Work sent me and several other coworkers to the annual HIMSS conference, which was in Las Vegas this year. It’s an enormous conference, and it took up the whole convention center.

My team spent most of our time on the showroom floor looking at what other software companies are doing to solve similar problems. I did also go to a few talks, but for the most part they were disappointing, too high-level and vague to be useful. The perspective of UX design in health software seemed to be almost entirely absent.

I’ve never been to Vegas before, so it was fun walking around seeing the casinos. My coworkers and I hung out a bit on Freemont Street, where some of the older casinos are, and a few of us went to see Absinthe, which is a burlesque acrobatic show in the round. There were several incredible acts, but my favorite was the one with two roller skates spinning around on a teeny-tiny stage.

For Christmas this year we spent a few days in LA with Zack’s family, then went up to see mine in San Jose.

In LA we visited with Zack’s family at their house, toured Universal Studios, which I’d never done before (overpriced, TBH), toured Hollywood with Zack’s sister, and went to the Getty Museum with her and their parents.

In San Jose we got to spend some time with my sister and her kids at my parents’ house for Christmas day. A cousin whom I haven’t seen in many years also came to visit from Texas while we were there and stayed with my parents too. There was an earthquake while he was there, but he didn’t feel it. We all met up with his dad at Mom’s favorite restaurant in San Francisco, the Cliff House.

Toward the end of the trip Zack and I went to Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, which is a nice Japanese garden that we hadn’t seen in a few years. It was nice to get some quiet time after all of the activity.

I just spent ages trying to figure this out, so I hope this post saves someone else some time.

I have a script named index.php that I want to send requests to by just referring to the directory it’s in, relying on the server to send the requests to the right place. I do that to keep the URLs simpler, and to make it easier to swap out the script for something else later without changing everything that refers to it.

That works great with regular GET and even POST requests, but for PUT and DELETE I was getting “405 Method Not Allowed” errors. After more digging around and false starts that I’d like to admit, I noticed that sending requests directly to index.php worked fine. It turns out that NGINX’s index directive does not allow PUT or DELETE.

That doesn’t seem to be officially documented anywhere, and the only workaround I’ve found is to either rewrite all URLs ending in “/”, which seems like overkill, or point the script sending those particular requests directly to the file instead of the directory.

We gathered with Zack’s extended family for a memorial service for Zack’s grandparents. His grandmother died recently, but I never met his grandfather, who died many years ago. The family rented a sailboat and we all went out on the San Francisco bay to scatter their ashes together.

We arrived several days early and stayed in a very cute hotel in Berkeley and got to meet up with my parents at Jack London Square. When the rest of the family arrived we stayed with them in a big Airbnb house.

There was a lot of wildfire smoke in the air while we were there, which you can see in a couple of the pictures, but we managed to get a remarkably clear day on the bay for the ceremony, with very little smoke and just a touch of fog.

Afterwards, Zack, his sister, and I drove up into the Berkeley hills to see their grandparents’ old house, and the new owner let us go in and look around, and see the sunset from the balcony out over the bay.

Toward the end of the trip I also got to meet up with an old friend in her new place in Oakland and meet her very sweet new kitty.

The annual visit to Georgia to visit my great aunt. My parents were able to join us this time, so we saw them too, along with my aunt and my cousin. Lots of cards at the retirement home, Zack and I wandered around the battlefield (the tower was open this time, so we got to go up!), and we went with my parents on the train ride from the Chattanooga train museum.

The total eclipse was amazing. We drove up north to a tiny town that probably quintupled in population with eclipse watchers. We hung out on their sports field in the heat for several hours before the eclipse started—it’s amazing how much cooler it was even with the partial eclipse. Once it got to totality the roosters nearby started crowing.

Christmas with our families. LA first, where Zack’s sister took us to a show and we toured Griffith Observatory (no relation). Then Christmas dinner at my sister’s house and several rounds of board games at my parents’ house.

Visiting family in Georgia. Lots of cards with my great aunt, and my aunt took us up to see some caves and where she worked on Signal Mountain. There was also a sweet kitty who really wants to adopt my aunt.

I swear the year only just started, and yet January also seems like it was ages ago. Life has been so full lately.

Last year I got laid off, spent a while dealing with burnout (including a month doing nothing but playing late-90s Japanese video games), spent some time doing contract work, and finally landed a job with UPMC, a local hospital and insurance company, where I have been helping kick-start the UX process for an internal insurance application. I know far more about insurance claims and payment authorization than I ever expected to know, and yet there is so much more to learn. Fitting UX processes into a long-standing development process without stepping on too many toes has been interesting, and is still an evolving process. We also just added a couple new people, and learning to organize and delegate has been an interesting process, too. I don’t quite know what I’m doing, but it’ll be ok.

I don’t know if UPMC is an anomaly in this, but I actually feel better about insurance having seen how much the people working the claims care about the members health and well-being. Most of them are former nurses who have been in the hospitals; they have seen patients with the same conditions they are now authorizing claims for, and they know how serious these things are. Not that that necessarily changes corporate policies, but it’s good to know there are people in the middle who care.

I’ve also been dealing with new dietary restrictions. At the end of last year I developed an inability to eat wheat or dairy, and learning how to eat again has been hard. It’s probably been good for me overall, in that I’m more mindful of what I eat and I don’t go out to restaurants as much, but it has been stressful at times. Sometimes I have to go out and there’s nothing I can eat. Sometimes I just want a cookie, and the easiest way to get one is to make it myself–and baking with no wheat and no butter or milk is extra hard. I’m getting there, though. Today I actually managed waffles.

Also this year, after 10 years together Zack and I finally got married and had a lovely honeymoon in England, Wales, and Scotland. It’s been 8 months, but after 10 years of having a “boyfriend” it’s weird to say “husband”. It’s weird to think that I have a husband. But not in a bad way. I feel like I ought to say more about this, but really, life together continues much as before (also not in a bad way ☺).

We went on a belated honeymoon in May to the UK for two weeks. First stop was London, where we stayed with Zack’s sister and her boyfriend. We went on a bus tour there and wandered around the Tower of London, and she took us through her favorite parts of the British Museum; my favorite were the persian lion hunt carvings (they really should return all that looted stuff though). We also went to a small gathering with songs and stories of the Scottish border country.

We went with Zack’s sister on a bus tour of an old long barrow, Stonehenge, and Avebury, then continued on to Wales alone. After that we took a train with a fancy sleeping car up to Edinburgh and toured around there a bunch, with some bus tours up into the highlands where the tourguide had some great stories from Scottish history and more stories of the border country, and down to some Roman ruins. Then it was back to London to visit Zack’s sister again before flying home.

Scottland was so pretty and I could have stayed there a lot longer. In fact, all of the UK was postcard-picturesque; on one of the train rides in the sunset through rolling green hills covered in white sheep I found myself thinking it couldn’t get more picturesque, and then a rainbow appeared, proving me wrong.

We needed to drive my car a bit to build up the battery since it had completely died from sitting too long, so Zack and I decided to drive out to see Falling Water. It’s a cool house, but like Kentuck Knob I don’t think I’d want to live there. Pictures are only the outside, since they don’t let you take them inside.