With Friday marking my birthday & several days off work, I went to Birmingham for the first time since last summer. And walked, ate & drank a lot. And took some photos.
Really nice seeing family in person after delaying in December, and finally exchanging Christmas gifts: My sister got me a chess timer which I’m thrilled about.
With all the walking recently, I found my old running shoes & went on a few short runs: My legs hurt, but, in a good way. What hurts in a bad way is my ego: I’m really down on my times from 2018, when I last did this. Hmm.
With media saturation, Roe vs. Wade in the US came out of the blue: It's disgusting. The subtext in the leak contains regressive rhetoric so far removed from reality that it might as well be a comic book villain.
On a positive political note, my home constituency of Wandsworth is no longer a Conservative stronghold. They blamed the youths moving in: I'm proud to have helped.
I also spent some time catching up with old friends and visiting old haunts, some for the first time in 2019. I’m just. So chuffed, really, at how well this went. Only sad I couldn’t have seen more people, or planned it all better.
I forgot how bad public transport in Birmingham is. For all of the things I love about the city, getting around is needlessly laborious & slow.
I worked remotely on Tuesday and found that it’s surprisingly doable: Maybe more trips like these in the future?
On Thursday, over a lunchtime beer, Jim talked me into going to DevOpsDays Birmingham, where I joined the open-spaces. Most memorable was a really nice back-and-forth on edge-compute. In anticipation I’ve already booked tickets for next year — see you there, reader?
Afterwards there was a social at PureCraft (one of my fave bars!) where I ended up chatting to lots of faces from the Birmingham tech-community, old & new, many of whom I hadn’t seen in years, including some old coworkers who’ve since (excitingly!) moved around a bit.
Birthday itself was a relatively chill affair: Thai food & cake. The surrounding stuff this week was pretty great, but, quiet seemed like the right thing given the year. Maybe next year will be bigger.
