Armed with cereal, music, a mirror, a hand full of toys, and 30 minutes of Judge Judy (whom I consider to be an excellent role model =P), I'm having my first evening where should he get hungry, he's totally mine to feed. We introduced solid food on the trip out here, and I haven't had much in the way of relaxing evenings at home where we haven't all wanted to just hang out. Angie's found a yoga class not too far from here and has gone off. So far we're doing well! I think I might plan this around a visit to the used book store down the street.

We told the relocation lady that we want to be within a mile of either Mt. View, San Antonio or Palo Alto Caltrain. Hoping to hear soon whether we'll have any luck, but hopefully we'll settle into this area for at least the next year and start to meet folks. It'll be nice to have our own furniture back finally. I'm ready to not feel like I'm travelling anymore.

I'm heading to Toronto this weekend for the Ontario Linux Fest. Later this month, I'll be at the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Boston. I'm looking forward to seeing people at both!

Hmm. Quick update of life: Last weekend Leif pushed out a third tooth. This weekend, I fed him for the first time. So far it's been Angie actually putting things in his mouth, but on a visit to Cha Ya, I fed him some miso soup. Totally fun. Our current experiment with him is to get him to sleep at night without nursing to sleep. It used to be that I could get him to sleep just by lying next to him in a dark room, and lately I haven't been able to. So, he's now nursing just before and then switching to cuddling to sleep. It's not ideal but it at least moves us from something only Angie can do to something both of us or a babysitter can do.

That's right, we're starting to think about babysitters. We don't know people here well enough that we can leave him with, but when we do, baby, there's a bottle of port with our name on it. (Yes, it's the same bottle of port I got for my 30th birthday. I didn't want to pass a sip for each of the 100 people that were there at the time, and the next major event that came along was Angie getting pregnant)

A quick geek moment: current Ubuntu Gutsy now suspends and resumes on both of my laptops with reasonable consistency. For a long time, I could suspend my Toshiba once, and the second time, it would lose keyboard but that seems to be fixed. My work laptop has suspended and resumed generally fine all along, but Network Manager still occasionally forgets the settings. This is really annoying when there's a pile of 802.1x stuff to key in. I can't reliably reproduce it, but maybe during the next Gnome cycle, I'll try to figure out why it does that. Other than that it's working really well. The wine that's in Gutsy claims to support iTunes, but it doesn't. Even if it did, it probably wouldn't work with the iPhone, but I'm sure that'll get fixed sometime. Or perhaps the lawsuit will yield something useful and make hacking it safe. Given that it's pretty trivial to get the browser into a state where it's worth power cycling the phone, I'm not willing to forgo updates in the meantime. Assuming I could do one, that is.

Lastly a happy Thanksgiving to everyone! We were attempting to meet a pile of people this weekend, but amazingly enough 4 different people ran into trouble getting here. It'll be a cozy event then.

Time from new home to work: 9 1/2 minutes.

I forgot to mention that on Friday night, Leif pushed out his third tooth, his first top one.

One of the things through this move has been that we've been trying to make sure that whatever place we live in is close enough to "stuff" that Angie doesn't go nuts. The bitch about corporate housing is that there's no point in trying to meet your neighbours - everyone is transient. While I never came home to the walls smeared with f ces but I think she was contemplating it.

So, we're in new corporate housing now in Mountain View. This time we're a block off of Castro and El Camino Real, several neighbours have said hi, there's other families around and a starbucks around the corner. I'm expecting she'll be much happier here.

And I found a store that sells lychee-fruit cups. I haven't had those since I left Vancouver! The salt-water taffy store's products aren't vegan, sadly.

Have I mentioned before that Leif is such an amazing baby? He's got his first cold, but despite this managed to sit up this morning, crack a smile, and then panicked because he couldn't breathe. But he's still trying to be cute and lovable.

In related news, I think a nose syringe is something that J&J makes for parents to let them pass the time while their child is screaming. It certainly doesn't seem to do anything else.

We took a tour of Mountain View with Leslie yesterday. It was nice to look around and see what was actually around here for shopping / things to do / how to escape to somewhere else. It looks like the biggest redeeming feature of MTV is that one can leave. It reminds me of Coquitlam. It's the last place we're considering outside of the city - but considering that we're not going to really be out partying in the next year, the crime rate is very low, and rent is sometimes half of what we'd pay, it's definetly worth considering. It also will keep the commute down to something reasonable (probably 15 minutes on a bike, almost too short).

Weird American thing of the day: Apparently for everything you need your SSN here. At home, the only people who are allowed to ask for the Canadian equivalent (SIN) are people who are going to pay you money. So a credit check can't require it. Your health card can't require it. Your driver's license can't require it. Angie not having one is going to get sticky in a few cases.

I actually walked just under 10,000 steps on Friday. I didn't bike because I wasn't feeling well, and it seems that the walk to the commuter train is somewhere between 2 and 3 thousand steps.

This past weekend I did the absolutely insane and attended a wedding and an ordination in Vancouver, without taking any time off of work. I've finished two weeks at the new job (and am loving it! I'll post more when I have something more than "done a bunch of classes, learned confidential pieces of Google knowledge, ate great food") and didn't want to go to my boss and ask for time off in the first month.

So, Friday night, 9pm, caught flight from SFO to SEA, rented car. We were sitting in Heather's room at 4am chatting away, slowly passing out. Next day, up at 9, go visit Jamu, sort out suit rental, go for lunch, back to his moms to get dressed. I hope to link to a wedding album sometime in here. He got married by the paperclip behind the Planetarium in Vanier park. There were 4 weddings that I saw there, all peacefully contending for the various views and trying to stay out of one another's photos. =) Saturday evening, the DJ was great. We tried an experiment to see if we could leave Leif with Sandy, and whether the solid foods would be enough for a few hours. He made it a couple of hours, and then joined us at the dance, being happier knowing that we were around. It turns out Leif likes dancing! I was a little worried about the volume, and at various times several of us asked the DJ to turn it down when the music was creeping louder. It was also fun to see a whole pile of friend that I haven't seen in something like 10 years and see how we've all changed. Thanks to Facebook, at least we didn't have to completely rehash the last decade. =)

I think we turned in at 1 or 2. The next day, up at 10:30 so that we could pickup the van, pickup Katy, pickup our mail, go to the Naam to meet Ernie, Janet, and Anika, drop off the suit, pick up a snack, go to MEC, drop off Katy, and then head to the Vancouver Unitarian Church to see Laura's ordination and meet Jon.

Laura's ordination was the most amazing that I've been to. Her ministry is centered around the Faithful Fools, and the people that she's touched and been mentored by were woven throughout the ceremony. I was invited to play the recorder, so I did the last part of the prelude, and played along with the choir for "Rise up, oh flame". People were wearing silly hats, there were stories, and tears, and another pile of people that I haven't seen in ages from when I was a member at that church. I'm also not sure that I've been to that church since getting married in it, so it was nice to be in that space again.

The reason for the visit to MEC was that my goal has been to start biking home. I'd acquired a bike, helmet, lights, and lock, but wasn't happy with my visibility in black clothing on a black bike. I got ankle reflectors and a vest for the backpack, and I biked home yesterday. I'm surprisingly not that sore for the 10 mile ride home. We'll see how I'm doing in a few days. ;)

In Santa Clara and still adjusting. The corporate housing that I'm in is nearly 4 hours by transit to the office according to the magic computers at 511.org. If I walk a mile on this side, and take a Google shuttle from the Caltrain, I should be able to get that down to an hour.

ahahahah, yeah right. I get a ride from Angie in the morning. It takes 15 minutes.

But *people*, c'mon.. This is California, right? Where are the people caring about the environment and hoping into mass-transit? Get out of your shiny Prius' and take a bus somewhere. Oh wait. You can't. Because it takes 4 hours to go 8 miles.

I'm thinking about this as I'm looking at churches and trying to decide if I feel like going to one this morning. I remember when I first joined the Beacon Unitarian Church, it was (as much as anything else) because I could walk to it. From the church, I could visit a half-dozen people who also lived walking distance from the church. How shall I build my community from inside temporary corporate housing in the middle of Santa Clara?

But we're starting to settle in a bit. We've swapped the van we used to drive across the country for a car. We've got a bank account. We've got a GrandCentral phone number which should follow us everywhere, and next we'll get an POBox so that as we move around a bit before settling in we'll at least have a permanent place to receive mail. It turns out that the State of California wants us to retake our written and road tests to move our licenses to here. That should be fun. Do you suppose it's an auto-fail if I yell "Christing fuck, people! Learn to drive!" as I merge onto the freeway? It's become a bit of a regular chant.

We arrived in Santa Clara two nights ago and have done the usual things like unpack, do laundry, buy groceries. Aside from that, a pretty mellow day yesterday. Randolph and his wife Amy came over for dinner. It's nice to start to get to know people. I spent a bunch of time looking at phone options, banks, PO boxes and mostly came away confused. How do Americans cope with so many choices?

Otherwise, I start my new job in just over an hour. Off I go!

We're about 40 miles outside of Bakersfield, CA now, leaving us 289 miles to get home. We'll be packing up shortly to start the trip while Leif is still asleep. This puts us in San Francisco a day earlier than projected. It means another night in a hotel in the target city, but at least it'll mean that the driving is behind us.

Lessee, I think we were in Albuquerque last time I posted. Since then, we saw the petrified forest a second time, this time when the sun was up so we could enjoy it. The temperatures were so warm during the day, we had to idle with the AC on to keep Leif from waking up screaming. We continued on to Flagstaff after that where we found a nice healthfood deli for dinner and collecting more snacks. My back reminded me that twisting to pick up a diaper bag while holding Leif isn't a particularly good idea, so we spent the night in a hotel and a bed instead of in the camper, and trekked off to the grand canyon.

We met Karina and Chris up there. Sometime in this stretch, we also misplaced the camera. Hopefully it's not sitting at the hotel in Flagstaff. So, we only have a couple pictures of us at the GC, sitting on Karina and Chris' camera. The two of them flew up from Tucson, and Chris offered to take Angie and I up for a sightseeing tour. The last trip I had been on overtop had been an adventure, but this flight was smooth, and nice to be able to say "Hey, I missed that", and then spin around to see it again". Karina managed to keep Leif calm and happy for the hour that we were up, which was also a nice break for us. Angie and I both started to worry about him at around the same time - something like 10 minutes before the end of the flight. =)

The rest of the day was spent wandering along the rim, ending in a nice dinner and sleep at the campsite. The next morning, we went to hear a ranger talk to people passing by about his topic-du-jour. In this case, it seemed to be about the wildfires going on the south rim. He had a telescope pointed at the river and would answer any questions, though. After that we packed up and headed out.

Our intended stop yesterday had been Needles, CA. It turns out that there's nothing there. No name-brand hotels, no Mojave information centre (despite there being signs for it), and a lot of dwellings with the sides falling off. The stretch over to Barstow seemed like the most boring stretch of the trip, probably because we had intended to stop at Needles, but also probably because we know that from here we're just going home. We carried on until Leif's patience totally expired and stopped in Tehachapi for the night.

We think Leif might be starting to push out a second tooth. He also might've gotten a touch too much sun at the Grand Canyon. It was hard to find shady spots to nurse him, and his hat seems to have gotten buried somewhere in the van. He's in good spirits, but his cheeks had a red tinge to them last night. =( He's almost six months, now, so we'll be able to put sunscreen on soon. In the meantime, we'll try to find a place to buy another hat today.

Update: We got access to the place today. Yay! Straight home for us!

And in Leif news, on Sunday his first tooth poked through and last night we decided to give him his first round of mashed bananas.

We followed the advice of some book and all got naked on some towels for the feeding. Then we all had showers and baths. You're going to get covered anyway, may as well plan for it. =) So.. No pictures, sorry. =)

We're in Albuquerque, NM now and have been for a couple of days. We made such excellent time across Oklahoma and Texas that we were able to stop and take a break for three nights.

Texas: Holy *crap* is Amarillo a dirty place. We spent three times what we've spend on any hotel this trip in order to get a place that we were sure was insect-free. And what we wound up with was a place over top of a bar. Luckily it wasn't all country, so we didn't mind too much. It was also (surprisingly) the best breakfast I'd had on the trip. They did hash-browns on a griddle, and had lots of ketchup (do I have to spell it catsup now?), tabasco, and pepper to go on it. Weirdly, they also had pre-mixed peanut butter and honey. Otherwise, the truck stop we stopped at had cockroaches on the floor, the bottled-water bottles were dirty on the outside, and the place smelled like an airport tarmac.

We left early and headed out to Albuquerque. Aside from the fact that whoever laid out the roads was certainly drunk at the time (We drove around in circles three times trying to get to a hotel we could see, but not find a way to legally drive to before giving up and going to a different hotel) this place is really pretty. I came here for my last meeting as a Regional Organising Consultant for Young Adult and Campus Ministry and got a chance to see a bit of the place and really wanted to show it to Angie. Instead we decided we'd had enough of driving and traveling. This hotel has laundry facilities and the town has a Whole Foods Market, so we stocked up on microwaveable foods, washed our clothes, watched TV and I finally finished Harry Potter during a nice long bath.

The next day (Yesterday), we headed out to the Puebo Cultural Centre to see the art pieces and learn a little about their successful resistance against the spanish resulting in actual land grants to the 19 local groups. We also got to see how different groups have influenced them over the years, with ancestry tracing something like 12,000 years back. From there we managed to find the old town and got to see the type of architecture that I wanted to show Angie. The little pink houses don't *just* exist in DisneyLand. ;) We went to a restaurant that looked really familiar - I think we ate there when I was here last. We had some wonderful New Mexico food and I introduced Angie to what the local sopapillas are like. Here's they're large puffy things, whereas the sopapillas in Texas and back home look like soft tortilla chips.

I've started uploading some pictures to Flickr, but it turns out that I hadn't done so since before Juniper's wedding and have over 400 pictures to send. Between hotel wireless being slow and f-spot being a fragile piece of crap I managed to upload something over 100 pictures of Leif to the family-only archives before giving up. I'll probably post the Opus pictures up on Facebook rather than flickr so that it's easier for other Opusers to find them

The next target is Flagstaff, AZ for Thursday night. We're meeting Karina and her husband for a day of wandering around the Grand Canyon, so we'll see if there's some interesting things between here and there. I suspect there will be. =)

*hugs*, all! Less than a week until I start my new job! I'm excited!

Hey'all! As part of moving, I need to get rid of a Fido contract that has two months left on it. Anyone looking to get a cellphone in Canada sometime soon? Taking over the contract has the advantage of giving you my $207 fido dollars which can be used towards getting a sexier cellphone than you otherwise would've gotten for the contract.

So if you're out there about to go get a cellphone anyway, drop me a line: jbailey@raspberryginger.com

The trip so far

Oklahoma is surprisingly empty. I'm not sure if that's because it's the Cherokee nation or for some other reason. One thing we noticed driving through Missouri was that there were a pile of Adult Superstores on the Interstate. Is there some sort of prohibition against them in OK?

We're just flipping through various news channels, and it looks like there's flooding through Illinois. We've passed through that area in just enough time it seems. We did hit rain that was hard enough that we pulled over twice yesterday.

Next stop: Somewhere in Texas, probably.

It's something north of 100 degrees F (I think that's 40+ in celcius) and sticky. The museum was way cool. I'll post about it when I can upload the pictures as well.

We're crashing with Stephanie Truax this evening in Indiana. It's time to head west.

Firstly, a big hello to Planet Ubuntu! As an Ubuntu community member and Ubuntu core-dev, I've decided to add my livejournal to there. Since I usually don't make any effort to sensor my thoughts on here, I chose not to add it while I was still with Canonical in order to make sure that there was no confusion as to the OfficialStatus(tm) of anything I write.

The last two days have taken us from Toronto through to Cincinnati. Andrew took us down to the Buffalo airport, we met Jason and Brian from Koolu on the way day and finally wound up down there at 22h30 despite having left NewMarket at 11am. When we stopped at Babur for lunch, we wound up seeing Nancy and Alexis walk past.

We stayed overnight at the Mum's Red Carpet Inn, just over the Pennsylvania border. It didn't have Red Carpet. It *did* have Orange Shag on the side of the bed, however. High class. The continental breakfast was Tang, Bananas, vegan doughnuts and twinkies. The vegan doughnuts were full of palm oil, I don't think my heart rate has recovered yet.

On the drive towards Kentucky, we got hungry (and tired of Subway) when we approached Columbus. We first tried to go to a place called "Leaf Restaurant", which it turns out can feed us exactly zero things. Down to the pre-made chef salad, and the spaghetti sauce having meat in it. We went a bit further, and decided to try the university district. We pulled over after seeing an Ethiopian place, and saw Ben Sostrom, whom we'd just met at Opus the week before! We spent the evening hanging out with him, michael dobson, amber, and the rest of their YA group. They meet on Tuesday nights a couple blocks from where we parked! It was nice to have a post-Opus day like that, but their stories of carjackings and cops randomly pulling people over are hopefully overstated by several orders of magnitude!

We continued the drive down to just outside of Cincinnati. We're meeting up with Stephanie Truax today for our tour of the Creationism Museum. After this, we'll turn west and try to find our way to California.

Hey'all! We're still in transit on our great trans-continental adventure! Sorry if you've emailed us and we've not gotten back, Internet access is spotty at best on this trip, and who wants to spend their vacation reading email anyway? =)

We just finished a good time in the kitchens of Opus and ConCentric. Angie, Sera, Chris and I all worked well together in a cohesive team, with a minimum of drama. It was really nice to work with such a solid group of people that we could say things like "Dude, I need a nap, can you cover for me?" and there was no problem with the rest of the team trading off.

Leif was an absolute hit at the con. We were able to participate in a couple worships where him singing along wasn't a distraction at all, and he totally loved being passed between people. It does mean that he caught his first cold, but he's doing alright.

There are always the people that I'll miss when I'm gone from there. Alexis was in the kitchen on a regular basis saying hi, Liz was always nearby, Karina with her star maps, lizzie the brit with her piles of energy, the frying-tofu master Geoff seemed to be in the kitchen often. In the kitchen, though, we got to see pretty much everyone so it was a nice chance to connect with people.

The staff was also a very neat set of people. I don't think there was anyone in the Opus staff that I couldn't see actively working hard to pull of great programming. There's always the curmudgeonly part of me that sits in the back corner and can nit pick things to death, but in doing so I wouldn't want to hide that by almost every measure this was a successful Opus. In particular, I was impressed that the staff faced head-on how to handle walk-ins at the staff meeting just before the con started. It was interesting to watch a consensus process work with a group of people who came in from wildly different personal perspectives and to watch people change from varying viewpoints to agree on the compromise that best suited the group.

So what's next? We've spent the night with Andrew from Koolu and will be heading down to Buffalo next to get an van and start on the adventure. We don't know where we're going yet, or how we'll get there, but the idea is to head down to the Creation Museum and then west towards Vegas and the Grand Canyon. On the way, we might see if we can visit Stephanie in Ohio, Sera in Albuquerque, and Karina in Flagstaff.

Peace, Love, Faith and Blessings to all.

Hah! Usually I don't like to post when I'm travelling so that I don't advertise when a good place to break into my house is. But hey, since we don't actually live anywhere anymore...

Angie, Leif and I are at Opus and ConCentric cooking with Chris Wulff and Sera Star! We're having lots of fun. Everyone's giving Leif all the lovin' he wants, and there's still time for both swimming, worships, and all the cooking that needs to happen. After the chaos that was last year's kitchen, it's not hard to improve on it, but I think we're managing to recreate the type of kitchen environments that got me into hanging out in the kitchen in the first place.

I miss lots of you who are usually here but aren't this year. Hugs&Love to y'all!

Our place this morning was so calm and peaceful. Angie was cooking muffins. Then the packers showed up at 8am. It's 2.5 hours later, and we're now surrounded by boxes. In another 24 hours, the computers will be shut down, the cable modem returned, and the moving trucks will show up.

Two weeks ago when we left Montr al for visiting family and going to UbuntuLive, we knew that we only had a couple days left back here, but the reality is now setting in. From here we'll go to Opus, the Unitarian Universalist young adult conference at which we're two of the four cooks. From there, we head south, fetch a rental car, and start our one-way drive out to California.

Crazyness!

So this is it, I've actually finished at Canonical! For most of the past week, I've been in Portland, OR at Ubuntu Live. I gave two talks (Ubuntu Technical Demonstration and Bringing your software to Ubuntu users) and one tutorial (packaging for Ubuntu and Debian derived distributions). I had a great time, and was glad to get a chance to see my former coworkers one last time. I'm happy to be leaving on great terms with my former employers, and hope to be at UbuntuLive again next year.

This conference was a whirlwind of meeting people. JP, Teri, Jim, Andy and MaryBeth are people I'm really looking forward to seeing in the bay area when I get there; I got to see Steve and Patty in the Debian booth; I managed to go for dinner with Chris and Leslie; A going away party that included many of the above plus Matt, Steve, Etienne and Torsten; I had lunch with Katie, whom I haven't seen since my wedding; I had another lunch with Mermaid, whom I thought had fallen off the face of the earth; my final lunch at Veganopolous included MaryBeth again and Rob. I did miss seeing Kamaya, which is sad, though. I got *almost* everyone I wanted to see.

It's a crazy list. Some of these people will be random business contacts. Some of these are folks that I feel like remeeting them after several years was like only missing a day. Some of these are people I miss already.

Sabrina and I are making the trek up north to Kit and Hannah's wedding. We're staying at Miriam's and had lovely Ethiopian food.

Time to sleep. 7am is going to come too early.