Colorado Startup Life: Week 4

Another week living the dream! Of course, I've been through so many new experiences in my life that I know this feeling, this euphoria, wears off. Soon enough I'll complain about the high cost of living, traffic, and the snow conditions.

Sunday started off a little different. Instead of going to church, I went to the climbing gym, Earthtreks Englewood. It's huge! I was blown away. Apparently it just opened up about two months ago so it's still pretty new. I think that finally, the climbing gym scene in Denver is built out. I don't think there is a whole lot of demand for another $10 million gym.

Work was good. I am rapidly integrating myself into the team and also I have contributed quite a bit. I spent about a full day this week working on tube routings. I had a great time doing it! That was a bit of a surprise to me because doing routings is typically not thought of as fun work. However, I like doing drawings too, so I suppose I'm a little different. One of the things about routings is that they are typically one of the last things to be designed, so they often look terrible. But when you see a piece of engineering "art" it will typically have really good routings. In the past I did hose routings, which is super tough, because a hose will not do in the model what it does in real life. Tube routings fortunately are a little easier because they are much much more rigid.

A look into different personalities, recently one person was going to be out of the office for basically three weeks, and I found out about it the Friday as he was packing up to go. Kind of a shock. Thinking ahead to my future work there were questions about what he might want for this project or that. On the other side of the spectrum, one coworker was planning and preparing all week for his one week out of the office to get married. There's a balance in there somewhere, and I tend toward the over prepared side of things, because uncertainty is not a good thing. I like to think of myself as a replaceable employee. Not a replaceable person, or human, no one is like me, but yes definitely someone else could do my job. So I strive to have good communication, and I prefer to error on the side of too much communication if possible.

Friday I left work at 2:30 PM... to go play beer pong with bankers. Our little company just took out a loan and the bankers were so excited they offered to pay for pizza, beer and wine in a little space in downtown Denver for us to "celebrate". The company was initially developed by people in their late 20s and mid 30s and the current location is a little away from a city center or where any of us live. So we don't really have a culture of going out and hanging out with each other. That's actually different than my last company where most of the young engineers were from out of town and thus hung out together. That being said, we're moving locations soon to a more urban location, and I am curious to see if that changes, especially since many of the recent hires are younger 20s and single, not 30s with kids.

Friday night after the work event I went to the friend of a friend's house for two hours and we had some good conversation before I headed home. I'm not saying I'm super social, but I am getting out there.

Saturday I tried to bicycle up Pikes Peak again, and failed. I made it from 7,400 feet below the gate up to 11,400 feet at the gift shop when I decided it was not safe to keep going above treeline. I averaged 5.2 miles per hour for those 11+ miles uphill. On a bicycle you can't just stop like you can when you are walking. So I kept taking little breaks, getting my feet out of the bicycle clips, and then back in, and being winded from getting my feet back in the clips. Sigh...

This upcoming week I have two medical tests on Thursday, a CT scan with angio something and I think a pulmonary function test. Point being, after seeing a really good pulmonologist for over an hour I am confident we are going to get this lung or heart thing figured out. On the odd chance any of the four doctors that previously worked with me on my previous seven visits read this, all the tests that were done were the right things in the right order.