I had a fantastic time with MJ while he was visiting over New Years.

To celebrate we met up with some friends in Old City Philadelphia for dinner at Triumph Brewing. I had been to their location in New Hope never been to the one in Philadelphia, and I have to say I prefer their Philadelphia location. Beer-wise I went with the Triumph John Bull Pale Ale which was quite good.

After dinner it was off to Penn’s Landing for the countdown. It was chilly and drizzly out but fun anyway, great company.

While he was visiting we also went to see Sherlock Holmes, which was fun but forgettable. I think part of this has to do with my preference for Basil Rathbone and Peter Cushing as Holmes and as lovely as Robert Downey Jr. is I don’t think I could get over that.

In the week since the visit I’ve been busy catching up on things from the holidays, managed to accomplish the Herculean feat of getting my inbox below 20 emails (from a peak of near 200 before the holidays) and I have a whole pile of Ubuntu related meetings in the coming weeks. Last Wednesday I attended Mark Jason Dominus’ PLUG Central talk on “10 useful tools and how I wrote them” which was enjoyable as his talks always are (slides here). Tomorrow I’ll be heading down to PLUG North for PostgreSQL Replication Solutions presented by Bruce Momjian which I’m really looking forward to.

Speaking of speaking, based on a blog post by Rikki Kite I picked up the pdf version of Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun and have been reading it and 40 pages in I’m still captivated. Spending this past year exploring the world of public speaking has been quite the eye-opener for me and I have to say that I’m quite pleased to have decided to get into public speaking, something you couldn’t have paid me any amount of money to do just a year ago. Books like this help a lot, knowing that it’s natural to be nervous when you speak and mistakes are things to be anticipated and handled rather than avoided.

My mother is coming to visit on Friday and we’ll be spending the weekend exploring Philly! I had my sister visit in the spring of ’09 but in all my years of living down here I’ve never had my mother visit so I’m looking forward to having her stay here for a few days. Moving stuff is coming along, but I’m trying to avoid packing too much until after my mother’s visit, I don’t mind living with piles of boxes but I’d rather not do it while I have company :)

Full of freedom, adventure, travel, love, success, independence and fun.

Sprinkled with just a bit of heartbreak, loss, failure and confusion.

In all, the good far weighed out the unfortunate, it was a good year. Looking forward to 2010 being even better!

I saw The Princess and the Frog with Nita the weekend before last. The verdict? I loved it, probably my favorite movie of the year. It’s no secret that I love Disney animated films, but aside from the standard Pixar gems, none have really captivated me like this one did since Lilo and Stitch back in 2002. The characters were delightful, the bad guy was deliciously bad, and I have to admit to picking up the soundtrack last week, I own a lot of Disney soundtracks but it had been a few years since I picked a new one up. That weekend was also spent enjoying the first snowstorm of the season, Saturday being so bad that leaving my apartment wasn’t a reasonable possibility. Fun snow!

I saw Avatar in 3D on Saturday with Nita and mct. It was less captivating, but it was quite pretty to look at.

Christmas was pleasant, I woke up to a thoughtful Christmas present from Simcoe of paper snowflakes (this means she shredded my toilet paper, gah). I was on call but that wasn’t very time-consuming and I was able to spend the evening with Crissi, Jon and their family at a casual buffet-style Christmas dinner to which I brought freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and mashed potatoes.

My poor car will be going back into the shop. Back in May I had the power window regulator go on the driver’s side, guess what broke last week? Passengers side window regular. This isn’t a cheap fix, and I’m not impressed that this happened less than two months before I’m selling the car. I’ll be calling my mechanic this week to schedule the repair. As emotionally attached as I am to Blinker, and thankful that a friend of mine was able to sell it to me under the conditions he did in the time frame he did, that silly car has been quite the money pit – given all the repairs it needed this year I realized I was spending $200/mo on the silly thing, plus insurance, gas and regular oil changes, yeesh. I have to say, living in San Francisco and taking public transportation everywhere will be a welcome change.

San Francisco! I am moving in less than two months. As mentioned in a previous post I have a lot to do before the move, and MJ and I have been chipping away at that these past couple weeks. We now have plane tickets purchased for the trip, after moving everything on Monday the 15th we’ll be flying out to SF on the 16th. I’m planning on taking the whole week off from work so I’ll have 5 days to settle in before I need to get back to work. I can’t begin to describe how excited I am for the move, every day I think of another reason why it’ll be awesome (today’s reason? sourdough!).

I haven’t talked much about open source project stuff this month. To be honest with plans for the move starting to get rolling, the holidays, and a million other things on my mind I’ve not been as active as in months past, mostly just working on things I already have going as needed. It’s been a welcome break and allowed me to step back and refocus. This past week I’ve been able to get some Debian dev work I’ve been putting off done, there is still a lot to do but I’ve made good progress. I’m also starting to get caught up on my email backlog.

Now going to chill out with some TV. I watched season 4 of Dexter this month, caught up on Burn Notice and Dollhouse. Retro TV wise I’ve been watching Forever Knight and The X-Files. With The X-Files there is a question as to where I should stop, at first I figured I’d stop at the first movie (so, finish with season 5) but it turns out season 6 has some really great episodes, maybe I’ll stop when Mulder leaves in season 7. On the TV menu for tonight? Probably will watch an episode of Season 3 of Star Trek: The Next Generation before bed.

I arrived at the Philadelphia airport late Saturday morning following the Ubuntu Developers Summit. The flight out of Dallas at 6-something AM after the UDS wrap-up the night before was a challenge, but I made it. I ended up sleeping the entire flight in a feat of airplane sleeping success that still amazes me, I don’t typically have trouble napping, but sleeping for a whole flight? Wow! I met MJ at the airport, as we scheduled our flights to come in on the same morning, he was staying for the week of Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately he ended up with a cold during his visit, but we had a nice time otherwise. We talked about some plans with regard to my move out to San Francisco in February (moving week is the week of Feb 14th). Thanksgiving was spent with his family, less than half of whom I’d met prior to this. There was turkey and football and all the predictable trimmings, and I was terribly shy as I always am in “meet the family” situations (ok, and in a lot of situations!). I also spent some time tagging along as he visited some local friends over the weekend.

I hate saying goodbye after visits, he flew out Sunday after Thanksgiving with only tentative plans to visit again before the move. Luckily those plans are no longer tentative, he’s flying out again for New Years :) To cheer me up after seeing him off Sunday night I ended up doing some shopping and swung by the brand new LA Fitness in Pottstown. I walked out with a membership. I got my first gym membership in 2006 with LA Fitness when I was working for Tyco. When I took the job with LinuxForce and no longer had a local LA Fitness to visit I ended up with a membership at the local YMCA. Given my transient state home-wise last year I ended up canceling that membership once my year-long commitment was satisfied, so I’ve been without a gym membership for over a year. I’d been playing with the idea of getting a membership at a local “cheap and in a shopping center” gym for a while but never went through with it (no pools? *pout*). The building of this new LA Fitness within 10 easy minutes of where I live was exciting, I’ve put on weight since the divorce and I’m really not feeling great about it. Plus I felt terribly out of shape and getting out to the gym gives me a place to go after work where I can be around people. Plus they have a pool! Win all around!

Monday I ended up with MJ’s cold, woke up with a terrible sore throat and terrible congestion. By Wednesday I was in the midst of cold coma – I’m so glad I work from home, otherwise I would have missed work over this, pretty much every day that week was spent either working or sleeping. I spent the weekend recovering too, I didn’t actually start feeling much better until last Tuesday and even now have a worse than normal cough lingering. I hate colds.

Last Tuesday was PLUG North and a great Nagios presentation by Andrew Libby. After which I had my first meal with others where I actually felt like a human again (did I mention it was a bad cold?). Wednesday evening was the first Ubuntu Women meeting on IRC since UDS, notes here. The team has a lot to work through but we’re moving forward on selecting a leader for the next 6 months (not me, with a move across the country coming up I don’t have time!). I spent the rest of this week catching up on a million project things I didn’t get to during the week of Thanksgiving or while I was sick. I still haven’t fully caught up (if I owe you an email, sorry! I will try to get to them all soon).

Saturday I attended the Northeast USA indoor “holiday geeknic” – which means we all went to the local Pinball Parlour and played pinball with a bunch of people for a couple hours and then headed out to dinner.

Sunday was spent at home doing some more catch up, some shopping and cleaning and by doing experiments on cats. One consideration with this move is cat transport, as they’re both coming with me to California (of course!). The options were: carry-on, checked luggage or cargo. My experiment was a vet-approved test to see how they’d behave after taking a small dosage of an anti-anxiety medication. How’d they do? Failed. The medication was a mild sedative so they had some trouble walking (poor kitties!) but when I packed them up in their carrier and drove them around for a couple hours they had no trouble meowing frequently. I think my cats are just too vocal to be good airplane cabin companions. The checked luggage option ended up being expensive and not fantastic, plus the temperature restrictions were troublesome for flying out of Philly in Feburary. Cargo? Sounds scary right? Turns out that Delta has pretty reasonable rates for pets as cargo, they could fly on a Delta flight we choose the same day we fly out, and their service seems safe and attentive to pets. Cargo it is!

MJ has been awesome through all this move planning, which is great because while I am good at being calm and patient about most things, moving gets under my skin. As I start to inventory the things I own, it’s so tempting to get out a big garbage can (or donation bag) and start purging “stuff I don’t really need” because I can’t be bothered to move it. His reassurance that storage space is available and he’ll help me handle the details of shipping has been quite soothing on my troubled mind. I’m trying not to worry about it. There are a lot of things I still need to sort through – getting health insurance out in CA (my current plan only covers PA), details related to selling my car, getting all kinds of other little things wrapped up here in PA. I have a very nice, almost new (a year old) queen size mattress and box spring I’d like to get rid of during the week of the move (so I can sleep on it until then!) and I need to get rid of my ancient dresser (falling apart a bit, but has a nice huge mirror), and a couple old CRT TVs, all of which will end up at Good Will unless I find better homes for them. Ugh, I am getting tired just writing about the move, how terrible is that?

The gym membership is working out better than I expected so far, upon emerging from my cold I’ve been going pretty frequently. A couple times late last week, hit the pool on Monday, got a really nice, impressively long cardio workout done yesterday. Good news is it turns out that in spite of the weight I’ve put on, I’m not actually as out of shape as I thought. I’ll keep it up, getting out of the apartment to hit the gym is making me feel great.

Plans for the rest of the month… more of the same. I decorated and got a little fake tree decorated with lights, but Christmas won’t be a big holiday for me this year, instead I’ll be celebrating New Years more. More move planning, more catching up on project work. There are also some things I’d like to do before moving away from Philadelphia, so I’ll see what (and who!) I can squeeze in for visits in the next couple months. I’m also flying my mother down to visit in the middle of January for a long weekend, which will be the first time she’s been to a place I’ve lived since leaving home.

And now it’s past my bedtime. Haven’t been sleeping great this past week or so (very unusual for me, I’m an expert sleeper!) so here’s hoping tonight is better.