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Tea, to do lists and books

Sunday, Jun 23rd, 2013 by pleia2 | 5 Comments

We have had a lot of stuff to work on at home lately. The most fun has been integrating our new wedding gifts into our small kitchen, which is somewhat challenging but I’m really happy to finally own a nice set of knives and pots. I’ve also been using the bread maker almost weekly to make dough for challah, which I think I’ve mastered the art of three strand braiding for (hooray!).

We also received a tea pot, which inspired me to finally give loose leaf tea a try. I wasn’t sure how it would go, since making tea is more work than making coffee (never underestimate the amount of laziness I have early in the morning) and in general my past attempts at teabag tea have ended with switching back to coffee. It turns out that the loose leaf stuff is a different beast entirely! After trying several that it tastes much better than teabag tea and you can totally geek out when researching, selecting and buying the stuff. Fun all around. I now have a counter full of 7 types with varying degrees of caffeine.

Our Ketubah has been framed and is now hanging in our den/my office. I’m really pleased with the framing job by Chandler Fine Art & Framing, they took time to work with us on frame selection and composition and it looks beautiful on the wall.

I recently came to the conclusion that we need another filing cabinet to rein in our mail situation (most of it currently lives in boxes rather than being properly filed, sigh). Unfortunately a prerequisite to getting another filing cabinet is finding a place for it, which means cleaning up our storage units. This is a massive undertaking, and after a couple overwhelming attempts last year that ended in surrender, I’ve decided to change my approach. Instead of tackling the entire project all at once, I’m devoting 3-4 hours a week on it, no more than 1 hour per day. Each day I’ve taken time to assess and work on one specific part of cleaning it up (find all file boxes, put all collapsed boxes in one place, find all my book boxes, take all CRTs to recycling center). This week I did this for 4 days and while it still looks like chaos, I have made progress and can take satisfaction from the specific parts I’ve been able to tackle.

Speaking of tasks, I realized the other day that I’ve now been using Taskwarrior for over 2 years, having started on June 6th of 2011. It’s command-line based and so far the only todo list tool I’ve managed to use for more than 3 months. Unfortunately I also came to the realization that as my todo list approached 50 tasks again, I had some on there that were over 2 years old. Psychologically this was really bad for me, life may actually contain a never-ending todo list, but using this tool is a way of managing specific tasks I am consciously making time for, not tracking the unattainable goal of everything-I-ever-want todo. I wanted to change this, since the really old stuff would realistically never come off the list until I turned them into serious action items – either by making progress or sending apologies and letting them go. So, much like my storage unit cleaning, I decided to take one really old task per day and do a serious assessment of it. I have more to do, but my list is down to 22 items and most have been chopped into manageable tasks.

But it has not all been todo lists and home stuff! I’ve started taking time to read more. This started on my honeymoon where I spent days just relaxing on the beach with a book and remembered the regenerative powers of such relaxing. I really didn’t want to let that go upon returning home. I just finished up Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman, whose style took some getting used to, but which I thought was really fun. I also read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, which I got at the Women of OpenStack breakfast at the OpenStack summit. This one has taken some processing and it’s not for everyone, but it certainly is targeted at professionals like myself who want to have a family and intend on continuing to pursue their career. I first heard about her ideas via her TED talk and it struck a chord for me (particularly about leaving before you leave), so the book itself had a lot of valuable advice and interesting commentary that I’ve missed in other arenas. I’m so glad people are talking about this stuff. I’m about halfway through Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts by Emily Anthes, which is a fascinating book, but I can’t help pondering at every turn “oooh, that would be cool!” – not surprising since I do admit that I owned some GloFish several years ago. Next up in my pile (which is a pile, not everything is on my Nook) is a collection of essays from geeky women called She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff, edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders. Looking forward to drawing some inspiration from these stories.

Today we’ve been working through some more home stuff and errands. We also have some flights to book and post-wedding things to get to. On Wednesday I fly out to New York City for the OpenStack Infrastructure Bootcamp, and I’ll be staying the weekend to hang out with my friend Danita who is coming up from Philly.

Filed under: books, life

My past month of warriors, bread and a baby giraffe

Wednesday, Jun 12th, 2013 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Since returning from the honeymoon a month ago our lives have continued to be very busy, catching up with work and projects while we were gone and catching up with all other life stuff we postponed while we were preparing for the wedding.

Because we have been so overwhelmed, I gave Instacart a try and had some groceries delivered from Safeway and Whole Foods. It went well and the couple hours it saved was a huge relief. Not sure if I’ll stick with them or try other grocery delivery services, but it’s great to know that it’s available when we simply don’t have the time on weekends to get the major shopping trips completed.

About a week after returning home, I met up with Grant Bowman and Christian Einfeldt for a Partimus board meeting. It was great to be able to catch up with everything and make some small, concrete plans for moving forward that took into account our busy schedules. I was also able to work with James Howard on a blog post for the Partimus blog about some work they were doing while MJ and I were getting married on April 28th: CACS laptop install day wrap-up

With the release of Ubuntu 13.04, I participated in Ubuntu Open Week with a session on the Ubuntu Women Project. I also was able to work with the Xubuntu docs folks to upload the 13.04 version of our documentation to docs.xubuntu.org/1304/ and install a new splash page at docs.xubuntu.org itself where we will keep all of the documentation for current stable releases. I don’t have much to do with Debian these days, but the release of Debian 7.0 while we were gone got me to upgrade most of my servers a couple weeks ago and it went pretty smoothly. I’ve also been working with the Canonical community team to launch community.ubuntu.com a couple weeks ago, which meant lots of content review and scouring for images to include on the site.

Over Memorial Day Weekend we had a lot of errands to catch up on, one of which was finally purchasing a proper bedroom set. We’ve been casually looking for quite some time and ended up coming back to one we saw at a furniture store in Berkeley a couple years ago. Unfortunately the delivery date is 8-12 weeks out for the set with the combination we ordered, so we’ll be waiting some time. On Memorial Day itself we managed to get over to the Asian Art Museum for the last day of their amazing Terracotta Warriors exhibit.

More photos from the exhibit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633750560814/

The week wrapped up with a bread experiment! One of our wedding guests bought us a bread maker, which I’ve so far used to make some white bread and then experimented with making challah fully in the bread machine, which of course makes it come out as a square rather than a traditional braided loaf. So that Friday evening I decided to try making the proper loaf. I used this recipe to start it out in the bread maker (so it would do all the kneading and rising work) and then took it out and braided it. Braiding wasn’t actually as difficult as I had feared, and I had a nice braided loaf to put in the oven:

I think I somehow didn’t let it rise enough, so it rose a lot in the oven and caused some unevenness with how it looked with the egg coating, but it came out tasting and looking pretty much like proper challah, if a bit on the thick side. I’ll give it another try this Friday.

The next day I went to the San Francisco Zoo to visit their newest arrival, a baby giraffe!

She was huge! 5’10” at birth and weighing 130 lbs, these animals are formidable creatures from birth. I was delighted to have the opportunity to not only see her when she was just a little over a week old, but also catch a few minutes of her nursing.

While I was at the zoo I also got to visit the other baby at the zoo – their tiger Jillian! I’ve been to see her a couple of times already, but this was my first time seeing her out in the yard. Got some super-zoomed photos of her snuggling mom, and then a few more of her playing in the yard.

More zoo photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633882815260/

Other miscellaneous things: Went to a BerkeleyLUG meeting recently while we happened to be in the area and needed some lunch (hooray pizza!). After months of not going to the theater, saw Star Trek Into Darkness and The Great Gatsby within a week of each other (still need to see Iron Man 3!). Went to a “State of the Stack” OpenStack meetup where I got to meet Randy Bias, but didn’t talk to anyone else because I’m too shy (d’oh). I have been meeting folks for dinner more recently, as much as I don’t like to believe it, getting out of the house after work really helps break up my day and leads to more productivity in the later evening. Tonight I spent the evening at an Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner.

Finally, I’ve sorted out much of my travel schedule for the next few months. In a couple weeks I’m flying to New York City for the OpenStack CI/Infra Bootcamp with my colleagues. At the end of July MJ and I are heading to Boston for a wedding. And finally in early August we’ll be going to Philadelphia where I’ll be speaking at FOSSCON on Open Source Systems Administration, specifically looking at how we do it in the OpenStack project.

Filed under: animals, food, life

Simcoe’s May Checkup

Wednesday, Jun 12th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On May 30th we brought Simcoe in for her 3 months checkup. We were going to wait longer since her results have been consistently good, but following our honeymoon she’s been acting a bit more restless than usual and we decided to take her in. Caligula was also having some stomach problems so we brought him along too.

We ended up leaving both of them at the vet for the morning so Caligula could get a vaccination and they could get some blood and urine samples from Simcoe. We got Simcoe’s blood results back on June 3rd:

BUN 48 (normal range: 14-36)
CRE 2.6 (normal range: .6-2.4)

Pretty much everything is within the margin of error BUN is up slightly from 46, and CRE is down slightly from 2.8. I didn’t write down exact weight, but it was down an ounce or two and the vet wasn’t concerned since it’s also within standard weight fluctuation. The only concern was slightly elevated protein in her urine sample, but they think that may be from a little blood that got in the sample from the needle, the vet just said we should do the test again next time she comes in.

So we’re no longer worried that Simcoe’s increased activity is a problem, we suspect it was just the three weeks being away from home had really upset her and caused her to demand a bit more attention. Ah cats.

Filed under: simcoe

AdaCamp take-aways

Tuesday, Jun 11th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past weekend I attended AdaCamp, put on by The Ada Initiative.

Attending this conference was an interesting move for me. I have a lot of respect for The Ada Initiative, but that’s mostly because they’re doing the offense and defense work that I no longer have the energy or interest to do. I’ve personally steered clear of most public feminist-related discussions and incidents these past few years.

In the past couple of years I’ve been putting a strong focus on growth in my career, both in terms of paid and volunteer open source work. I’ve been supporting fellow women in tech by being a visible role model, helping promote the work of other women I work with (this is mostly what I focus on with Ubuntu Women these days) and with limited, organic mentorship.

I’m keen to continue this trend as I feel much more satisfied in my current role than I was scrambling to learn about the advanced feminist topics and fight to directly change the world. So, my intent with attending this conference was to:

  1. Learn the concrete tools that others have been using to increase participation in open source for everyone
  2. Meet other people who share my goals and passion for increasing involvement in our open source projects
  3. Share my own successes and experiences with open source involvement

To this end…

I was able to meet and speak with several women who were interested in open source but were unsure about where to start, how to get familiar with the tools and expressed concerns about “doing it wrong” in such a public space (specifically how this would impact being accepted into the project and career prospects). My hope is that with personal and in-session discussions I had with them that some of this was dissipated, but it really highlighted some pieces of what we need to do to make sure our projects are welcoming to people who are new to open source (“just toss is up on github” certainly does not!).

I also learned about some of the content of OpenHatch’s Open Source Comes to Campus events and learned that they will soon be publishing the material they use for these “introduction to open source” events they host. It would be great to have these materials to host similar events in the wider community for folks who don’t have access to these campus events (either don’t have the resources to be a student or are no longer students).

During a session about “Quantifying Community Dysfunction” there was talk about community metric tools to track certain contributions so that the effectiveness of targeted efforts (or the opposite – negative incidents) toward improving participation and retention of new contributors could be measured. In this discussion I learned about the Metrics working group and their mailing list and was able to talk about the use of MetricsGrimoire in the OpenStack project for our Development Dashboard. The OpenStack project also has launched OpenStack Insights powered by wikidsmart and documented here and we also have several tools at status.openstack.org, including the Bugday tool that teams have taken to showcasing the results from after successful bug targeting days.

There were a lot of book titles flying around over the weekend, but the one that caught my attention in particular was The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Open Source projects are often criticized for only valuing direct code contributions (not documentation, project coordination, UI design), but it seems that even those which have succeeded in being inclusive of these contributions still aren’t doing a great job of valuing “emotional work” that contributors put in, whether it be efforts made during collaboration or dispute resolution. The existence of “emotional work” as a thing was actually the first revelation for me, I’ve known that there was a considerable amount of emotional effort that I expend on my work but I never really had a label for it. Even worse, I totally discounted it as a skill even in myself, it was “just how I am,” not something that is inherently valuable and sometimes felt like a liability because I was spending time “dealing with people” rather than “doing Real Work” with my technical peers. I bought the book for my Nook on Sunday night and have been reading through it these past couple of days. It’s really changed my perspective and I hope will lead me to have more compassion for myself and others who do this work in our communities.

Finally, I got to meet some really amazing women this weekend. As much as I love working with my amazing male colleagues, there is always something different about being able to sit down with other women who have shared the experiences that are often difficult to explain to people who haven’t had them. Even better, many discussions I had were advice and solution-driven, “I had $foo experience, here’s how I handled it.” Awesome.

Filed under: computers, events, tech

Open Source Sysadmin: Reorganization of the OpenStack Infrastructure Docs

Tuesday, Jun 4th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

In January I joined the OpenStack Infrastructure team, which manages the continuous integration system for the project, as well as several other applications and sites that the project uses on a day to day basis. My favorite part about all of this is while I’ve spent several years using open source software in my sysadmin day job and running a couple servers hosting various Ubuntu community resources, I’ve never actually done the actual systems administration itself in an open way.

In the OpenStack project, it’s all done out in the open![1]

The CI tools we use are all open source, the puppet and other configurations we have are all hosted in public revision control (see here) and any changes submitted are made by the same process all other changes in OpenStack are made. They go through automated tests in Jenkins to test applicable syntax and other formatting and the code changes submitted are reviewed by peers and approved by members of the infrastructure team. This has made it super easy it is for the team to collaborate on changes and offer suggestions (much better than endless pastebins or sharing a screen(1) session with a fellow sysadmin!), plus with all changes in revision control it’s easy to track down where things went wrong and revert as necessary.

Last week my colleague James E. Blair spent time reorganizing the documentation for the OpenStack Project Infrastructure. James wrote that the goal of the rewrite was to “to re-orient the documentation as an introduction for new contributors and a reference for all contributors.”

The Project page now links to all of our team resources, from IRC channel (#openstack-infra) to bug tracker.

Each Major System that is maintained by the team now has a page that gives links to all of the current hosts the section of the project is associated with, the puppet configuration files required to make changes to it, links to actual project pages for the resource being used and where to report bugs for it. As an example, check out the new Logstash page that Clark Boylan recently rewrote.

The coolest part about all this is that while the OpenStack infrastructure has always been out there in the open, this all really does make it easier to get yourself familiar with the project infrastructure and able to make small edits here and there in your area of expertise, whether it’s fixing some CSS, adding service to puppet, patching Zuul or updating the very documentation this post is about.

Interested?

If you’re not yet involved with OpenStack, check out the How to Contribute wiki for how to get set up to make contributions to the project.

Once you’re set up, visit the Gerrit Workflow wiki to learn how we use git-review to submit changes for review.

Then have a browse through our shiny new OpenStack Project Infrastructure documentation or our low-hanging-fruit bugs to find something you want to work on and submit a patch!

We could also always use help with code reviews, specifically from folks with Python, Java and Puppet experience, check out Anita Kuno’s great post: Reviewing an OpenStack Patch. Most of what we work on is prefixed with openstack-infra/ in Gerrit.

And feel free to drop by #openstack-infra on irc.freenode.net and ask anyone (I’m pleia2 there) if you want some help getting up to speed or have questions.

[1] Well, almost all in the open. There are some passwords and other authentication that we store in Hiera, but the type of data we store in it is well-documented in our main site.pp.

Filed under: openstack, tech, work

Adopt a Salamander

Saturday, May 18th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

For each Ubuntu release I spend a little time finding a toy or other representation of the codename animal to use at booths, Ubuntu Hours and other events. I wrote about Quetzals and Pangolins here and you may have seen Raring here.

When the salamander came up I was confident that a toy would be easy to find, and indeed they were! Even better, I found that the World Wildlife Fund offers a $50 Hellbender Salamander Adoption Kit that ships with 2 plush salamanders! Mine arrived yesterday, I’ll be keeping one to use at our events and will find a way to give away the other (perhaps as part of the Ubuntu Women contest we’re planning? Or at some LoCo event?).

Event decoration + helping to save the actual animal, hooray!

Oh, and it is a release late, but while I was in Mérida, Mexico we stopped in to Miniaturas where I picked up some adorable quetzal earrings:

I think I’ll wear them to our San Francisco Ubuntu Hour on June 12th, and bring along the salamander!

Filed under: animals, ubuntu planet

Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit 1305

Friday, May 17th, 2013 by pleia2 | 6 Comments

Since I left for my wedding and honeymoon a bunch of things happened! Ubuntu 13.04 was released, 13.10 was given the code name “Saucy Salamander” and Debian 7.0 Wheezy came out. Plus lots of exciting OpenStack development discussion that came out following the Summit (I left right after it). When I got back into the country on the 12th I had a lot to catch up on! I did my best to cram before sessions and certainly had to limit involvement to a handful of sessions that I was particularly keen on attending and so could get up to speed with quickly.

This was the first virtual UDS I was able to participate in, so it was all new to me. Essentially the the “fish bowl” (as seen here, I took this photo from my spot in the wider attendee seating) is replaced by a Google Hangout and the “wider attendee seating” is an IRC channel. For the 4 sessions I participated in this worked very well, session leads were pro-active about asking who wished to participate in the Hangout so everyone who wanted to was able to. A great deal of attention in all these sessions was given to the IRC channel, which is a contrast with in person UDS where the channel can sometimes get a bit left behind (even though it’s being projected, it was easy to forget once you get talking). I didn’t use the summit.ubuntu.com page for anything aside reference, preferring to pop out the etherpad and use my standard IRC client, but I appreciated it all being there as a resource (and I’m sure it was super helpful for newcomers to follow along!).


Cheri Francis and others in the Ubuntu Women session

I found the sessions I participated in to be productive and focused and when applicable resulted in a solid list of action items. I hope that the event also lessened the experience gap that was always present for in person vs. remote participants, we all got the same experience. Now I have to admit to not being a fan of using Google Hangouts for this (I like Google, but it is still a proprietary, closed-source tool that we have no control over), but I understand that the ease of use and immediate availability of videos on YouTube makes a compelling case. Perhaps my only other complaint is lack of cohesiveness that comes from an online event, I didn’t watch the introduction or the wrap up. I also didn’t participate in the “beer hangout” – I didn’t even know it was happening, and sitting in front of my computer with a beer in the middle of the day wasn’t particularly interesting to me. I only attended a few specific sessions and there was no “wandering into something that looks interesting” (instead I just went back to work) or the regular social down time we get to relax or sit down to hack on things. I do hope we can find some kind of replacement for the in-person events, it would be great to see something on the LoCo team level at conferences where we seek to have an expanded Ubuntu presence focused on contributors (perhaps an Ubucon with a participant track?).

And the venue… it was at home! In order to participate in the hangout I did feel the need to leverage my multiple monitors.


My desk is a bit chaotic

Now the sessions themselves…

– Planning for Ubuntu Community presence on the Ubuntu Website –

This was not a particularly productive session as far as action items were concerned, but it turns out that while I was gone the removal of the “Community” link from ubuntu.com took on a life of its own (and boy was I surprised to see my name end up in a recent Datamation article about it). Personally I was satisfied with Daniel Holbach’s blog post on the subject a day after the change was made, but it was nice to speak with with some folks from the Design team and allow everyone to confirm that no ill will was intended and that plans for a new and improved community site were moving forward. The session was kept short given the more structured session about the community site specifically planned for the following day.

YouTube video of the session here

– Ubuntu Women UDS-1305 Goals –

Huge thanks to Silvia Bindelli and Cheri Francis for doing all of the leg work for this session while I was gone, I felt very comfortable reviewing their pre-session notes and found a really great, collaborative environment upon joining in. The discussion began talking about an information scavenger-hung competition that the team will be doing in the coming months, seeking volunteers to assist. It then moved into a topic that I was really happy to see on the agenda – a user poll to see how the team could be most effective in serving our audience of women interested in Ubuntu. I find that the project needs a bit of an adjustment every couple of years to refocus on our current targets as Ubuntu and the open source ecosystem evolves, so I’m excited that we’re doing this. Finally, much of the session was spent discussing our intention to further collaborate with other groups seeking to encourage women in open source (and in technology in general).

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Revamping ubuntu.com/community –

Picking up from where discussion left off the previous day, this session was a focused on on concrete things that need to be done to get the proposed community website that was under development reviewed and published. I admit that job change + wedding planning had my attention diverted this past cycle so I wasn’t able to contribute to this project, but I made sure to spend time the night before to do a review of the content so I’d be prepared. I was able to go through some of my suggestions during the meeting and took a few action items to continue with a more thorough review and to collect some quotes and photos from the community to make the site more personal and approachable.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Shaping a plan for the future of Ubuntu Documentation Team –

I can’t begin to say how pleased I was to see this session land on the agenda. The Ubuntu Doc team has been a very small team for a long time, and new contributors have struggled to participate as the docs for writing the docs got stale to a point where they were not useful. We’re at a very exciting time now where we have limited support from a couple of the (very busy!) former drivers of this team and at least two strong contributors who have committed to moving the project forward. The first thing on the agenda was addressing the updating of docs so that more contributors can get on-boarded. I was able to pitch in with a couple action items to nudge things along a bit, but I’m hopeful that this is the beginning of an exciting new phase for the team.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

Slimy Salamander (Plethodon glutinosus)
A Slimy Salamander (wait, you said Saucy?)

– Xubuntu –

Since the event was online, the Xubuntu team took advantage of the flexibility and ended up pulling their sessions from UDS proper and scheduling our sessions for the hour after UDS each day to tackle a series of blueprints designed for the coming months. I was able to use my YouTube account + Hangouts to replicate that portion of what main UDS was doing.

Discussion of most interest to me centered around our testing+release plans (should we do alphas? betas? which ones?) and documentation, but discussion of our limited developer force (want to grow it!), a proposal for a shortcut overlay and default applications also were discussed. A much better summary was posted on the Xubuntu website yesterday: Looking towards Xubuntu 13.10. Pasi Lallinaho also wrote bullet-point style summaries of Night 1 and Night 2 which include links to their respective YouTube videos.

In all, a productive UDS for me, I have a lot of work to do… :)

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet, UDS

Honeymoon week 2

Friday, May 17th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The second half of our honeymoon was full of adventure (and ok, a bit more luxury). We decided to spend 5 days traveling through the Yucatan peninsula visiting Mayan ruins, cenotes and local cities. We wanted our visit to be stress-free so MJ did some research and found William Lawsons Personal Driving Service which would not only take us around the peninsula but our driver would also be a registered tour guide! We met our guide, Angel, at the resort on Tuesday morning to begin our adventure.

Our first visit was to the ruins of Ek’ Balam. This was a really cool site, with multiple structures to climb, including the huge main temple. It wasn’t until I climbed to the top that I fully appreciated how hot it was out (and that I hadn’t brought enough water!).

More photos from Ek’ Balam

I was pretty tired after wandering around those ruins in the heat, so I was delighted when our tour guide was able to find Cenote Hubiku, just north of Valladolid where we were spending the night. A cenote is a “a deep natural pit, or sinkhole, characteristic of Mexico, resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater underneat” (wikipedia). There are thousands in the Yucatan and many that are equipped for people to swim in. Cenote Hubiku had a small admission fee and full, modern facilities for changing before swimming. We caught them at the tail end of their day, but got a good 20 minutes of swimming in the beautiful, cool cenote before being on our way. It was the perfect thing for post ruin exploration.

Photos from Cenote Hubiku.

For dinner we went to Taberna de los Frailes for a delicious dinner that included a grilled watermelon with cheese appetizer (which I wouldn’t have ordered, but the waiter recommended it). We retired for the night at Casa Hamaca Guesthouse which was a cute little inn in the heart of Valladolid. Even better, the proprietor Denis Larsen is a northeast US expat who was exceptionally welcoming and helpful the next morning as we enjoyed banana pancakes and chatted about everything from our shared love of Google Docs for collaboration to tips for the rest of our stay in the Yucatan.

We then spent the day exploring the beautiful city of Valladolid. We visited the small San Roque Museum and then spent some time walking around the main square. From there we did some shopping and I picked up a couple of the traditional embroidered blouses that Valladolid is famous for. We also got a couple of brimmed hats for further ruin exploration. Mid-day we met up with Angel who took us to the Convent of San Bernardino de Siena and Cenote Zaci – a cenote right in town! We didn’t swim but it was nice to visit.

Photos from Valladolid

Come late afternoon it was time to start driving toward Mérida to check in to Hacienda Xcanatun boutique hotel for the night. This former hacienda was one of the many in the region that used to be a sisal (fiber) plantation. This was my favorite hotel. The rooms were sprawling and while modernized, still held an architectural feel and basic layout similarities to what I’d expect from and old hacienda. We had dinner at their famous on-site restaurant of the same name.

Photos from Hacienda Xcanatun

The next day was Uxmal! Plus a couple other sites on the Puuc Route. Uxmal was a major city and so touring the ruins takes several hours. We managed to see most of it and had a lot of fun climbing around several of their major structures (only the largest and a few minor sites had climbing prohibited). This site really rivals Chichen Itza in how big and amazing the ruins are, definitely one of my favorites.

More photos from Uxmal

Next on our list to visit for the day was Kabah. Most amazing about this place was its famous “Palace of the Masks” which was a whole building covered on one side with ornate faces of stone. You’re allowed to climb up to and around the palace, making this probably my favorite small site we visited.

More photos from Kabah

The last ruin site we visited was Sayil where we just visited the Palace of Sayil (the site was very spread out, with buildings up to 1 mile apart). Like so many of these palaces, it was an impressive and imposing sight! No climbing up the structure allowed though.

Photos from Sayil

Our final new site of the day was the Ecomuseo del Cacao. Our first hint that this place wasn’t quite up to par with the rest of our day was the clue from Angel that, while a traditional Mayan thing, cacao doesn’t actually grow naturally in the Yucatan because it’s not humid enough. The museum had it’s moments but was a bit too polished and cheesy. It was nice visiting the grove of artificially maintained cocoa trees and the hot chocolate tasting at the end was probably worth the entrance fee.

Photos from Ecomuseo del Cacao

From there we headed back to Uxmal for a sound and light show. I hadn’t read great things about it online, so I was prepped for something really cheesy, but I admit having really enjoyed it. The main track being broadcast is in Spanish, but you can rent headphones in several languages so you can hear the stories going along with the show that paint a picture of what it may have been like in the height of civilization there. It was also then that I noticed how beautifully clear the sky was out there, you could see so many stars.

That night we checked into Hacienda Temozon. It was a beautiful property, advertisements for it are quick to tell you that Bill Clinton stayed there once and the only owned by a major American company. The rooms were large, but it turns out perhaps not the right place to stay during ant season. Staying true to some of the age of the place, it didn’t have glass on the windows so everything was quite open-air and the doors covering the windows didn’t seal (you could put your finger through some of the gaps). I did enjoy a wonderful Mexican omelette in the morning.

Photos from Hacienda Temozon

Angel picked us up in the late morning and, knowing our interest in cenotes, decided to take us to a less touristy one that he knew of, Cenote Kankirixché. It wasn’t a fancy, staffed cenote like the previous ones we’d been to, we had to change in the van and then it was just a hole in the ground and a somewhat questionable wooden staircase taking you down to the water. It was beautiful and refreshing though!

More photos from Cenote Kankirixché

From there we were off to the city of Mérida! First stop was to check in to the stunningly modern Rosas and Xocolate boutique hotel before heading across the street to the Anthropology and History Museum. The museum is located in the former Canton Palace and while all in Spanish the exhibits mostly spoke for themselves. My favorite exhibits were one of one of the earlier expeditions to the Yucatan where many of the Puuc sites we explored, seeing photos from those sites before they were uncovered and restored was really cool. They also had a local embroidery exhibit upstairs which, seeing them in context, made me really happy about my beautiful blouse purchases in Valladolid.

Then it was off to the Grande Plaza district of Merida where we had lunch at Amaro. We did some shopping and were able to visit the Casa de los Montejo and the Palacio de Gobierno with it’s captivating murals by Fernando Castro Pacheco. We enjoyed dinner back at the hotel and in all a relaxing night.

Photos from Mérida

Unfortuantely the adventures had to come to an end at some point, our last day was spent visiting the famous Chichen Itza.

Chichen Itza is a huge settlement and we spent over 3 hours exploring it. It was more crowded than any of the other sites we went to, but the benefit of going in the hottest part of the year is that it wasn’t overwhelming with people at all. One of the interesting things about it though was while it’s expensive for tourists to enter (up to 5 times as much as other sites), the whole inside was filled with vendors! Angel told us it was because it used to be privately owned and they owner brought in all these vendors, and when it was transferred to more government run thing they kept the vendors. At first it was a little off-putting to have so many vendors throughout the archaeological site, but I came to realize that these vendors were selling on-topic keepsakes that tourists (including myself) were interested in buying, and technically these people are descendants of the Mayans who built this city – this is theirs. It also brought a liveliness to the site that was lacking at the other sites, I appreciated them by the time we were wrapping up our day there. And what a day. You couldn’t climb any of the ruins but it’s probably for the best, even just walking among these giants in the heat was enough to tire me out considerably.

More photos from Chichen Itza

We spent our last night in Mexico in Cancun so we’d have easy access to the airport the following morning. MJ picked a hotel on the beach where we could have a romantic private cabana dinner. Perfect wrap up to our honeymoon :)

Filed under: travel, wedding

Honeymoon week 1

Thursday, May 16th, 2013 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Tuesday the 30th we flew from Philadelphia to Cancun, Mexico. From there we took a shuttle south for about 40 minutes until we got to the Riviera Maya district and Grand Velas, the all-inclusive resort we had reservations at for the first week of our honeymoon.

We then spent a much-needed week relaxing.

We had a stunning view from our room.

Hours to spend relaxing on the beach, or in one of their several pools where they brought us all the food and beverages we wanted.

Plus, chocolate strawberries.

I read my way through several books that I’d been wanting to read but never could find time for. Pretty much the only decision we needed to make all week was which of the top notch restaurants they had on site for each meal. I quite enjoyed room service for breakfast.

More photos from our stay: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633490351996/

We did end up making one excursion during the week, and that was to Rio Secreto, a nearby series of underground caves and waterways. I wasn’t sure what to expect since it was quite close to such a touristy area (tourist trap?) but my expectations were surpassed in all ways. We were geared up with water shoes (we opted to buy new ones for $10/pair), helmets and wet suits and we had a great tour guide, but it was far from a risk-free, polished tourist experience. We got a real feel for the natural caves and we had an amazing time swimming through some of the pools we were taken through in our 3 hour tour through 600+ meters of cave.

A photographer came along with to take photos and we paid the charge to download them all royalty-free, I uploaded several of them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157633479166189/

Alas, the luxurious stay had to come to and end at some point. The following Tuesday we packed up… but not to end our honeymoon! Instead we repacked to spend the next 5 days traveling through the Yucatán visiting Mayan ruins and modern Yucatán cities! But that’s for the next post…

Filed under: travel, wedding

Our wedding!

Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 by pleia2 | 10 Comments

On Sunday April 28th MJ and I were married!

The day began gathering with mothers, my aunt and the bridesmaids in the bridal suite of the Joseph Ambler Inn where we and most of our out of town guests stayed. Inn Manager Keenan Christiansen and Brian Cottman really made us feel welcome throughout our stay and during all the planning.

My maid of honor, Danita Fries, took care of morning makeup and hair preparations, bringing in Daneene Jensen and her team to take care of hair and makeup for all of us. Not being a makeup person, I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of wearing it, but Daneene made me feel comfortable and was great about keeping the makeup light and the look very natural. MJ’s Best Woman even stopped by with refreshments in the late morning so we wouldn’t be without lunch.

We met with our photographer, Melissa Morelli, at 1PM to begin taking photos at the inn. She was the photographer MJ hired for our engagement and a few months back she also did my head shots. We were really happy to have her join us in Pennsylvania for the wedding.

After photos at the inn, we took a small bus chartered by 1st Class Transportation over to the wedding venue, Talamore Country Club.

The weather was beautiful, which was quite fortunate as the wedding was outdoors and Melissa was able to take some great pictures throughout the venue before the ceremony.

Everything began the signing of the Ketubah we selected by Amy Fagan of 20th Century Illuminations and the Badeken.

Then, the ceremony! We went back and forth about having a videographer for our wedding and decided to go with one from the Mixed Media Productions, the firm our DJ, Mike Robertson, runs. In retrospect I’m glad we decided to have one, the photos are great but I was so overwhelmed (happy! excited! nervous!) that I can’t say I actually remember that much of the ceremony :)

It all went very smoothly. My mother and grandfather walked me down the aisle. We were honored to have Rabbi Elliot Holin work with us on the ceremony and finally to officiate.

We also held our reception at Talamore, starting with a cocktail hour in the garden room (this room was also backup for ceremony had it rained). Then dinner in their main ballroom which was decked out with the amazing flower centerpieces by Moles Flowers.

The rest of the reception was also pretty traditional, short speeches from family and friends, a first dance and cake! We selected a multi-flavor cake from Bredenbecks and I made sure to have a bit of each ;)

And in addition to being able to talk to many of our guests, we even danced a bit! It was an amazing night.

Afterwards we had a bit of an after party back at the Inn, giving us time to kick back and relax for a couple hours with some of our guests.

In all, things went as perfect as I could have imagined thanks to MJ’s attention to detail throughout the process along with some great vendors who were able to work with us on requests.

We’ll be updating our website in the coming weeks with tons more photos and other details of our wedding weekend which included family and wedding party dinners.

Filed under: life, philadelphia, wedding
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