Hodepodge o' stuff

Let me get it out of the way - today was my first day working out since last Sunday. Yes, yes, yes - even though I swore up and down in my last blog post that I was back on track, and I had my shout out to Mr Pooh for motivating me, I took a week off. I have excuses, not good ones. But I have them. So there's that.

This past Monday I slept in b/c I knew I had a travel day ahead of me. This was lame excuse #1, as my flight was only 1.5 hours. I went to work for a half day, and then caught a combo of train and bus out to LaGuardia. Our flight boarded on time, but then we sat for 45 minutes while they injected air into the strut (???) on the right side of the plane. Amazingly enough, we still landed on time in Atlanta - I don't know if we got an excellent tail-wind, or if they had counted taxi time in LGA and circling time in ATL into the original estimate, but we landed exactly right.

I met my coworkers at their gate - they got in about 45 minutes after me - and then we took off for our hotel. On our way through Atlanta, I got to see the giant statue of the Olympic flame, so that was pretty cool. We did dinner and drinks that night, before I crashed out watching TV from my bed. I usually don't mind travelling - the thing I like the most is having a TV in the bedroom and being able to fall asleep with the timer on (Blondie and I ditched the TV in the bedroom about 5 years ago, and even before that, he hated when I would leave the TV on until the sleep timer went off).

Tuesday I woke up feeling like shit - completely drugged and out of it. I've been fighting some kind of allergy / cold for about 3 weeks and it's taking a lot of me. It was all I could do to get showered and down to the lobby to meet the guys for our trip out to work. I slugged down a monster sized coffee to no affect.

Work was okay that day - we were in all-day meetings, but it was good getting to put faces to names. I didn't have much to contribute, so got to keep quiet, and take notes. Also, my laptop refused to connect to the internet even though I plugged directly in, so I pretty much had the day off.

At one point I headed over buildings and met up with 1 of my good friends from the Atlanta office. We had a blast ragging on his cubemates, catching up on each other's lives, etc. He's someone that I trust with my work life - he would never blab anything I told him, so he got an earful about this new role I'm in.

That night, my coworkers that had flown in and I had dinner at our hotel restaurant - afterwards, I headed to our hotel bar with 1 of my coworkers while the other went to bed. We had a good time - we're both at hard places in our lives for different reasons. Mine is work related, his is personal, so it was good to have a sounding board for our issues - my personal life is on track right now, while his work life is on track. We talked and drank for so long that they had to kick us out of the bar. And yes, even that late and with that much drink in me, I still feel asleep to the TV on sleep timer. :)

Wednesday was travel back to NYC day - the exhaustion was beyond believable. When they started boarding my flight, I literally thought "I don't know how I'm going to stand in that line long enough to get to my seat". It took every last ounce of strength to get myself onto the plane (and in the middle seat, woot). I slept literally the entire way back, and caught a cab - and had amazing luck in that getting through NYC wasn't that bad.

Thurs I headed into the office, fought with laptop to get it going (4 hours later), and then left around 1:30 pm to head out with my team to go bowling! I still had the tireds something fierce but managed to chug down a gallon of beer and then drunkingly head out to get a burrito before heading home. Blondie that evening then suggested our bar, so I chugged some water before joining him for more beers.

And then Friday was a full day. It went super fast, mostly because I hadn't really been on email since Monday afternoon so I basically played catch-up most of the day. Friday night, Blondie and I took it easy - we watched the Brewers win their game and had a few beers. But we had to keep it low-key. And that's because...

We are now trained to be balloon handlers!!!! Saturday we were up and on an 8 am bus to Jersey (Meadowlands Stadium) where we got trained on how to haul the T-day balloons around! It was fun and exciting, and they literally brought in 3 of the balloons and inflated them, and we learned all the signals, how to raise and lower the balloons, how to take corners on the balloons, etc. We met a pretty cool chick from Brooklyn also, ragged on the uber-excited people, ate some free breakfast, and enjoyed our free gift of a slinky afterwards.

We were back to NYC around 1 pm, and immediately headed over to Southern Hospitality for brunch and beers. It was a gorgeous day - 80 degrees, no clouds whatsoever, so after lunch, we stopped at a local farmer's market (not our typical one) and then headed on home to nap for several hours. Balloon training took a lot out of me - we were on our feet and moving for over 4 hours.

Today I got up and after I finally stopped sneezing, I did my Cardio Max Insanity DVD. My legs were shaking so bad by the time I was done. I'm now lying in bed, wishing we had a TV in here, b/c the Packers are playing and I feel like lying in bed while watching them.

Tomorrow is our official 8 year anniversary - looking forward to that. And next week, we have a show that our friend from the bar is in. And then 2 weeks from tomorrow, we will be in Barbados! I hope to feel good enough when I wake up tomorrow to attempt a run, maybe some weights. Half of the office is off to the SF offices this week (not me), so it should be a bit more quiet than usual. Here's hoping the week goes fast!

--K