My schedule will be more family-focused till November 28, when I’ll be back home in Warsaw.

I got into Outreachy and will be posting the open-source posts on my official blog and Outreachy logs on a dedicated blog - I haven’t set that up yet, since the internship officially starts December 6 and at the moment I’m working mostly on tasks not directly connected to my projects.

On my recent adventures in Atlanta:

• I went to visit my cousins’ school for Thanksgiving lunch twice and really enjoyed it. The school is colorful and at the moment full of turkeys in all shapes and sizes. I also loved the library and the book fair at school. It seems like a lovely place to learn.

  Every child has to say and write a lot about what they are thankful for and one of my cousins said that he’s thankful for his cat due to peer pressure - there is no cat. I think being grateful for what one has is a much needed tradition everywhere.

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• On Tuesday we went to mini Legoland - we saw how Lego blocks are made, had a ride of shooting bandits to save a princess, a tour through Lego Atlanta and loads of fun building and playing. We also went to a 4D Lego cinema, with wind blowing and snow falling.

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• Today we went to visit the Stone Mountain and had a wonderful 2h hike. I was surprised that the boys went all the way up - especially little Alex in his cute Thanksgiving turkey outfit. There were all sorts of attractions, especially Christmas-themed - which was kind of amusing, since it was warm and sunny. It’s a lovely summer this November. After the hike, we went down in a cable car.

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• After the trip we went for some delicious freshly baked Krispy Kreme donuts and got to see how they’re made. There is an icing waterfall on the conveyor belt.

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• I’ve also had some time to read with my cousins, both in Polish and English. Here you can see me puzzling over a Polish ABC-book from mid-seventies.

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And now I’m relaxing and working in the most comfy of chairs.

Achievements (accumulated over the past few days):

• got safely and happily to Atlanta
• rested and spent a lot of quality time with family
• started helping my little cousins with their schoolwork
• refactored my Outreachy application
• worked a little bit on coding and writing
• taught my uncle some programming

The last few days have been a blur of great food and quality time with my family. I’ve never had a chance to visit my godmother, uncle and two little cousins in Atlanta, so I’m happy to stay here for the next three weeks. One of my grandmas is also here, so I get the benefit of loads of delicious Polish homemade food while still being in the US.

The schoolwork in the US is different - my cousins have a lot of worksheets and tests, with very detailed instructions. It’s also very cute how a lot of things connect to American traditions - I’ve never seen so many pumpkin and turkey themed tasks.

I haven’t done enough coding and writing, because I’ve been in the family haven. I’ve finally refactored my Outreachy application and project proposals - it took a lot longer than I expected, since I’ve decided to focus on quality time rather than development over the past week. With a lot of help from Tim, Steve and Neeraj, advice from Leah and a ton of inspiring posts and ideas from Sumana, Julia and other Recursers, I’ve added some details and tried to focus more on why I’m a great fit for Zulip rather than a general presentation of my skills.

I got accustomed to slow life in Atlanta suburbs (I mistakenly thought it was much closer to the city itself) and will be able to focus more on my growth again. I’ve had a lot of programming-related quality time today, as I showed Jerry (my uncle) FreeCodeCamp and GitHub - I’m glad that by being here I encouraged him to try it out and see if he enjoys it.

The Outreachy results will be known at 4pm UTC - which means I’ll have only the next 6 hours to stress about it.

Achievements:

• helped with cleaning at RC
• visited Eva, Shawn and the baby
• bought some gifts and knick-knocks
• had a midnight checkout group dinner

The never graduation party ended late, so I started my day with a long walk through Manhattan and gift shopping. The weather was perfect for simply sipping my chai latte and talking, taking a ton of photos on the way (some of them are from previous escapades).

I finally arrived to RC just in time for the cleaning party - Deniz and Isla had a wonderful idea of cleaning the shared space together. I didn’t help as much as I’ve wanted, since I had to visit Eva and Shawn and hug the baby as the responsible auntie I am.

We went for dinner with most of our midnight checkout group and had great time, especially with very intriguing rolled ice cream at a place called Juicy Spot - they literally froze them from milk and other ingredients right before our eyes, in a magical process that included a lot of scraping.

I didn’t get to say all of my goodbyes the way I’ve imagined them, but that may be for the best - there were so many feelings and tears in the last few days, I might’ve not been able to go through more.

My time in New York and physical presence at RC is over, but I’m never graduating. I need some time to write a proper return statement, as I’ve written so much in the past 12 weeks I’ll need at least another two to go through all of it.

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