I Live in Iowa: Week 163

Another week in the record books. I don't think it would be wrong to say I can be an emotional person. My head has been up and down this past week. Some highlights…

Thursday, what a day! I am hosting a coworker from India and this was his last day in the office, so an eventful day in any regard. However, around 11:30 AM in a meeting we learned that we had failed a test. I won't go into the specifics, but let's just say failing this test was easily going to cost tens of thousands of dollars, and a hundred thousand was not an impossible unexpected cost from failing this test. I went into overdrive sending emails and calling people to basically get the rework started and get the manufacturing progress stopped, that day. The short story is this should not have been tested so late in the program. Quickly this escalated above me to managers and supervisors as we went about damage control. However, around 3 PM, as I'm still on the phone talking about this issue, I get a call on line two that the test was not done according to our internal specifications due to another product breaking the fixture recently. A quick rerun of the test results ignoring the erroneous test and substituting a similar test, and the news comes back, we passed!

How to waste an afternoon…

Then we went out for a wine tasting and out to eat a steak as a goodbye to our coworker who is leaving. Needless to say, by the time I went to sleep Thursday I was done. I ran twice, I did some social hosting, I had an emergency at work, that was declared not an emergency later that day.

I ran 87 miles this past week. I'm struggling to get my mileage into the 100s, but I've been in the high 80s the last few weeks. It takes time for the body to adapt to stress and recover and be able to handle ever higher mileage, and I feel I am getting there, but I am not there yet. On a side note, I think I might start popping a 27 mg iron pill every day instead of only two or three times a week. I've done that the last few days and felt much better.

Friday I spent an hour in a kevlar canoe with the best local paddler learning about paddling sports. Why am I dabbling in something new? If it goes anywhere I'll let you know.

The summer is ending, and I am sad about that. I am sad because I feel that opportunities are slipping through my fingers and I am doing nothing about it. To some extent we all live in the real world and our own fantasy world, but where does one end and the other begin? What is just my imagination and what is real?