Monday, November 22, 2010

calm before the storm

I think we're going to have a very interesting couple of months (6-8?) ahead of us.  Wowzers.

Denver update
I am officially a Denver employee!  Yay!  I'm still living in Houston, probably for another month.  Our house has been on the market for 3 weeks - we've had 8 showings.  Most comments are that they like the house but don't like the apartments directly behind our house.  The apartments are actually condos, of which the majority are privately owned.  So, while there isn't anything we can do about them physically being behind our house, we can better educate potential buyers on what they are.  Hopefully this will yield some results.

We had 2 showing yesterday (Sunday), which strikes me as odd.  Sunday seems to be a day where most people get ready for the upcoming week.  At least for us, that's the day we do chores, laundry, grocery shop, and make our food for the week.  Having 2 showings put a crimp in our style.  Especially when the second one called us at 5:45 PM, asking if they could schedule a showing for 5:45 PM (me: "that's basically right now???").  We have an 1 hour courtesty notification on our listing and the listing service actually sounded a bit testy when I asked for 10-15 minutes so we could leave our house.  Good thing I wasn't in the middle of cooking dinner!  I mean, who really looks at a house at 6 PM on a Sunday night?  And the comments were that the "house wasn't large enough".  Ugh.  Annoying.

Our tentative plan is that I'm here until the end of December, then we'll drive me (and my bike) up to Denver, where I'll stay with my mom in January.  I should have a field project back in Houston for half of January, so I'll be going back and forth, which is perfect.  That way, I should have enough overtime from work where I can go up to Denver and look for a rental house w/out having to use vacation time.  Then at the end of January/early February (assuming our house doesn't sell before then), we'll pack the house up and move everyone up to Denver.  Will still isn't 100% on board, and I'm not sure why.  We both agree that living in limbo is a bad thing for both of us, but for whatever reason, he seems tentative to set a move date.

Training
So far, so good.  After a killer week, things have stabilized and are going ok.  Fri-Sat-Sun seem to be killer days.  Friday is usually a swim workout and an 1 run.  Saturday is a long run, Sunday is a long bike (and with an occasional 1 hr run tossed in there).  Its challenging for me to work in some of the runs (ie hill workouts or the Friday runs) because I'm battling darkness.  I prefer to run in the mornings, when there isn't much traffic, but to make it to work on time, I need to be done by ~6:30.  On days where I swim (practice is in the morning), that leaves either a long lunch so I can run in the daylight or having to run after work in the dark. 

I pulled some stuff in my right leg during my heavy week.  My achilles is tweakly, likely from my Newtons.  Then I pulled my quad/adductor (same thing I pulled last Nov) - likely from not stretching when it was tweaky on a run last week.  I've been doing extra stretching and using KT tape, which helped.  Today things feel much better - I'd say 80%.  Hopefully things will continue to heal and I'll be 100% for my half marathon on Dec 12.

Family
To make things even more fun for us, Will's got some family health issues that are pretty serious.  His grandfather was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  Not a huge suprise as he's 89, and apparently its highly treatable.  And Will's dad is having more health issues.  His diabetes is not at all controlled, he's lost 100 lbs in 8 months (he's now at 250 lbs, but this is not healthy loss, he lost mostly muscle), he may have a rare bacterial infection in his heart (probably from his heart surgery), and he is needing more and more frequent care.  He keeps having low blood sugar episodes, which cause him to fall and not be able to get up, which then results in a 911 call.  He can't work and doesn't have enough money to cover his mortage and bills if he can't work.  We're (as a family) are looking at options and will likely have to make some difficult decisions soon. 

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