Pokemon Go
Once again my husband and I got sucked into playing Pokemon Go. We have spent more nights and weekends than I would like to admit fighting gyms and slaving away catching Pokemon just to collect that oh so precious stardust. The Fire and Ice Festival is really what revived our interest. It brought a renewed sense of hope and vigor to our hearts that we may finally attain a Charizard. I was beyond thrilled. I would finally be able to collect enough Charmanders to be able to evolve them into a Charizard. Up until that point, Charmander was my Pokemon Go buddy and I had walked many kilometers only to collect a few Charmander candies. Now with the festival, I would be able to catch enough Charmanders to hopefully evolve them into a Charizard. Game on!. My husband on the other hand became obsessed with collecting Quilava along with Charmander. Anytime we saw a Quilava the pressure was on. We didn’t know if Quilava would be around after the festival so we had to collect as many as we possibly could, thanks to the law of scarcity. As soon as I would get home from work we would venture out to our nearest park or neighborhood catching as many fire-type Pokemon as we could. I literally spent so much time catching Pokemon during this festival that it was like having a part-time job. The good news is that by end of the Fire and Ice Festival I caught enough Charmanders to evolve them into a Charizard so all that hard work paid off.
Raids, Legendaries, and Pokemon Fest
After the Fire and Ice Festival, we were burnt out! Yet a few weeks later we were back at it again during the Pokemon Go Fest. This time the goal was to play as much as you could because Pokemon candies, stardust, and XP points were all doubled. The game makers had just introduced raid battles and had released the first legendary Pokemon Lugia and Articuno. Unbeknownst to me, my husband had a friend who enjoyed playing Pokemon GO with his wife. We ended up teaming up with them and 15 other people to catch Lugia. It took us quite a few tries and my womanly wisdom before we were able to catch him. I had read somewhere that you were able to get more XP if you threw curveballs so I thought why not? I will give it a shot, and on my last attempt, I threw a curveball and captured Lugia. I advised my husband to do the same thing and Botta bing botta boom we both had Lugias. After we had our Lugia’s we went to test them out at a gym battle and we were pleasantly surprised. One Lugia was equal to three or four Pokemon. We were now on our way to becoming the ultimate Pokemon masters. Slack had also become a very revolutionary tool for Pokemon Go players. Our friends who were a part of the Slack group didn’t even know what it was. I was excited. Now we would be able to meet up with other Pokemon Go players and take on the raids with success.
OpenWest
This was the second year that I attended OpenWest but the first year I attended as a speaker. How does someone get to speak at OpenWest? They submit a speaker proposal on a topic(s) they want to speak on and then these topics are voted on through “blind voting.” Since this “blind voting” is open to anyone I told my boss about it at work and he was very supportive. He voted for my talks and got others to vote for me too. I also promoted my talks on Twitter and Facebook getting anyone who I thought might be interested to vote and voila I got accepted. OpenWest was from July 12 through July 15th. I presented two talks. One talk was on Flexbox. Which is a talk that I have given at a few meetups so I figured hey, why not. The second talk I gave was on WordPress and why you should consider it as an entrepreneurial web developer. 
As a WordPress Consultant, I spent my week talking to newbs about how to debug, build, and market their WordPress sites. It’s a great gig with the exception of back to back calls 40 hours a week, day in and day out. So like any unhappy Millennial I started looking around for other “potential” possibilities. After about a month of scavenging the job boards, I had found what I was looking for. I met with the employer and we decided to try things out on a temporary basis. So along with my WordPress Consultant gig, I began consulting. I was pulling about 50 + hour weeks
