A Really Good Day

I never do "day in the life of" posts because I'm actually very boring day over day. But yesterday was quite special in a normal day kind of way. Walk you through it.

6:40 am
Woke up feeling refreshed and a few minutes before the alarm clock went off. Breakfast was oatmeal with raisins and a banana, delish! Got in my first workout of pushups (40) and some planking, followed by about 30 minutes of yoga. The time on the mat was particularly calming and felt great, and I haven't been on the yoga mat very much lately so this was much appreciated.

8:20 am
Made my way into the office. The commute is only about 6 minutes now, and that is quite nice. I am starting to get settled in at this new job, and I've been assigned a special project that is really fun. My new coworkers are really smart, and this system is very complex. I have been feeling like it's too complex for me to fully understand, but trying to have patience in learning the new system. That's not easy. This is week 3 of the new job, and I'm still waiting on that first paycheck to come in, which is equally frustrating. Finally starting to make some progress on the new project was a nice confidence boost.

The Oval, right behind my office building on the NC State Centennial Campus - BEAUTIFUL

11:15 am
We regularly have a meeting scheduled from 11:30 to 1pm on Wednesdays which directly conflicts with my noon swim practice. I hate this meeting anyway. Today it got cancelled! Yay! I can actually make the Wednesday swim practice! But I have no gear.

11:30 am
go to swim practice. Swing by the house first to pick up my gear and some extra food - love that short commute! It really does make a huge difference. We got 3200 yards in the pool in an hour and 15 minutes with some hard 100's that I absolutely crushed. Felt great to be in the water, so glad I was able to make practice.

1:30 pm
Back to the office, eating at the desk. Realized I brought a lunch that was fit for a non-workout day. Right after I finish that, someone tells me there is catering leftovers in the main break room, so I grab an extra sandwich from there to finish things off, and a brownie. I get a text about a bill pay, and Kelley tells me that both paychecks came in today! I get paid every week and it took a few weeks for the system to catch up. Ah, getting paid on the 29th of the month is a real relief when you have to make a mortgage payment and the first health insurance payment on the new plan (not withheld) so we paid all of the bills. amazing.

Then I cleared a huge milestone on my new project. For my fellow nerds, I was able to use a console app to authenticate TFS online, execute a query and process the work items returned individually. This is very challenging, and finally getting the result set I was expecting was a serious win!

4 pm
Work held a social hour in the big Centennial room on the first floor. This meant free beer and catering for all employees, and apparently they do this once a month. My boss found us all down there and told me how excited he was about my project and that he left a LexisNexis pint glass on my desk because all of the cool kids had one. I'm cool now. And finally full. Nothing better than free food (and beer!) after a nice hard swim practice. I went home after the social hour and got to hang with the fam for a bit.

6:30 pm
Choir practice started and was wonderful. I don't talk much about singing or church on here, but that is how I worship best. I love my church and the family feeling we have in the choir, usually about 20 - 30 people singing. Practice ran a bit long tonight, then we end up hanging out talking for a while after practice.  Here's a video Kelley took from the service a few weeks ago where I got to lead a song of worship.

8:20 pm
Hitting the gym for my last workout of the day. Like I mentioned earlier, I am on a marathon training plan again and I had to get in my 6 miles with a 25 minute tempo section in there. I went into the gym feeling grateful for exactly how well everything had gone so far. There was no way I had the energy or stamina to pull off a good run after all of that. But since it was the day where good things happen, I nailed it. Hit my tempo time, felt good the whole way. It's too hot to run outside anymore here in NC, so I'm on the treadmill all the time again. Baseline was at a 7.5 speed (8 minute miles), and for the tempo 25 minutes I took it up to a 7.8 mph (7:38 pace) until it was time to cool down.

9:30 pm
Made it home tired and satisfied. Icing on the cake, June 30 is the next price increase for 2 of the marathons on my 12 in 8 months list. After paying all of the bills, we still had enough left over to go ahead and register for both of them. So I'll be going back for my 3rd Tobacco Road marathon in March, and my first time tackling the City of Oaks marathon will be in November. Both are local, here in Raleigh so the logistics are easy.

11:30 pm
back to bed.

See? that's a totally normal day. I went to work, had some solid workouts, got to spend some time with Kelley and the kids in between, and capped it off with registering for 2 marathons. It just so happened that everything went right in some very incredible ways.

Since about mid-May when I found out my last job contract was not going to be extended, it has been kind of high stress around here. I was glad to finally be done with that place, and it only took a week to get this Lexis job lined up. But the transition into Lexis has been incredibly frustrating. I know the zen theories about suffering (everybody has both good days and bad, in the end they number about the same) but to string a bunch of bad days together like we had then was really tough. Being unexpectedly unemployed for over a week while I waited on a background check to clear threw a lot of money stuff up in the air. It was a valley for sure. Then stuff started to go right again. I got into the payroll system. The complex software started to roll up. Today was a real peak. it makes me humble and grateful.