Colorado Startup Life: Week 7

The week began in Wisconsin. I went to church with my mom, while my dad was doing a class for new church members. Everyone's aging. There is no denying it. My family is 10 years older than it was ten years ago. That also brings wisdom with it. My parents walk regularly, and ten years ago they didn't really do much exercise. Walking is such a great exercise. Sometimes I think a daily step count is the best measure of exercise, better than miles or minutes ran or walked.

Along those lines with my pulmonary embolism healing I've been trying to exercise, and some days that means I've only barely managed to achieve my step goal for the day, which was as low as 7000 steps just two weeks ago. My recovery is going in steps and plateaus. I'll have a breakthrough, and then be stuck at that aerobic level for most of a week. I ran twice for 7 miles this week.

Monday, before I left Wisconsin I went with my parents for my mom to get an infusion of saline at the hospital in Milwaukee because she has cancer. When a person has cancer it's common to get infusions of saline and sometimes some drugs, to stay hydrated. So my mom has been somewhat alternating a chemo treatment with a saline infusion. When people have the more difficult cancers they might get an infusion of saline every day, but only get the chemo once a week or something like that.

Tuesday I returned to work and had a funny moment. I drove to work, arrived at 7:19 AM, and the gate was locked. I hadn't checked my email since Friday, so I did. Turns out we were having an all employee meeting at 9 AM at our new office 40 minutes away. So I drove home, grabbed my personal laptop, and went to the new office. We had a somewhat highly hyped building meeting about a new project with a very big name company. It was exciting! When I started here, as employee 27 (or so) I thought that I missed all of the cool projects and real ground up design. I kind of thought we were "done" and I just had to work on some brackets and tube routings. Well, that is not at all the case, which is incredibly exciting for me!

The rest of the work week went really well too. For the first six weeks I had been feeling a bit underutilized. However, as part of our hyped Tuesday meeting, we took a bit of turn (a very small one, but a direction change none the less) and I was handed some responsibility that I had been expecting, and looking forward to. I'm excited to deliver on my little aspect of our project!

To leave a little cliff hanger for next week, we have a technology problem...

On Friday my friend C from WPI flew in and we went for a run. We're the same age, and he's one of the people I can really relate to because we've shared so much life experience. In fact, we talked dating for maybe the first time and it was pretty funny how similar our experiences have been. Ladies, if you're going to spend five hours with a man, on a second or third date, and let him pay for everything, don't break it off a few days later because he will be out of town for two weeks. Please end the night earlier, say you want to get to bed early, or call a family member.

Saturday was nice too. After morning coffee at OZO and a little walk while my runner friend without a pulmonary embolism went for a run I went for a walk. Then we went to prethanksgiving afternoon get together in downtown Denver with a friend of mine. I am so blessed to have the friends that I do! Really, I have friends all over this country, and the world, and there are so many of them I could sit down with and share a two hour meal with and laugh, cry, and think. It's a full life.