Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Rainy days make me thankful for a gym

It was nice to know that I got 2 miles in on the treadmill and 25 minutes on the bike today. On the drive home I noticed this poor fellow running in the rain and thought to myself, sure glad I'm not training for anything because that would be me! It's amazing how quickly you lose your HTFU attitude when you aren't planning on doing any races longer than a 5k.

With so many changes and so much going on in our lives right now, I am content to just exercise and a do a 5k here or there. Maybe once schools tarts in the late summer I'll consider taking on something larger but for now I'm happy to try and take it easy and get the most out of my days and life.

Last Friday was my daughter's Walk-a-Thon that raises money for our parents club to help support smaller class sizes, PE, teacher's aides, etc. While it wasn't a perfect course I do believe each lap was .25 miles possibly more. Her goal was to complete 12 laps. When she got lap 4 she was saying she was tired already. Kids are awesome at sprinting at super speed and than getting tired and walking and repeating several more times. I really wanted her to reach the goal she had set for herself. So I started doing laps with her, after all some sprinting would do me good. Once Sydney hit the 12th lap I asked how she was feeling and what she wanted to do, and she wanted to keep going! Ultimately she ran/walked 21 laps! She would have kept going but it was only a 2 hour event. While I was the only parent who actually ran laps with my daughter, I am proud of her accomplishment and I know that being by her side I was able to help her meet and exceed her goal.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Changes, changes and more changes

First, an update on my tree's. They are still in my yard in all of their beauty. Thank you to an amazing lawyer who warned PG&E that if they cut the tree's down he would be going after them for damages, PG&E has decided to back off and see if we can resolve the issue nicely. We filed a formal complaint with the PUC and while that is pending a hearing PG&E is hoping we can resolve this without having to go through the hearing process with the PUC. Hmm, probably because if we win, this will severely hamper the "we can do whatever we want" attitude they have and crimp their style (money) of having to go back to trimming instead of removal. I'm currently waiting for their rude Arborist to call and schedule a time to measure the actual line distance from the ground in front of our property, good times.

In other news, most everyone knows that I quit my job. I thought my last non-profit experience was bad but nothing like this. I kept quite about much of the day to day drama, the inappropriate and unprofessional behavior of many of my co-workers and the different directions I was being given by various people. It's one thing to work with other people who really only give 50% to their work, I can work in my own little bubble and ignore their lack of pride in their work, but there are some things that I just can't ignore. The final straw was finding out that ZERO of the money we raise in development would go to any of our programs, ZERO. I can't in good faith go out and raise money when the money I raise is not going to any of our programs, not a dime. So I bid farewell to the chaos and am feeling pretty good about it all.

Over the past 5 months our family has been on a roller-coaster that we just couldn't get off of. Being the one responsible for getting the kids ready for school, dropping them off, picking them up and getting dinner ready every night took a toll on everyone really quickly. Getting home at 6:15pm-6:30pm when your kids go to bed at 7:00 and 8:00pm leaves no quality family time let alone time for homework and practicing reading. The kids were starting to pick up on our stress and we all just hunkered down and tried to survive each day. I neglected lots of things over this time including friends and just my general well being. So we are all now on the road to health and happiness. It took 5 months for all of this stress to build up so I know it will take a while to get back to the person I was, but already I feel a sense of relief. I'm not a person who lets go of things easily but I can honestly say for the first time after leaving a job that I have really let it go, I don't care, I can't.

We celebrated my daughter's Third Birthday and spent a great weekend with family and friends. Despite everyone but me (knock on wood) having the stomach flu this week has gone amazingly well. I have gotten a little glimpse of what the summer will be like with both girls at home full time. I have enjoyed several days of sitting in our backyard and really enjoying it, which amazingly I never seem to find time to do.

On that note, lots of race changes. I was not able to run in my favorite race this weekend due to Sydney being sick but Scott and Kylie ran and had a great time. Scott took all the bibs so he could get all of our t-shirts and oops my timing chip attached to my bib was in the jogging stroller, needless to say I came in 2nd in my AG for a race I didn't run. Before all of this happened we made the decision to not run in the COPS Memorial Run this upcoming weekend because of a party that would include the entire family. Now bummed realizing I won't get to run 2 races, I decided to register for the See Jane Run 5k in  Alameda. Originally I thought we would go to Sonoma that weekend and run, but some more changes in plans and I decided that finishing a run with champagne and chocolate sounds right up my alley.

On to bigger and better things.