The mac is back in Boise. Wow, I really dropped the ball on this one. I cannot believe two months have passed since Andy came home.Well, I will do a summary of what I originally intended to write and then add another entry to catch us up to November!!
The summer was really a whirlwind. I kept myself very busy since Andy was still in China. I worked A LOT, I exercised A LOT and then I spent as much time as I could outside of those activities with friends and family.
From my vantage point now, it exhausts me to think about all I was doing this summer. I was literally up before 5 AM and then stayed up until at least 10:30 or 11 PM. Loco!
Because of that I was able to get a lot done. My new project management job was WAY too big but I was able to keep up with it the best I could. I was managing really five separate areas that ranged from printer driver software to firmware to software specific to our MFPs digital sending functionality to testing an integrated fleet of devices. Wow, it was crazy!
About the time I realized that there was no possible way to do it all well (July), rumors started flying about a massive reorganization. I told my boss at the time that my goal out of the re-org was #1 to still have a project management job and #2 more focus so I could feel like I was doing my job well. It turns out that he didn’t end up having any say into what my fate would be, but ultimately I got what I wished for. More on this later.
At the end of August, my friend Kelly and I drove over to Forest Grove, Oregon to compete in the Hulaman 1/2 Ironman. We drove half way on Friday and stayed in The Dalles, Oregon that night. My friend Jenny Loughmiller and her cute family live in The Dalles, so we went over to their house for a tasty homemade vegetarian dinner Friday night. We drove the rest of the way Saturday and arrived in Forest Grove before noon. In Forest Grove, we stayed in the Grand Lodge which is one of the famous McMenamins hotels in Oregon.
It lived up to the hype…it was such a cool place. The building was actually the old Mason Lodge and orphanage. They had completely restored it into a hotel with a indoor movie theatre, multiple restaurants, pubs, etc. All of the walls were intricately hand-painted with a history lesson of the area. The hotel was actually able to accommodate up to five weddings at a time and I think at least three were going on while we were there. Our only complaint was that there was no AC and it was hot on Saturday.
Luckily Sunday was not as hot because that was the day of the race. I won’t go into too much detail about the race but that it was a great race more or less…especially writing this two months in the future.
Okay so actually the swim sucked. I breast stroked over half of the 1.2 mile swim and a storm was picking up so by the second lap of the swim, we were fighting a brutal current. There was also a gross sewer smell at some point during the race that was unfortunate. If I had been swimming with my face in the water, I wouldn’t have smelled it, I guess. The good thing about being nearly last out of the water is that all you do is pass people the rest of the race.
The bike was absolutely beautiful winding through country side, vineyards, etc. For most of the bike, I was trying to focus on the beautiful colors of nature to pick out paint colors for the upstairs rooms in our house. I ended up settling on a single brown contrasting wall (as recommended in the domino decorating magazine) which was inspired by a tilled field, barnyard red for the dining room, a dark wheat for the living room and a sky blue for the kitchen. I had colors picked out for the other two bedrooms as well but then gave up on that once I realized how much work the rest of the rooms were going to be.
Back to the triathlon, my bike time was good and then I totally rocked the run. I honestly didn’t feel like I was running that fast, but I felt so good and was passing tons of people. It was hot, but not too hot and a boring route, but it was flat and a fairly easy course.
When it was all said and done, I was very happy, had set a personal record and had broken the six hour mark! Yea! Kelly and I celebrated with our friends Matt and Tamara who had also come over for the race and enjoyed some beer and good food.
Back in Boise, I started on the painting and got all of the rooms and ceilings primed and then realized that I sucked at painting and did not want to finish the job. While I was in Oregon, I had had the wood floors refinished and the Bosnian guy who did the floors had a friend who was a painter. I ended up paying him to finish the painting and he was less than thrilled that I had taken it upon myself to prime the walls because it made his job more difficult, especially in the dining room. Oops. I really wanted to save money and do it myself, but I wasn’t willing to give up three weekends to finish it. (I had made much less progress than I was expecting in the first weekend.)
Related posts:
- The Elusive Summer Update It has been a busy summer and unfortunately I have not written because too much has been going on. ...
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