david.watkis.blog

2017 has ben an…interesting year, to say the least. We are truly living in a strange new world that many of us are continuously trying to come to terms with. Abnormal is the new normal and reconciling this fact with my usual expectations and guiding principles has been a tremendous challenge.

While I’ve been doing my part to stay informed and make my voice heard, the past five months have been unique for me for wholly unrelated reasons as well. With a mixture of professional meetups and vacation time, I found myself traveling for 30 of the first 90 days of the year and I still feel like I’m trying to catch up on things I’ve put off to make room for these adventures.

The first excursion was a trip to Las Vegas to meet with some of my colleagues from Automattic towards the end of January. It was my first visit to the state of Nevada and I’ve only just now finished editing the photos I took along the way. I’m not really sure what I expected of Vegas exactly, and in search of an adequate description of the city it’s difficult to avoid referencing Fear and Loathing. Suffice it to say I’m glad that I had the opportunity to visit and I’d be open to giving it another go in the future purely to win back the $30 I lost to the slot machines 😬

Paris may be the city of light, but there’s something about those neon colors against the night skies of Vegas that absolutely appeal to the senses.

While I was in town, only a handful of days had passed since the inauguration of our 45th president and I guess it was only fitting that his real estate eyesores loomed over the city.

Most of the trip was occupied with work which happened from a great spot called Work in Progress. Because of the size of our group, we took one of the larger spaces appropriately named, “The Garage” which was in fact a big garage.

On the final evening, I made it to the casino on the ground floor of our hotel. It was actually a pretty fascinating experience and as I mentioned above, I’ll be back for my $30…