Spoiled Beach Plans and a Weekend of Fun

On Friday, just as I sat down at the beach I had a call from my adviser. The reviews of my paper that had been submitted came back and to answer one of the questions there is quite a bit of work that needs to be done. My God this process is annoying. Now I am not being paid by my university and as my health insurance expired the second they stopped paying me I had to go out and find bridge insurance to get me from that point to when my new insurance will take over. I know it's not all about the money, but rather the pursuit of science...but it's always a little bit about the money. Had I chosen to stay in the field this wouldn't be a big deal, it would just be another little thing that had to be done. I will still do it, it's just that right now I have to prepare for my defense talk which is now in a week and three days, I have a new and super exciting new job starting in three weeks and so now this looks like it will have to be done in the evenings and on the weekends. I'm frustrated because of course I want all the work to end up in a publication, and it has to, I just wish that this kind of question had come up in the already long and involved review process so that I could get away from it. Anyways. frustrating to say the least. So I left the beach to start looking at that. I thought that the last month or so would be a relaxing break but it's been nothing of the kind. From job interviews, interview tests, studying for interviews (even though I know that's impossible), last Friday was the first "day off" that I thought I could have. Oh well.

Jason and I spent the rest of the weekend a) talking about our new apartment and b) spectating a half ironman competition in Racine, WI. This girl did the race and holy shit man, she's amazing. In fact everyone that day was awesome. Jason and I stood at the finish line watching people finish, and there were a lot of faces filled with determination, tears and laughter. Jason and I are more and more intersted in doing triathlons as they just look really really fun. After we got home I found out that my new boss's wife did the race that day too, which is quite the small world.

We drove Barb up there on Saturday to check in and to drop her bike off and then Jason and I had a barbeque and then tickets to the White Sox (I know I know...still an evening of baseball is fun) game. We had to leave the game early due to an early wake up call on Sunday. Jason and I got up at 2:30 in the morning and left at about 3:15 so that we could stop at the starbucks that is open 24 hours on North Ave. It's awesome when you are freshly awake and there are people that had yet to go to bed. Awesome. We picked up Barb right on time and headed north so she could get setup and marked up and all that good stuff.

The race started about an hour late due to fog. We walked with Barb to the start of the swim and stood among the masses of wetsuit clad folks. The water was a brisk 55 degrees yesterday! Just about when the swim started we headed back towards where the transition was so we could catch Barb between the swim and the bike and then her starting out on the Bike. She was a lot faster than we though she was going to be and spanked her goal out of the park. She transitioned fast and was on the bike.

While she was biking Jason and I walked around downtown Racine which was deader than a doornail. It was such a cute downtown and we thought that there would be a cafe or something and there was *nothing*. We headed back to just about the start of the bike where we had seen a restaurant. We had a great breakfast and then headed back to the race to watch the leaders finish up for the day. They broke a new course record finishing in about 3 Hours and 49 minutes. After watching them finish up we headed back to the end of the bike course to wait for Barb to finish up. We saw her and she mentioned that she couldn't keep any food down. We ran down to the transition area and saw her making her way out on the run. After seeing her start off we headed farter up the run course so we could see her at about the 6 mile mark of the run. I walked with her for a bit and the she continued on her way. We moved our spectating party to about the 7.5 mile mark saw her one last time before heading back to the finish.

We knew that she could break 8 hours if she kept moving. Other friends of Barb's were there too and so one of them went back to run with her. When we saw her coming we all starting screaming and cheering and she gave us a triumphant fist pump and ran through the finish line. The announcer said that she finishing in 7:59:30 making the 8 hour cut off by 30 seconds.

She was awesome and it was a really fun day. I took about 250 pictures and hopefully I got a few that work. I'll have a gallery up on SmugMug within the next few days/weeks depending on how much time I have to go through them. I'll have at least a few up soon though.

Alright with that, the duty of working on my talk calls and so I must go. Congrats again to Barb it was a really fun day!