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Layover “at” Heathrow

Tuesday, Aug 30th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

While on my way back from Mumbai several weeks ago I ended up with a seven hour layover at Heathrow. I had planned on just camping out in an airport lounge for that time and catching up on email, open source stuff, work stuff. Then my friend Laura reached out to see if I wanted her to pick me up at the airport so we could escape for a few hours and grab breakfast.

I’d never left the airport on a layover like this, but the chance to catch up with a good friend and being able to take advantage of not needing to plan for a VISA to enter were too good to pass up. Leaving immigration was fun, having to explain that I’d only be out of the airport for five hours. And so, with 7 hours between flights I properly entered England for the second time in my life.

We ended up at Wetherspoon’s pub in Woking for breakfast. Passing on the pork-heavy English breakfast, I had a lovely smoked salmon benedict and some tea.

The weather that morning was beautiful, so after breakfast wandered around town, stopped in a shop or two. We got some more tea (this time with cake!) and generally caught up. It was really nice to chat about our latest career stuff, geek out about open source and fill each other in on our latest life plans.

Definitely the best layover I’ve ever had, I’m super glad I didn’t just stay in the airport lounge! I’ll remind myself of this the next time the opportunity arises.

A handful of other photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671052472560

Filed under: travel

Local Sights

Sunday, Aug 28th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve been going running along the Embarcadero here in San Francisco lately. These runs afford me fresh air coming off the bay, stunning views of the bay itself, a chance to run under the beautiful Bay Bridge and down to the AT&T ballpark. I run past palm trees and E-Line street cars, and the weather is cool and clear enough to pretty much do it every day. In short, it sometimes feels like we live in paradise.

Naturally, we like to share that with friends and family who visit. I’ve had a fun year of local touristing as cousins, sisters and friends have been in town visiting. Our favorite place to take them is Fort Baker. It’s almost always less chaotic than the lookout point at the north side of the bridge, and you actually get to walk around a fair amount to get some views of both the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco itself. It’s also where I got my head shots done, including the header image I’ve used for this blog for several years. I’m a big fan of the city skyline from there.

Back in April we made a visit up to The Marine Mammal Center, which I wrote about here. We took an alternate route back due to a closed tunnel, and that’s how we ended up looking down at the Golden Gate Bridge from the northwest edge, the one view I hadn’t seen yet. It’s a pretty exceptional ones, getting to see the undeveloped hilly area on the north side and then the San Francisco city skyline in the far distance. I probably could have sat there all day.

Alas, I didn’t have all day. I had only taken the morning off from work and I had to grab a bite before catching the ferry back to San Francisco from Sausalito while MJ took everyone else on to Muir Woods. Now, I’d taken a ferry in the bay before, one to Alcatraz to do some tourist visiting, another to Alameda and back when visiting a potential location for a Partimus computer lab deployment. It’s always been a beautiful ride, but the ride from Sausalito to San Francisco lands into exceptional territory. You get views of several islands, both of San Francisco’s bridges, Alcatraz, Sausalito and the city. I was so happy on this ferry ride that I even had a conversation with a couple who was in town visiting from Canada and answered piles of questions about what we were seeing. This is something that shy, introvert me hardly ever does.

We also take folks up to Twin Peaks. How many cities in the world are there where you can climb a hill and look at downtown? In San Francisco, you can go up to Twin Peaks. It’s breathtaking.

Nice bay, right? We have an ocean too. I spent my youth on the coast of Maine. I didn’t sneak out to late night parties when I was a teenager, I snuck out to go to the park and sit by the ocean. My head clearing spot? The ocean. Needed cheering up when I was depressed? Trip to the ocean. First kiss? Happened right there on the rocks by the ocean. My love for being near the coast is a pretty deep part of who I am.

From the Cliff House on the western side of the city you get some great views of the beach stretching south.

Looking north you can see the ruins of the Sutro Baths that were opened in 1896 and lasted through the middle of the 20th century. Looking beyond to the other side of the golden gate.

Further views we caught this spring are in a pair of albums on Flickr, by month: April and June

Filed under: san francisco

FOSSCON 2016

Tuesday, Aug 23rd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week I was in Philadelphia, which was fun and I got to do some Ubuntu stuff but I was actually there to speak at FOSSCON. It’s not the largest open source conference, but it is in my adopted home city of Philadelphia and I have piles of friends, mentors and family there. I love attending FOSSCON because I get to catch up with so many people, making it a very hug-heavy conference. I sadly missed it last year, but I made sure to come out this year.

They also invited me to give a closing keynote. After some back and forth about topics, I ended up with a talk on “Listening to the Needs of Your Global Open Source Community” but more on that later.

I kicked off my morning by visiting my friends at the Ubuntu booth, and meeting up with my OpenStack and HPE colleague Ma Dong who had flown in from Beijing to join us. I made sure we got our picture taken by the beautiful Philadelphia-themed banner that the HPE open source office designed and sent for the event.

At 11AM I gave my regular track talk, “A Tour Of OpenStack Deployment Scenarios.” My goal here was to provide a gentle introduction, with examples, of the basics of OpenStack and how it may be used by organizations. My hope is that the live demos of launching instances from the Horizon web UI and OpenStack client were particularly valuable in making the connection between the concepts of building a cloud the actual tooling you might use. The talk was well-attended and I had some interesting chats later in the day. I learned that a number of the attendees are currently using proprietary cloud offerings and looking for options to in-house some of that.

The demos were very similar to the tutorial I gave at SANOG earlier this month, but the talk format was different. Notes from demos here and slides (219K).


Thanks to Ma Dong for taking a picture during my talk! (source)

For lunch I joined other sponsors at the sponsor lunch over at the wonderful White Dog Cafe just a couple blocks from the venue. Then it was a quick dash back to the venue for Ma Dong’s talk on “Continuous Integration And Delivery For Open Source Development.”

He outlined some of the common mechanisms for CI/CD in open source projects, and how the OpenStack project has solved them for a project that eclipses most others in size, scale and development pace. Obviously it’s a topic I’m incredibly familiar with, but I appreciated his perspective as a contributor who comes from an open source CI background and has now joined us doing QA in OpenStack.


Ma Dong on Open Source CI/CD

After his talk it was also nice to sit down for a bit to chat about some of the latest changes in the OpenStack Infrastructure. We were able to catch up about the status of our Zuul tooling and general direction of some of our other projects and services. The day continued with some chats about Jenkins, Nodepool and how we’ve played around with infrastructure tooling to cover some interesting side cases. It was really fun to meet up with some new folks doing CI things to swap tips and stories.

Just before my keynote I attended the lightning talks for a few minutes, but had to depart early to get set up in the big room.

They keynote on “Listening to the Needs of Your Global Open Source Community” was a completely new talk for me. I wrote the abstract for it a few weeks ago for another conference CFP after the suggestion from my boss. The talk walked through eight tips for facilitating the collection of feedback from your community as one of the project leaders or infrastructure representatives.

  • Provide a simple way for contributors to contact project owners
  • Acknowledge every piece of feedback
  • Stay calm
  • Communicate potential changes and ask for feedback
  • Check in with teams
  • Document your processes
  • Read between the lines
  • Stick to your principles

With each of these, I gave some examples from my work mostly in the Ubuntu and OpenStack communities. Some of the examples were pretty funny, and likely very familiar with any systems folks who are interfacing with users. The Q&A at the end of the presentation was particularly interesting, I was very focused on open source projects since that’s where my expertise lies, but members of the audience felt that my suggestions were more broadly applicable. In those moments after my talk I was invited to speak on a podcast and encouraged to write a series of articles related to my talk. Now I’m aiming for writing some OpenSource.com content on over the next couple weeks.

Slides from the talk are here (7.3M pdf).


And thanks to Josh, José, Vincent and Nathan for snapping some photos of the talk too!

The conference wound down and following the keynote with a raffle and we then went our separate ways. For me, it was time for spending time with friends over a martini.

A handful of other photos from the conference here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671843605132

Filed under: events, openstack, philadelphia, tech, travel

Wandering around Philadelphia

Monday, Aug 22nd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Philadelphia is my figurative (and may soon be literal…) second home. Visits are always filled with activities, events, friends and family. This trip was a considerably less structured. I flew in several days before the conference I was attending and stayed in my friend’s guest room, and didn’t take much time off from work, instead working from a couch most of the week with my little dog friend Blackie.

I did have some time for adventuring throughout the week though, taking a day off to check out The Science Behind Pixar exhibit down at The Franklin Institute with a friend. On our way down we stopped at Pudge’s in Conshohocken to satisfy my chicken cheesesteak craving. It hit the spot.

Then we were off to the city! The premise of the exhibit seemed to be trying to encourage youth into STEM fields by way of the creative processes and interesting jobs at a company like Pixar. As such, they walked you through various phases of production of Pixar films and have hands-on exhibits that let you simply play around with the themes of what professionals in the industry do. It’s probably a good idea to encourage interest, even if a museum exhibit can’t begin to tackle the complexity of these fields, as a technologist I agree that the work is ultimately fun and exciting.

But let’s be honest, I’m an adult who already has an STEM career and I’ve been a Pixar fan since the beginning. I was there so I could get selfies with Wall-E (and Buzz, Sully and Mike, Edna Mode, Dory…).

A few more photos from the exhibit here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671629547292

We had the whole afternoon, so I also got to see the Lost Egypt exhibit, which was fun to see after the Egypt exhibit I saw at de Young last month. We went to a couple planetarium shows and also got all the nostalgia on as I revisited all the standing exhibits. Like the trains. I love the trains. The Franklin Institute is definitely one of my favorite museums.

That evening I also got to check out the new Hive76 location. The resurgence of hackerspaces had just started when I left Philly, and while I was never super involved, I did host a few “PLUG into Hive” meetings there when I was coordinating the LUG and had friends at Hive. It was nice getting to see their new space. After dinner I had the amusing experience of going to catch Pokémon in a park after dark, along with several other folks who were there for the same reason. There really is something to be said for a game that gets people out of their house at night to go for walks and socialize over augmented reality. Even if I didn’t catch any new Pokémon. Hah!

Wednesday and Thursday nights I spent time with my best buddies Danita and Crissi. Dinner, drinks, lots of good chatting. It had absolutely been too much time since we’d spend time together, spending time catching up was just the thing I needed. I’ll have to make sure I don’t let so much time pass between getting together in the future.

More photos from various wanderings this past week (including dinosaurs!) here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671629567332

And then MJ and I spent Friday and Sunday on a secret mission before flying home. I’ll write more about that once it becomes unclassified.

Filed under: philadelphia, travel

Ubuntu in Philadelphia

Monday, Aug 22nd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last week I traveled to Philadelphia to spend some time with friends and speak at FOSSCON. While I was there, I noticed a Philadelphia area Linux Users Group (PLUG) meeting would land during that week and decided to propose a talk on Ubuntu 16.04.

But first I happened to be out getting my nails done with a friend on Sunday before my talk. Since I was there, I decided to Ubuntu theme things up again. Drawing freehand, the manicurist gave me some lovely Ubuntu logos.

Girly nails aside, that’s how I ended up at The ATS Group on Monday evening for a PLUG West meeting. They had a very nice welcome sign for the group. Danita and I arrived shortly after 7PM for the Q&A portion of the meeting. This pre-presentation time gave me the opportunity to pass around my BQ Aquaris M10 tablet running Ubuntu. After the first unceremonious pass, I sent it around a second time with more of an introduction, and the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo so people could see convergence in action by switching between the tablet and desktop view. Unlike my previous presentations, I was traveling so I didn’t have my bag of laptops and extra tablet, so that was the extent of the demos.

The meeting was very well attended and the talk went well. It was nice to have folks chiming in on a few of the topics (like the transition to systemd) and there were good questions. I also was able to give away a copy of our The Official Ubuntu Book, 9th Edition to an attendee who was new to Ubuntu.

Keith C. Perry shared a video of the talk on G+ here. Slides are similar to past talks, but I added a couple since I was presenting on a Xubuntu system (rather than Ubuntu) and didn’t have pure Ubuntu demos available: slides (7.6M PDF, lots of screenshots).

After the meeting we all had an enjoyable time at The Office, which I hadn’t been to since moving away from Philadelphia almost seven years ago.

Thanks again to everyone who came out, it was nice to meet a few new folks and catch up with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in several years.

Saturday was FOSSCON! The Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo team showed up to have a booth, staffed by long time LoCo member Randy Gold.

They had Ubuntu demos, giveaways from the Ubuntu conference pack (lanyards, USB sticks, pins) and I dropped off a copy of the Ubuntu book for people to browse, along with some discount coupons for folks who wanted to buy it. My Ubuntu tablet also spent time at the table so people could play around with that.


Thanks to Randy for the booth photo!

At the conference closing, we had three Ubuntu books to raffle off! They seemed to go to people who appreciated them and since both José and I attended the conference, the raffle winners had 2/3 of the authors there to sign the books.


My co-author, José Antonio Rey, signing a copy of our book!
Filed under: events, LUG, philadelphia, tech, ubuntu planet

A lecture, a symphony and a lot of street cars

Monday, Aug 22nd, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

My local July adventures weren’t confined to mummies, baseball and food. I also attended a few shows a lectures.

On July 14th I met up with a friend to see a Kevin Kelly speak on The Next 30 Digital Years, put on by The Long Now Foundation. This lecture covered a series of trends (not specific technologies) that Kelly felt would drive the future. This included proliferation of “screens” on a variety of surfaces to meet our ever-increasing desire to be connected to media we now depend on in our work and lives. He also talked about the rise of augmented reality, increased tracking for increased personalization of services (with a sidebar about privacy) and increasing sharing economy, where access continues to replace ownership.

What I enjoyed most about this talk was how optimistic he was. Even while tackling difficult topics like privacy in a very connected world, he was incredibly positive about what our future holds in store for us. This held true even when questions from the audience expressed more pessimistic views.

In a weekend that revolved around events near City Hall, the very next evening I went to the San Francisco Symphony for the first time. As SciFi fan who has a sidebar love for movie scores, my introduction to the symphony here was appropriately Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage — A 50th Anniversary Celebration (article). The event featured the full symphony, with a screen above them that showed clips and a narrated exploration through the Star Trek universe as they played scores from movies and selections from each series. They definitely focused on TOS and TNG, but there was decent representation of the rest. I also learned that SF trekkies really like Janeway. Me too. It was a really fun night.

We also went to an event put on by the Western Neighborhoods Project (WNP), Streetcar San Francisco: Transit Tales of the City in Motion at Balboa Theatre.

The event featured short films and clips of historic streetcars and expertise from folks over at Market Street Railway (which may have been how I heard about it). The clips covered the whole city, including a lot of downtown as they walked us through some the milestones and transit campaigns in the history of the city. It was particularly interesting to learn about the street cars in the west side of the city, where they used to have have a line that ran up around Land’s End, and some neat (or tacky) hanging “sky-trams” which took you from Cliff House to Point Lobos, an article about them here: A Brief History of San Francisco’s Long-Lost Sky Tram, which also references the WNP page about them.

This event also clued me in to the existence of OpenSF History by WNP. They’re going through a collection of historic San Francisco photos that have been donated and are now being digitized, indexed and shared online. Very fun to browse through, and there are great pictures of historic streetcars and other transit.

Filed under: san francisco

The West, Mummies and Baseball

Wednesday, Aug 17th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I spent most of July at home, which gave us time to take some time get over to the Legion of Honor for an exhibit I was looking forward to, and to another Giants game this season.

The exhibit I wanted to see was Wild West: Plains to the Pacific. There are absolutely heartbreaking things about the west story, but I grew up on westerns and stories of wagon trains. I have a visceral connection to the west story. People from the east building their new life out west, braving hardship and heartbreak. Even my own move west was a re-invention of myself. So I was definitely drawn to this exhibit.

The exhibit takes you through various periods of time, from the frontier to present day. Journeys by the first artists who captured the beauty of the western territories, wild west shows, farmers and beyond. Some of the most striking images were those advertising fruit boxes from California, each drawing distinction for their brand with bright colors and clever names.

While we were there, we decided to also go to a lecture that happened to be presented that day on “Mummies! The Medicine, Myths, and Marvels of Ancient Egyptian Mummification” by Charlotte Read which accompanied another exhibit they had, The Future of the Past: Mummies and Medicine. It was a great talk to see prior to seeing the exhibit, since she described many of the things we’d later see, including details about amulets, which played a prominent role and gave us a glimpse into the technologies they’re using today to peer under the wrapping of mummies, non-destructively.

The exhibit itself was quite small, only taking up one room, but it was worth seeing. You get to see the pair mummies themselves, along with facial reconstructions and the high resolution CT scans preformed on them. The exhibit also presented several of the artifacts that are often buried alongside mummies.

More photos from the Legion of Honor here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157667790231333

Later in the month we went to see the San Francisco Giants play over at the beautiful AT&T Park.

It was the second game we saw this season, and sadly they did not triumph this time. It was a good game to watch though, and the weather was beautiful. Plus, we had great company as a friend of ours joined us.

Filed under: san francisco

Local Edibles

Monday, Aug 15th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

San Francisco has a lot of great food, and more restaurants than we could possibly visit. Over the past month or so we’ve tried a couple more and returned to a couple of our favorites.

While MJ was working in the city, I finally got to visit Hakkasan, an upscale Cantonese restaurant. They have an array of delicious entrees, but their “small eats” and dim sum are exceptional. The food is also beautiful, upon receiving our first round of dishes, including the amazing Crispy prawn with mango, MJ asked where I wanted to start. “I want to start by taking a picture of my food!”

Our new dining adventures continued with a visit to Tadich Grill, arguably “the oldest continuously running restaurant in San Francisco” (via wikipedia). The place started out as a coffee stand in 1849 and has changed names and owners, making their “oldest” claim a bit tenuous, but however you count, it is an old place by San Francisco standards and they’ve been in their current location since 1967. They don’t take reservations, and we came in around 9PM and still had about a half hour wait along with the crowd that was mostly tourists. We were finally seated as one of the last seatings of the evening. They specialize in seafood dishes, and the wait staff where all wearing white jackets, looking pretty formal. The appetizers and entrees didn’t blow me away, but it was a decent seafood. What did make me happy was dessert, they have a solid carrot cake, which I’m not used to finding in San Francisco. Paired with a Claiborne & Churchill 2014 Dry Gewürztraminer, it was a perfect ending to the evening. As a bonus, it made me explore Claiborne & Churchill’s wines, and their selection of sweet wines is really nice, I’ve ordered a Port, a couple of their Muscats and of course some more Gewürztraminer.

We also recently joined friends for a dinner at Lazy Bear, which we first went to in December. As I wrote then, the seating is family style and they serve a fixed tasting menu. This time I also did the wine pairing, which was totally worth it, they had a really nice list of wines and the portions were nicely timed with the dishes.

Going to Lazy Bear is always an experience, more photos from the evening here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157669411350191

Last, but the most important, we went back to Jardiniere to celebrate our third wedding anniversary… a couple months late. I was traveling on our actual anniversary at the end of April, and then between trips and general being busy, it took until July to actually get reservations and settle on the evening. It was nice to finally go out to celebrate together. They have a variety of French inspired dishes that I love, but they prepare an amazing rare wagyu both proper the Japanese Wagyu, and American. We got one of each, along with a lovely dessert.

Filed under: food, san francisco

Local Critters

Saturday, Aug 13th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I already wrote about some of the local drinks we’ve been enjoying over these past few months, it’s time to move on to animals! Most of which have had their existence proven by science.

Back in April I made one of my standard pilgrimages to the San Francisco Zoo, where we’re members. This time we went with my sister and law and her husband, and the highlight of the visit for me was finally seeing little Jasiri, the lion cub. He was a bit hard to make out, hidden under the shade of a bush, but I was able to find him, near his mother Sukari.


Jasiri and Sukari

We made our usual stops, visiting the rescued sea lions, the grizzly sisters frolicking in their pool and of course to penguin island. I also got my first look at Claudia, the Andean Condor who recently became a resident there. I’ll have to go back soon, they opened up their new Mexican gray wolf exhibit in June and their Sifaka Lemur exhibit opens in a week.


Rainbow at Penguin Island

More photos from that visit to the San Francisco Zoo here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157666612834551

During the same visit to San Francisco, the four of us also made our way up to Sausalito to visit the The Marine Mammal Center (TMMC). It’s one of our favorite organizations, and following our donation this year they reached out to us to offer a tour, which we decided to take advantage of while we had family in town.

The volunteer spent about an hour with us, walking us through the public areas, including the holding pens where we saw the elephant seals being fed, a lab where they were doing blood analysis, their “fish kitchen” where they prepare food for the animals and over to their public autopsy area. He also demonstrated for us how they go about capturing the animal, joking that “everything is a seal, and everything is about 100 lbs” when people call in reports. In reality, they also rescue many sea lions as well and most of the animals are quite a bit heftier and powerful than the 100 lbs claim suggests.

We then went behind the scenes. The site is owned by the US government and the organization is granted use of what is actually and old missile facility. Part of the massive filtration system for all their tanks and pools is now located where they used to store missiles. Fortuitously, we also got to see a truck coming in with some newly rescued patients. A baby harbor seal was among the rescues, who we got to see unloaded and nearly broke my heart when he cried his “maaa” cry. He’s in excellent hands though, they do really great work there.

Picture taking behind the scenes was limited, but I do have several more photos The Marine Mammal Center here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157664556780964

Finally, I made a visit to a more… elusive critter. After giving an Ubuntu presentation at Felton LUG a few months ago, I took the opportunity of being in Felton to visit the Bigfoot Discovery Museum right down the street. It was amusing, but completely coincidental, that this visit came on the heels of my visit just weeks before to the International Cryptozoology Museum in Maine. It’s true that I’m terribly fascinated by the search for cryptids like bigfoot, but the skeptic in me won’t get me much further than fascination until there’s more solid evidence.

This museum walks you through the evidence that does exist, including various footprint casts, an analysis of the famous Patterson–Gimlin film and maps of reported sightings throughout northern California. There’s also nearly a full room devoted to the pop culture around the creatures, from toys to movie posters. The proprietor was enthusiastic about sharing stories with visitors about sightings and the evidence that exists, and hearing his enthusiasm for his work was alone worth the visit for me.

More photos from the museum here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157670265156315

Filed under: animals, san francisco

Local Potions

Friday, Aug 12th, 2016 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

As I look through my blog posts this year, I’ve noticed a very travel and conference-focused trend. It seems I’ve been really good about staying on top of writing about these things, and less so with some of our local adventures. At this point it seems I have to reach all the way back to April to start writing about what we’ve been up to, covering visits with friends and family, trips up to wine country, adventures to new theaters and the symphony. Instead of stepping through these chronologically, I thought it might be more interesting to group things up.

To begin, let’s talk about some of the wonderful things I’ve had to drink this year.

Back in April, my sister in law and her husband were in town visiting. When we have guests in town there’s a bunch of stuff we love to do, but it’s also fun to check off some of the attractions we haven’t seen yet either. That brought us to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Going into this I didn’t have any expectations, I wasn’t sure what it had, how big it was or anything. Now that I’ve been, I can definitely recommend a visit.

There’s a path that winds through the garden, taking you through various Japanese trees, flowers and other plants. Throughout they have pagodas of varied provenance, some created in Japan and shipped over, some with dedications, one that came from the Pan-Pacific International Exposition (world’s fair) that was held in San Francisco in 1915. There’s a distinctive arched bridge, stone lanterns and various water features, from fountains and streams, to a koi pond. The walk through these lovely gardens concluded for us at their tea house, where we got snacks and some hot Matcha green tea.

More photos from our visit to the Japanese Tea Garden here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157666201291390

Moving from tea to something a bit stronger, in June we had a pair of friends in town who we took up to Sonoma County for some wine tasting. Now, we’ve done this journey with many folks, so I won’t give a play by play this time around, but it was worth noting because we went on the Partners Wine Tour at Benziger Family Winery, something I hadn’t done in years.

But first, we had lunch! We ordered sandwiches at the nearby Glen Ellen Village Market, bought a bottle of 2013 Dragonsleaf Pinot Noir and sat outside in the shade outside the tasting room at Benziger. There are few things in the world so relaxing and satisfying as that picnic lunch with friends was.

It was then onward for the tour! Taking a little over an hour, the tour took us on a long ride through the vineyards, giving history of the winery and tastings throughout our journey. We then went into the wine caves, where we sampled some not-quite-finished wine right out of the cask. The dining room in the cave was closed for maintenance, so our final tour stop was into the library, where our membership status got us a sample of one of their amazing old library wines.

More photos from the Benziger Partners Tour, and stops at Jacuzzi Winery and Imagery Winery here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157669175719622

Wine adventures continued later in the month when MJ and I went up to Napa Valley for an afternoon of dining at Rutherford Grill and tasting as Rutherford Hill Winery, where we are members and had to drive up to pick up our shipment of wines. I’m a fan of Merlots, and Rutherford Hill is internationally famous for them, but what really made membership for us was how well we’re treated as members. They have an amazing tasting room in their wine caves, and are very flexible about wines you can pick up in your shipment, since price is determined by precisely what you buy anyway. With them, membership turns out to essentially be an agreement to buy a certain number of wine bottles per cycle, with a set of recommendations as a default. It was all very refreshing for such a large Napa winery, and their wines are exceptional.

Upon arrival, we were led back to the caves where we sat in a little alcove to sample a series of wines. Our host was wonderful and we really enjoyed the ambiance and coolness of the cave, especially with how bright and warm it was outside. Once the tasting was concluded, I took advantage of the springtime climate that had all their flowers in full bloom before going inside to pick up our wines and a few other goodies.

More photos (especially flowers!) from our day up at Rutherford Hill here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157667277830503

My final drink adventure was closer to home than all the rest, a quick walk from home down 2nd street and over to Black Hammer Brewing. It was here that I met my friend Pasi who was in town from Finland and another fellow in town from Copenhagen. It’s on the newer side and they don’t serve food (though outside food is allowed), so I hadn’t been to this brewery before. We arrived pretty late and only had a couple rounds, but I was really impressed with the variety available in their small batches of beers. I went with the Nautical Twilight and Sunrise Set.

I love living in a place where I can not only find some delicious things to drink, but do so in beautiful places. Even the brewery, though lacking in scenery of my tea and wine trips, had a comfortable atmosphere that’s begging me to return.

Filed under: beer, food, life, san francisco
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