The good:
- Met a whole new bunch of wonderful people - relationships to last a lifetime. Arthur, Audrey, Celso, Cody, Daniel, Jacob, Jeff, Lahn, Moriah, Skyler, Todd and others I'm certainly forgetting to my undying shame. Thanks for your awesomeness!
- Presented and taught at Pycon 2010.
- Had a blast in the blizzard of 2010.
- Prepped my house of 9 years for sale and sold it.
- Paid off my debts. I sleep so much better now.
- Left NASA after 5 years and 3 months for freelancing pastures. Thanks Eldarion LLC, Revsys LLC, Holdenweb LLC, and Bryan Klein. Being exposed to some of the incredible code and developers on these projects has made me a better developer. Show me more!
- Flew enough in the spring to put me ahead of notorious traveller James Tauber for about 2 months in sheer mileage accumulated.
- Got to reconnect with a cousin and met his lovely wife and handsome son. Also hung out with my Uncle Al and Aunt Sandra.
- Got a tour of Ames Research Center thanks to Michael Sims. He'll probably be presenting at Pycon!
- Attended another NASA wedding by Mark and Ariel.
- Took a cruise to Mexico on a ship that caught fire just months later.
- Said goodbye to Virginia and moved to Lawrence, Kansas to run with the unicorns and 5 months later to Los Angeles, California.
- Road tripped across the Western half of the country! Twice! Spent 3 days in Las Vegas over Halloween!
- Learned fundamentals of Capoeira from Celso Wills. Wish I could learn more from him. :(
- Learned how to drive and bought my first car.
- Worked on another course for Holdenweb LLC.
- Launched Django Packages.
- Presented at DjangoCon 2010.
- Started Muay Thai classes in Los Angeles. I've done quite a bit of it, but these were the first regular classes I've had in about 16 years.
- Brought my son to Los Angeles so I could spend a week with him for the first time in 15 months.
- Almost up to 7 years without a broken bone!
- Worked another year in Python related technologies.
- Started learning LISP and played a lot more with JavaScript (especially JQuery and JQuery UI).
- Left my students in Virginia. The young ones were especially hard to let go.
- Had to say goodbye to friends in the DC area. Some people I'll miss are Alex, Beth, Brandon, Chris, Dave, Daye, Eric, Jim, Joe, Katie, Muhammed, Pilar, Rich, Renee, Ron, Sarah, Sebastion, Shawn, Steve, and Whitney. I know I'm missing some names!
- I'm far from all my immediate family: Carla, Ciana, Dad, Doug, Michele, Midori, Mom, Seth, and Timiri.
- Watched NOVA Django falter after I left the DC area.
- Had to wait 15 months between spending more than a day or so with my son.
- Didn't really practice much Eskrima all year.
- Didn't blog enough. Last year I blogged almost twice as much!
- Frustratingly, haven't been able to finish something that prevents me from writing about certain things. Yes, this is quite vague, and my hope is to clarify it in a few weeks.
Hey, nice post, its easier to forget that people have it rougher than you... i havn't seen my son in weeks, you didn't see yours in 15 months ... wow, how do you cope with it?
ReplyDeleteI program too of course.
Israel,
ReplyDeleteYeah, life was pretty awesome this year.
I did see my boy, mostly just every few months and then for a day or so. For a few months I saw him every week or so. But to spend a whole week with him? That was bliss.