20 minutes at a time 3 times a day (I do it 5 times a day, but 2 of those are while I’m working!). I’ve tried to read before bed like I used to, but I’m so tired by the time I get to bed and I really need to sleep. All of my personal projects have been gathering dust. Open source projects I’m involved with only get a small sliver of my time. Even personal email has been piling up in a way I’m not accustom to.

Still, while I know I’ll never again have the glorious swaths of free time I enjoyed before we had a child, but I think things will get easier once little Adam drops his middle-of-the-night feeding and is slightly more self-sufficient.

But enough with the preamble, I went back to work at the end of April! I have an office now, which taught me that it wasn’t specifically offices that I hate working in, but open floor plans. I look forward to my days at the lab, even if my commute is 3 hours (1 hour in the morning, 2 hours to get home).

I was able to celebrate my first Mother’s Day as a mother back in May! I now understand why so many mothers want to trade a fancy brunch for sleeping in. I did partake in a bit more rest than usual, then was surprised by roses and some small gifts from the family. We went to a brewery for a leisurely lunch and sat outside, which was wonderful and not stressfully busy like all the brunch places would have been.

We’ve had some house projects going on. The one I took the lead on was getting our yard sorted out. Between my inability to do gardening while pregnant, and then the chaos of having a newborn, the yard turned into a jungle! After calling around, I finally found a service who would come out to spend a couple days getting it in order. Next I just need to find someone to maintain it, since as much as I want to do it myself, I am struggling to find the time.

MJ is taking the lead on getting our roof prepared for solar panels to be installed, which is a multi-phase effort to get a bunch of things moved and then a roofer in to tidy it all up before the solar guys come out. He also plans on installing the closet doors we finally got painted and are sitting in our garage.

We also had some family photos done. We met up with the photographer who also did our engagement, wedding, and my professional head shots. The original plan was just for MJ to get head shots, but I added in family photos since I figured it would be a nice opportunity. We went up to San Francisco to meet her, took Adam to the beach to start the photos (beautiful place, but windy, cold and in retrospect, not the best idea) and then over to the Palace of Fine Arts (a better idea!). We got some good pictures, but it was a tiring day for us all.

Another weekend was spent closer to home, with MJ’s friend Matti in town we made a short walk to the Castro Valley downtown to enjoy the annual car show. I took lots of pictures and daydreamed about what classic car I’d love to own some day. It was a warm day and Adam slept through most of it as we strolled down the boulevard.

More photos from the car show are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157709126865576

The next weekend MJ brought Matti to the airport and headed off to do some work while Adam and I met my friend Nathan at the San Francisco Zoo for Adam’s first zoo visit! I thoroughly enjoyed getting to visit with a friend, but quickly realized how difficult it is now to have meaningful conversations with a six month old in tow. Adam is a great baby, but his age means he needs a lot of attention, so our conversations were often interrupted and staggered. Fortunately Nathan took it in stride and insisted he still had a great time when I later apologized for having my attention split so much.

I didn’t take many photos at the zoo, but there are a few: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157709210306098

This takes us to the end of June, when we hopped on a plane and went to Philadelphia for a couple weeks, and then on to Florida for a wedding.

Looking at how much we have been doing these past couple months, I should probably cut myself some slack regarding how little I feel like I’m getting done. It’s not always easy, but we’re still having fun and getting out there as we adjust to life with the newest little member of our family.

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

Building a PPA for s390x

Tuesday, Jun 18th, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

About 20 years ago a few clever, nerdy folks got together and ported Linux to the mainframe (s390x architecture). Reasons included because it’s there, and other ones you’d expect from technology enthusiasts, but if you read far enough, you’ll learn that they also saw a business case, which has been realized today. You can read more about that history over on Linas Vepstas’ Linux on the IBM ESA/390 Mainframe Architecture.

Today the s390x architecture not only officially supports Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), but there’s an entire series of IBM Z mainframes available that are devoted to only running Linux, that’s LinuxONE. At the end of April I joined IBM to lend my Linux expertise to working on these machines and spreading the word about them to my fellow infrastructure architects and developers.

As its own architecture (not the x86 that we’re accustomed to), compiled code needs to be re-compiled in order to run on the s390x platform. In the case of Ubuntu, the work has already been done to get a large chunk of the Ubuntu repository ported, so you can now run thousands of Linux applications on a LinuxONE machine. In order to effectively do this, there’s a team at Canonical responsible for this port and they have access to an IBM Z server to do the compiling.

But the most interesting thing to you and me? They also lend the power of this machine to support community members, by allowing them to build PPAs as well!

By default, Launchpad builds PPAs for i386 and amd64, but if you select “Change details” of your PPA, you’re presented with a list of other architectures you can target.

Last week I decided to give this a spin with a super simple package: A “Hello World” program written in Go. To be honest, the hardest part of this whole process is creating the Debian package, but you have to do that regardless of what kind of PPA you’re creating and there’s copious amounts of documentation on how to do that. Thankfully there’s dh-make-golang to help the process along for Go packages, and within no time I had a source package to upload to Launchpad.

From there it was as easy as clicking the “IBM System z (s390x)” box under “Change details” and the builds were underway, along with build logs. Within a few minutes all three packages were built for my PPA!

Now, mine was the most simple Go application possible, so when coupled with the build success, I was pretty confident that it would work. Still, I hopped on my s390x Ubuntu VM and tested it.

It worked! But aren’t I lucky, as an IBM employee I have access to s390x Linux VMs.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: IBM has a series of mainframe-driven security products in the cloud: IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services. One of these services is Hyper Protect Virtual Servers which are currently Experimental and you can apply for access. Once granted access, you can launch and Ubuntu 18.04 VM for free to test your application, or do whatever other development or isolation testing you’d like on a VM for a limited time.

If this isn’t available to you, there’s also the LinuxONE Community Cloud. It’s also a free VM that can be used for development, but as of today the only distributions you can automatically provision are RHEL or SLES. You won’t be able to test your deb package on these, but you can test your application directly on one of these platforms to be sure the code itself works on Linux on s390x before creating the PPA.

And if you’re involved with an open source project that’s more serious about a long-term, Ubuntu-based development platform on s390x, drop me an email at lyz@ibm.com so we can have a chat!

Filed under: computers, mainframes, tech, ubuntu planet

Red Hat Summit 2019 in Boston

Monday, Jun 17th, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

In early May I had the opportunity to attend the Red Hat Summit in Boston. I’ve gone to a lot of Linux conferences and have participated in events in the Red Hat arena for some time but it occurred to me that I’d never actually been to a Red Hat Summit! The first thing you learn about it is that it’s a huge event. It’s also an event that draws a spectrum of people. It’s very customer-driven, but you also have long-time Linux enthusiasts, and so many of them bring real heart to the event. I had some wonderful tooling discussions with infrastructure professionals like myself.

The keynotes were enjoyable. Several features customers who have found success with solutions provided by Red Hat, and there’s still a commitment to open source. It was also interesting to hear from IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. Now, obvious disclaimer, I now work for IBM, it was my second week on the job. I had been paying attention to IBM’s plans to buy Red Hat, but I have no insider knowledge, so it was great to hear directly from Ginni, on a public stage, that there was a commitment to making sure Red Hat is empowered to keep doing what they do to succeed.

My goal for this event was to meet with some of my new IBM colleagues, connect with contacts from previous roles, and spend time at the IBM booth learning more about LinuxONE and the resources we had available for the Linux on Z community. I met and exceeded all of these goals, squeezing in some meals and making really valuable contacts at this event, including folks inside of IBM who I’d be working with moving forward.

While on booth duty, I learned about the LinuxONE Community Cloud and had great chats with the fellow who runs it. I got to read LinuxONE for Dummies back at my room the first evening so I could re-join the booth the next morning equipped with enough knowledge to be useful (or dangerous!), so it was fun to chat with folks who were interested in learning more about what LinuxONE is.

It was also nice to get confirmation so early in my new role as to what developers, and infrastructure professionals like myself, want to hear about with regard to LinuxONE. Folks I work with are fascinated by the alternative architecture, and ease with which Linux can run on it. They also want hardware-driven crypto, and appreciate the decades of expertise in building isolation and security. I also quickly learned that lot of the strengths that mainframes have, and were developed to solve problems in the past, are evergreen and are solving new problems today. I really enjoyed this article by Misty Decker (now a colleague!) on the topic: When the Past becomes the Future.

I also got to meet up with some friends at the event and have a bit of non-work fun. I first met my friend Stephen in an Ubuntu IRC channel a decade ago and we now meet up at all kinds of Linux events, so it was fun to go to the closing party together, even if it was chilly!

It all was an incredibly energizing way to kick off my second week. I was able to get back to my first week “in the office” with a pile of ideas for moving forward, and both materials and connections to start realizing them.

More photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157709126780038

Filed under: computers, events, mainframes, tech, travel, work

IBM TechU 2019 in Atlanta

Monday, Jun 10th, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On April 30th I started my new job with IBM! Due to the timing, my week was spent at the IBM Systems Technical University (TechU) in Atlanta.

I was actually born in Atlanta, but I hadn’t been back since my family moved to Maine before my sister was born. I didn’t get to see much of the city, but it was interesting being back there.

The event itself was a waterfall of knowledge and connecting with new people. I finally met my boss in person for the first time, and had dinner with her and two of my new colleagues. I chatted with long time IBM customers and partners, met other people working on the LinuxONE mainframe platform and Linux on Z, spoke with students who were incorporating IBM technologies into their latest work. I also got to meet a z14 mainframe in person! Every one of these things made the event an exceptional way to on-board.

I focused on talks that would lend themselves to my specialties in Linux on Z and cryptography, so I attended talks about some of the work being put into Ubuntu support, and another on Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). I am glad I attended these sessions, because it was at them that I noticed a gap in our messaging that I’d be very good at filling. The sessions talked a lot about Linux, the features of the distributions, and touched upon how they were working to leverage the benefits of the mainframe. Both talks seemed pretty geared toward mainframe admins who were looking at or dabbling in Linux as another OS in their fleet. This didn’t speak to the Silicon Valley Linux systems administrator that I am, or developers who were already deep into the latest technologies. That’s the story I need to be working on in my new role.

In my new role I’ll also be working to promote some of the things that Linux on Z has made possible with regard to data encryption. With encryption technology built into each processor, and additional cryptographic express cards available, the platform allows an organization to Pervasively Encrypt all of their data. Data at rest on the harddrive, data in flight that’s being served up and protected with SSL. That said, I knew very little about this on my first week, so with little more than the term “Pervasive Encryption” I went to a few talks to get me sorted on the basics.

I also went to a talk that specifically talked about Hyper Protect, IBM’s encryption offering in IBM Cloud. You have to be clever or familiar with IBM’s terminology for this space to figure this out, but Hyper Protect is powered by IBM Z. That means there are mainframes in the IBM Cloud!

This whirlwind tour was far too much to absorb at once, but looking back at my notes a month later I was able to make the connections between what I was first exposed to then, and all the training videos and documents I’ve been watching and reading as I get up to speed day to day. I also learned a lot about the resources IBM has available for learning about the technologies, both internally and externally. I been making my way through Red Books and Red Papers related to what I’m learning about. I also went to a talk about how OpenStack is being used to manage VMs on LinuxONE machines, and during which they discussed some of the history around the efforts to control z/VM with OpenStack, and the origin of the open source cloud connector for z/VM.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and I was really thrilled to get back out to events. Looking forward to more!

Filed under: computers, events, mainframes, tech, travel, work

Visiting relatives on the road

Wednesday, May 29th, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The first two weeks of my new job had me away from home, first in Atlanta and then up in Boston. I have family in both areas, so I made sure to visit with them while I was in town.

First, in Atlanta I got to visit with my father’s brother, my Uncle Paul, and his family. With them in Georgia and my family up in Maine, we never saw much of each other, but bringing our lives closer together is one thing we can thank social media for. Furthermore, my cousin just had a baby! So I was eager to share some new mother kinship time. But first, I had to enjoy the moment where I was attending an IBM conference and meeting up with my uncle who spent a nice chunk of his career at IBM.

Over lunch I got to meet my cousin’s little one and catch up with my uncle, aunt, and cousin. I had a nice time and I’m really glad they were able to make the trek down to see me, especially with a newborn in tow!

My next trip took me to Boston for my first work trip where Adam and our au pair joined me. It’s a configuration I’m not likely to repeat often, conferences are hectic and extremely long, a simple eight hour day won’t do. In order to handle care for Adam, I not only had our au pair cover the day, but MJ’s best friend come over a couple nights to look after him while I went to evening events, and one evening was covered by my mother and sister who came down from Maine. That day also gave my sister and nephew an opportunity to finally meet little Adam! And I was able to carve out a couple hours before the conference to go to the New England Aquarium with them.

At the aquarium I discovered that Adam seems to like turtles. He was pretty memorized when he saw the sea turtles passing by in the large tank. His grandma bought him a turtle stuffed toy on our way out at the gift shop to remember the occasion. Getting some quality time with my nephew was a lot of fun, and I’m glad he was able to spend time holding and helping with his new little cousin.

Naturally they were wonderful with little Adam while I went off to attend evening keynotes and meet up with some people before returning to my room for the night. And Adam slept very well during the trip, only getting up once over night to eat, and pretty much sticking to California time, which allowed me to have a little time with him before I went to bed, and then could depart my room in the morning for the conference before he woke up. It was an exhausting week, especially once travel across the country with a connection was figured in, but it was totally worth it to squeeze in as much as we could.

Filed under: animals, family, travel

Saying goodbye in Florida

Thursday, May 16th, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Everything was coming together. I had just finalized travel for my first couple weeks of work and our new au pair was getting into the routine of caring for little Adam. It was then that we received the terrible news that a close relative of MJ was unexpectedly in the hospital. He passed away soon after.

We immediately made plans for all four of us to fly to Fort Lauderdale to be with our family and for the funeral on Monday. My soon-to-be boss was incredibly understanding when I asked to push my start date out by a day and had to change my travel plans. Our au pair was fantastic about the abrupt trip, and was incredibly helpful whenever we needed her.

It was a sad trip. There were tears, hugs, and love, and everything you’d expect from the funeral of a man who was beloved in his family and community and was so suddenly taken from us. I’m grateful we could be there, and while it wasn’t the way I expected to introduce Adam to the rest of the family, having him there did lift spirits some. And regardless of the circumstances, were were in a beautiful place and we had a little one to keep happy.

On the way there, Adam finally got his American Airlines wings.

We were fortunate to be there for the conclusion of Passover, which we observed with family. Our 6th wedding anniversary also landed during that weekend, but we simply enjoyed our time together instead of partaking in any grand plans.

On our last full day there, we took some time to introduce Adam to the ocean, which I think was a bit scary for him, but I made sure he got his feet wet.

All things considered, it was a good trip and I’m glad we could make it work. On Tuesday we parted ways. I flew to Atlanta to start my new job, and MJ, Adam and our au pair flew home.

Filed under: family, travel

Wrapping up maternity leave

Wednesday, May 15th, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

These past few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. I’ll discuss my recent work trips in more detail soon, but for now I thought I should write a bit about my last few weeks of maternity leave. As I wrote previously, we welcomed an au pair into our home last month. She’s wonderful and I’m happy to say that it’s going well so far. MJ was able to use some of his paternity leave to get her settled in, and I was able to spend three full days getting things done on my own as she took the reins for Adam’s routine daily care.

Adam and I did a bunch more walks. The four of us heading out to Lake Chabot Park one afternoon.

Another day I walked with him to the library and discovered a path that took us up to the boulevard.

We also celebrated our first Passover with little Adam. We went to San Francisco to partake in a second night Seder with the rest of our congregation.

The weather started warming up in April too, with temperatures soaring into the 80s some days and making me grateful that we’d finally installed air conditioning. On the house side, MJ has also been chatting with various solar companies to get traction on our solar panel project as well. Our yard is the next big project on my radar. It seemed like it would be low maintenance when we bought the house, but the mulch is no match for the weeds and it’s gotten a bit out of control. With an infant and so much else going on right now, it’s pretty clear we need help with it, my feeble attempts at weeding every few weeks when I can make time aren’t even putting a dent in it.

I started work at the tail end of April, and have been pretty much non-stop since. A trip across the country for a funeral, two east coast work trips. The weekend in between trips was spent attending a memorial and celebration of life for Rabbi Larry Raphael and minivan shopping.

Losing Rabbi Raphael this year was difficult for me. He was my first rabbi, having taught the introduction to Judaism class I attended before MJ and I got married, doing our pre-marriage counseling, and later sitting down with me to talk through my thoughts on God. He was a wonderful teacher, and his fondness for books made me eager to work with him and read every book he recommended and loaned to me, I was still in possession of one of his books when he passed. I still remember when I asked him how to reconcile competing religions all claiming to be The Truth and why I’d choose one over the other, he told me that they were all just different paths to God. I don’t think he’d suggest that the details didn’t matter, but there is more to faith than just picking a religion off a shelf when you decide you want it in your life. There’s culture, connection, family, and a lot of other squishy human stuff. He will be missed, but I’m grateful we could take time to celebrate his life with the rest of our congregation.

And then there was the minivan shopping. When we rushed out of town for the funeral of a relative in Florida, we happened to book a minivan. It was the right choice after squeezing the four of us into our 3-row SUV along with all our luggage, and Adam’s stroller. We don’t pack light, especially when we have to bring formal clothes, and Adam had a whole big suitcase all his own. Plus, I also had to pack for a work trip I was leaving for directly from Florida. Fitting everything was no problem for the minivan we rented. The sliding doors were actually quite nice too. As a car fan, I wasn’t proud to admit entering this part of adulthood, but it did convince us that we should send the Santa Fe to our place in Philly (the lease on our current car there runs out in October) and get a minivan as the family car here. We haven’t pulled the trigger on it yet, but we’re pretty sure we know what we want now and will likely come home with one pretty soon. And fun fact: Maserati is owned by Fiat Chrysler so the infotainment system in the Maserati Ghibli is the same as the Chrysler Pacifica. It’s so weird.

Filed under: family

Working Mother

Friday, May 3rd, 2019 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Motherhood can be a tricky topic for working mothers in the United States. People have strong opinions about leaving a child with alternate caretakers. Since I chose to return to work, I have a pile of books written for working mothers that I’ve been working my way through over the past couple months. These books all agree that being a successful career woman and a mother is hard, but possible with enough support. At first I was incredibly intimidated by this. I don’t want to be Super Mom, I just want to be me, with a family, and a career I love. As I bonded with my son and started getting ready to start my new job, I realized that both are exciting enough to me that I want to excel at both, and that is what will give me strength to be the best mother and the best professional I can be.

I also put a lot of thought into what I get value from. I started my new job on Tuesday with a trip to Atlanta for an event. I missed little Adam terribly, at one point I nearly cried while walking past the baby aisle in a CVS. Out at dinner with a friend and colleague, we spent almost the entire meal talking about our kids. But I also felt great. I was so happy and fulfilled to be back at work. This tug between parts of my life can be best described by Emily Oster, as she so honestly wrote in her recent opinion piece in the New York Times:

I work because I like to. I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. It isn’t that I like my job better — if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with them declines fast… The first hour with my kids is great, but by the fourth, I’m ready for some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this nose-dive in marginal value — the highs are not as high, but the hour-to-hour satisfaction declines much more slowly.

Sidenote: The article was adapted from segments of her recently released book Cribsheet which I pre-ordered after loving her pregnancy book so much. It was released last week and I have almost finished reading it. It’s so good.

Being on this firm footing privately has left me in a great spot, but I’ve also been trying to figure out how public I want to be about my family. There’s a meme that went around that, when referring to working mothers, “At work, you have to pretend you don’t have kids. With your kids, you have to pretend you don’t have work.” This speaks to the career penalty that many women suffer, and negative judgement from people who don’t believe mothers should work full time. It bothered me. Not just because it’s unfair, but on a deep level I’ve always been very public and genuine. Hiding the fact that I have a child from my professional life would not be consistent with who I am. It’s also not what I want. I bring my whole self to my job, and my whole self now means that I now also identify with being a mother.

And many of the skills I’ve developed and discovered in this new role as mother will serve me well. I thought I was pretty good at multitasking before, but motherhood has bumped that to a whole new level. I thought I knew tired and sleep-deprivation given my work and international travel schedule, but it’s difficult to compare to the first few weeks of having a newborn at home. I think the difference is there was always an end time with work and travel, a time when I could crash and sleep for a whole weekend without having to worry about anything. No more! Even when I did have times of more sleep when MJ or my aunt would take over, I would have to wake up to pump, or just because my brain decided I should check on the baby. The mantra “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it,” could easily be narrowed down to say “If you want something done, ask a working mother to do it.” For me, I feel like I’m a better employee because I now have this experience. I value my time more and am considerably more strategic about how I spend it.

In keeping with this openness, the other day I took to Twitter to see if I could find a hotel room for an upcoming conference. The opportunity to attend came too late to book a room near the conference venue, and I was hoping someone knew of a last minute room cancellation that I could take advantage of. My request got a lot of attention, especially when I disclosed my reason for needing a close hotel room (bringing along my infant, who I am feeding breast milk). But being honest about that caused me to pause. Was I sharing too much information? Was asking for this “accommodation” going to hurt me? Of the people who responded, there was an overwhelming amount of positivity, support, and problem-solving to make pumping and milk storage work at the event. Shining a giant spotlight on my situation was scary, but regardless of the outcome, I’m glad I spoke up and asked for help. Maybe other women who feel less privileged than I will also feel more empowered to speak up, and the stigma around everything related to motherhood will slowly fade away the more we talk about it. Right now I worry that many mothers are instead just making the choice to stay home when they’d rather work, switch their child to formula sooner than they’d like, or put a pause on career advancement when they really don’t want to. I’d really like to see support for working mothers improve in this country, both culturally and legally.

I expect the next several weeks as I settle into my new job to be a tiring time, but I’m looking forward to the challenge and opportunity. I’m excited about my work, I already enjoy working with my colleagues and a technology that’s partially new to me. I spend less time with Adam, but I’m happier and more energized about quality time together when I get it.

Filed under: family, reflection
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »