The Grinch

Am I still alive...in a word yes. Back to school for 3 weeks now and we are just getting in some last minute tests before a short holiday break. The holidays won't be quite like normal due to having some major exams the day we return to school on Jan. 4th. Bah humbug.

My Thanksgiving break was awesome and I was very sad to see it end, but I did have a great trip out East, did some fun biking and overall just decompressed a lot. It feels so long ago already.

It hasn't taken me long to recompress however, as this quarter is going to be my hardest to date for sure.

I am currently taking Pharmacology 2, Physiology 2, Microbiology, EKG, Clinical Medicine Labs, Clinical Medicine 2, Women's Health, Preparation for Clinical Practice, and a dumb InterProgram Core Medicine class. Each of these classes have multiple exams except for the last one so I am a little busy to say the least.

Winter in here...it was 75 and sunny this weekend. I know I know, I should miss winter...but I don't so there you have it. I got out for a 1.5 hr ride and it was LOVELY. Due to the weather and the studying, I haven't really found my Christmas cheer yet. Maybe when I ship off to Ohio on Tuesday I will find it in the 2 inches of snow. I have exactly one night to purchase all and I mean ALL of my Christmas presents for my family after my last exam on Monday before flying out on Tuesday.

I am soooo screwed.

Happy Holiday!!!

Soooooo happy.

Finals are done. Seven finals in 6 days...brutal. I am still delirious but 'oh so happy'.

Heading off to grab a brew and listen to some live music.

Hopefully my brain muscle will get a break and my body muscle can take over for two weeks. I am going to ride till I puke tomorrow...it will be awesome.

Close

I can almost taste the dirt and sweat that is awaiting my return to fun outdoor activities following finals this week.

Five days, six tests...let's do this thing. This Friday can't come soon enough.

I promise to post at least one outdoor action shot, maybe even some blood if I get lucky enough to fall off my bike :)

TIREDDDDDzzzzz...Snort..

I am burnt out and sick right now...but there is no rest for me yet. I got up at 4:30 am for a test this morning and am feeling it right now. I have two weeks of school and then finals left in this quarter. This is by far the hardest mental challenge I have ever done. The amount of information I am cramming in is ridiculous...

I worry, how much will I retain? Will I feel like an idiot when I start clinical rotations next June? How am I already almost halfway through the didactic (classes) portion of my education? This seems exceptionally fast.

I have learned how to do a complete physical exam, including and up to a well woman's gynecological exam. We practice on standardized patients, and that was an experience to say the least.

I have a fun finals week coming up with exams Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday plus an additional full physical exam on a patient which will fall on one of those days. Sort of makes me want to crawl in a hole, but mostly that is lack of sleep talking and the fact that I want to be in bed with a horrible head cold rather than sitting up studying for 6 hours a night.

Am I whining...maybe just a tiny tiny bit...but sometimes you just need to eat ice cream and cry ya know?

These nerve lesions aren't going to learn themselves so I am need to get back to it. Also damn the heart, it is a complicated crazy little organ that takes a lot of studying to understand. To bad 27% of us will end up dying from it's malfunction.

Need bed...must study.

Is it already nearly October?

Apparently it is almost October. Time flys when you are having fun or stuck in a bubble of "learnens".

Definition of "THE BUBBLE": when life receeds as I sit in the library on a Friday night and only when I get up to leave at 10 pm do I feel tired or hungry or in the need of a work out and only then do I remember that I have an hour drive home to a home and a husband.

My transformation is becoming complete into full on random medicinal fact robot girl. World domination is following shortly behind.

This quarter is pinging along nicely, with many of my classes interweaving each other in order to fully maximize my brain's potential. Pharmacology feeds directly into Physiology which is highlighted by Neurology. Pathology is the bottom line on learning Physical Diagosis and is rounded out by Epidemiology or the study of infectious diseases and how they trend. My final class Pediatrics sort of incorporates all of the above in how child growth and develop and how things can and do go wrong.

As far as work-life balance, I am fully committed to this year as a year off of life so I just fit in whatever I can when I can. Mostly this means gym time but I do get out for one mountain bike ride per week. For whatever reason, I feel like I get better on my bike every time I ride. I still think I am dialing in the whole clipless pedal thing and so my climbing is improving with each ride.

Tom and I had our two year anniversary this week. Two years ago, I was dragging him to 400 foot falls in poring rain storms and we were clinging to the edge of a zodiac raft in 10 foot waves. Good times. Life is quite different now than it was then, but Tom is my rock in a sea of change and we are in everything together. Cheers to being such an awesome husband Tom and to letting me "practice" eye and nose physical exam skills on ya and only yelling "you're blinding me..AHHHH" a couople of times.

Peacenout. Some pics from a lazy Ohio ride with the fam during my last trip home in August.

Today, I shall write.

I will give you two words in which to base your judgement of me: surviving and thriving.

I will give you one word in which to base your judgement of this blog: dead.

It is hard to understand why I am not blogging at all. Part of it is obvious...I don't have a whole lot of extra time. But really it is more than that, because I could jot off a quick blog entry every couple of days or even weekly and it wouldn't take that much time.

I think part of it is the feeling of the unnecessary. I started blogging for three reasons: 1. Boredom...in massive amounts, due to sitting in front of a computer for hours every day while hating it. 2. Because I was making a conscious and very real effort to live my real "non cube" life in exciting ways in which I was was taking lots of cool pictures, pushing myself to learn new things and experience Arizona for all it's glory. 3. I wanted to write as a catharsis for the feelings of unsatisfaction of the career/life path I was on and the exploration of determining what I wanted my new path to be.

These reasons have faded with a new challenge, more intellectually based than adventurous, and a feeling of immense rightness in that direction I am heading. I have still gotten out and explored some cool things, but I haven't been taking as many pictures, and I have felt the need to savor these special rare moments of nature to only myself.

I don't really want the blog to die, because I think it still serves it's purpose and I am proud of the history I have solidified through it. But it may be on hiatus, pending desire to write, because I don't see much point in writing simply to alleviate guilt for not.

Who knows what time will tell?

Also, on an aside, I completed my first quarter of school, passed my classes and got pretty damn good grades in all reality. I am now in a new set of challenging classes, that are much more related to real medicine, diseases, treatment and assessment and I really like it. Time is FLYING and my previous life with computers seems so distant to the bubble I have immersed myself in.

Thanks for still reading, most likely via Google Reader.

Cranial Nerve X

POP QUIZ: Where is Hannah?

A). She was kidnapped by aliens.

B.) She fell off her bike and broke all fingers and can't type with her tongue.

C.) She is stuck in the middle of finals week and can't wait until next Thursday when she will have a glorious 10 days off from the endurance sprint that is known as PA school.

If you guess correctly, you can help yourself to a cookie from the jar of will it never end.

Here are some photos from the trip to Fossil Creek I took a couple of weekends ago when I pretended like I didn't have studying to do. We camped in hammocks by the river and it was glorious.

Where did La Chaser go?

Ummm yeah....so about the blog....

Sort of haven't had any time to write lately. Or hike. Or bike. Or do any sort of "fun" activity. My life has been consumed with school. I go from one test to another with the feeling of cram between each one. I am surviving and thriving, but it takes a lot of work.

I have discovered, that I am smart enough and hard working enough and have enough dedication to studying to succeed in my classes. But it takes all my time. I really really have no life. I have also learned that I can study for 12 hours straight...seriously not a problem, flys by. I have also learned that I can actually survive on four hours of sleep, but it takes a lot of caffeine.

But the good news is, I have almost learned the entire body anatomically. I know every nerve, vessel, muscle, and bone in the body from the neck down...in eight

weeks. Finals are in three weeks and then I get a week off before coming back to even harder and more exciting classes.

I just had the priviledge of buying my first diagnostic set and stethoscope so I can now do a physical exam. I should the the hit at parties from here on out, listening to beer course through people's bladder.

Since I don't have any exams for a couple of weeks, I am getting out of town this weekend to camp by a lake on Friday night, and camp beside a waterfall on Saturday night. It is going to be glorious. It is amazing how 12 weeks of siting in a library makes you so grateful just to get out for a hike let alone camp.

But as I have said in most of my posts lately, each and every day I am more confident in my decision for this career. I actually may get to have a job I love some day. Glory be.

Have a grrrreeeeeaat weekend ladies and gentlemen. This is where I will be:

Changes.

On Friday I was conducting a mock chief complaint, history, and review of systems with a paid actor who happened to be an older man complaining of a red eye. Our school hires people to be difficult and they video tape us to see how we handle things. As he started yelling at me when I asked him about his sexual history (we were supposed to), I realized how bizarre the whole situation was. Five weeks ago, I wasn't talking to elderly men about how they can't get it up anymore.

Funny how quickly life can change. I can honestly say I am really starting to LOVE school. It is still ridiculously fast and requires studying all the time, but it feels more right every day.

Big test tomorrow morning on the abdomen, and chest so I must peace out. Lata.

A Day in the Life of a PA Student.

There is a reason that I have all but dropped off the face of the earth. Let me give you a taste of today which I assure you is very much the norm during the week. It changes on the weekends where it is just study for 14 hours straight.

6 am - Up, pack clothes to wear to school, lunch, coffee, and bookbag.

6:30 - 7:30 am - Out the door for my 1 hour commute while listening to anatomy lectures.

7:30 am - Workout at school gym, shower, eat breakfast. Study while on bike, ellipitical.

9 -12 pm - Three hours of behavioral medicine class (replace with Biochemistry on other days except for Thursdays when class starts at 8 instead of 9).

12 pm - Lunch for a blissful 30 min.

12:30 pm - Prepare for anatomy class at 1.

1 - 3 pm - Two back to back anatomy lectures.

3 - 5 pm - Cadaver Dissection Anatomy Lab

5 - 8 pm - Study at library.

8 - 9 pm - Drive home while listening to Biochemisty lectures.

9 - 9:30 pm - Stop at store for a couple of groceries.

9:30 - 10 - Dinner....STARVING.

10 - 12 am - More study. Possibly say hi to husband.

12 am - 6am - Hopefully sleep unless early exam requires I get up earlier than normal.

Did you see the blog time built in there? I didn't either. So check out some archives, look at some cool photos of Arizona and check back in the third week of August for my week long break where I assure you I will be doing something TBD (but I promise it will be hella awesome).

Week 3 of Boring Hannah

Argh...can't believe I haven't posted in over a week.

I am hanging in there. I just finished my first two big exams in both anatomy and biochemistry and guess what, am already behind in both classes. We have our exams at 6:30 am so that we don't "have" to miss any class...I call bull$h*t. I am starting to figure this school thing out to a degree.

It is 5x more intense than my previous undergrad degree of computer engineering, but the concepts aren't really any more difficult. It is just the amount of knowledge in a few weeks that we are supposed to get that make it tough.

I am bad at bulk memorization and really need to spend time getting visuals and figuring out things that can help me. I had a steep learning curve on the first tests of both classes because I don't actually think my puny few prerequisite classes were enough to prepare me for this program. A vast majority of my peer have MUCH MUCH more knowledge than me coming into the program. I am studying my ass off though and think I did well enough on my first two exams. I held a human heart today and cleaned the blood out of its vessels...the whole experience is surreal and awesome so I can't complain that much.

My life or what used to be my life is definitely suffering right now. I only have time for eating, commuting, studying and semi regular gym trips right now. Fun things like Saturday's on my mountain bike just aren't happening while I figure out how to survive this program.

Anyway, I am taking off for the weekend to head to San Diego on Friday. I may regret it when my next exam rolls around and I will definitely be studying part of the time there, but with no major tests next week, it ocean time baby.

Firehose Part II

For today's blog update...see last week's.

No seriously. More fire hose drinking, more dead bodies, more insane amounts of anatomy stuffed into a brain that had been on a mental diet for the last 3.5 years.

We have our first exam next week which covers 1/4 of the body. It is a four hour exam. Yes I realize that I have only had 2 weeks of school. This is how we PAs roll.

I am going to be spending this entire weekend studying, because for some reason, I am having a hard time memorizing 75 muscles and their innervations, orgins, insertions and actions (x3 because most have multiple). Memorization wasn't a big part of the engineering curriculum...so it is different.

I still feel very behind the curve as far as previous anatomy knowledge. Most people come from the health care world and just know a lot of the easier stuff. I have to learn it all right now and it is showing. Can't help but feel stupid at times. I am sure to catch up at some point, once we get past the stuff that my fellow classmates already know. Or maybe I am just not as smart as my mother thinks I am. It will be fun uncovering this. Sarcasm...sarcasm.

I have been faithfully to the gym but I am sorely missing things like mountain biking. My "I always drag him along when camping" husband is going camping without me inFlagstaff. Boo freaking hoo...what is the world coming to? I have virtually given up reading all blogs right now (and news/tv/any activity that can't be coupled with studying anatomy...i even study on the stairclimber). My brain is tired, but all the thinking it burning calores (my lowest weight in awhile) so that is good right?

Well enough bitching, time for my 40 min. commute. In all reality though, if you asked me whether I would rather be back at In-hell (my previous co., figure it out) or doing this new insane dance of the first year medical student, dance on my friends.

Signing off for another week. Cross fingers I won't fail my first exam.

Fire Hose Drinking

Wow...can't believe it has almost only been a week since I have posted. During orientation, they told us that the pace of learning would feel like we were trying to take a drink out of a fire hose.

We all laughed then. It is so true. We had four days of class this week, and I can't even believe how much information we both learned and are responsible for learning. We had 8 separate anatomy lectures and 9 hours of anatomy lab dissecting my first real human. We had 4 biochemistry lectures along with about 12 other lectures on everything from medical documentation, taking a patients history, etc. We have four days of class, but every Friday, they schedule study session and lab reviews so I will be on campus that day also. Lectures are so fast that it is impossible to catch everything so a lot of weekend review is needed to master the topic before the brain dump starts again.

It is equals parts amazing, ridiculous, fun and exhausting.

Alert. I will probably be talking about things like dissection of a cadaver quite a bit this quarter...so if that type of stuff bothers you, take note.

We started off day one with 5 hours of lecture followed by the immediate dissection of our cadaver's back skin and muscles. When you cut away the skin and reflect it (pull it back) it allows us to see all the fascia (connective tissue), fat and hopefully the outer back muscles. Our cadaver is a larger lady so we had to contend with a large amount of back fat which we had to remove before we could examine the superficial layer of extrinsic muscles. We uncovered layers of muscles until we were able to examine the spinal cord. We also cut into the spinal cord to see the layers inside of it. Lab was my favorite part this week.

My commute too and from school was about 40 minutes each way. It is shitty but actually better than I expected. I find that the amount of focus needed for the 8 hours of class each day followed by a couple hours of studying and a gym workout burns me up so bad that I do struggle on the drive home. I definitely foresee my caffeine intake increasing dramatically but that is unavoidable. I did find a carpool partner that I will switch some rides with, but she doesn't like to stick around to study or spend extra hours in the lab so I won't trade rides with her every day.

The program is going to be 1 year of this insane schedule, but the amount of information I will learn in that 1 year will be amazing. I did meet a cool biker friend in my class who I took out to Black Canyon Trail on Friday morning for a quick ride.

Okay, gotta study again. Party on my friends.

Schools Not Out For Summer

Orientation is over in all it's amazing glory.  Two days of 8 hours of presentations...fun fun.

This is what I learned.

1.  We can have a keg on campus but don't get drunk.

2.  Don't cheat.  No one wants a doctor who cheated their way through school.

3.  Wear old clothes to anatomy lab.  Dissecting bodies is grusome business.

4.  Expect to get stressed/anxious/depressed.  Apparently PA students use the counselor the most.

5.  Studying is generally a good idea.

6.  My commute is going to be around 40 min. each way.  It is going to get real old real quick.

7.  I need to read actively not passively whatever that means.

8.  Everyone needs some down time. 

9.  Everyone who works at Midwestern seems to love their job.  Even the librarian and the security guard.

10. This next year will be one of the most exciting and crazy years of my life.

I am very excited for school to start tomorrow.  Let the good times roll.

When Fun Must End

My ticket on the unemployed with nothing to do train is coming to an end. It was a great 2 .5 week ride while it lasted.

I can't keep track of all the fun things I did...and I am finally getting into shape again. But alas, tomorrow begins the new journey of excitement and good times studying in the library so cheetos and flappy arms here I come.

Orientation is tomorrow. I am excited to meet my new classmates who I will see for 8 hours a day for the next 14 months. I am electing myself "chief adventure officer" and plan to see any of them want to go explore a waterfall this weekend as a "welcome to arizona" trip.

Speaking of waterfalls, I hit up Christopher Creek canyon a couple of weeks ago and although the water level was a tad lower than last year, it was burrr... freezing. I am made of steel though (aka have body fat to keep me warm) so I didn't freeze as much as some of my puny friends Angel and Tim.

Moab Rocks!!

I got tired of my old header so I made a new one rather than create a substantive blog post. This is my last free weekend before orientation next Wednesday. Maybe I will find the motivation to blog when I start school again and maybe I won't have anytime...we'll see.

Moab was sick, really really awesome sick. We biked Slick Rock Trail and Porcupine Rim Trail (with no shuttle...brutal ride to the trail head), and hiked in Arches National Park. I didn't want to leave..seriously. I improved my riding skills by a bunch and learned how much more I need to improve by another bunch. Overall, sweet trip.

Buckskin Gulch: Chocolate Pudding Edition I

My first week off of work, and I am slacking in the blogging department...tssk tssk. Mission heat biking acclimation isn't going to do itself.

So I have a recommendation for any adventurers out there in the Four Corners area. Get off your duff and make a reservation to hike through Buckskin Gulch..it is worth it.

I have done slot canyons before and I have hiked along rivers many many times, but never has the grandness of the extremes been this visible. It was deeper, longer, muddier, and more beautiful than any of canyon predecessors that had come before it.

When cliffs rise up 400 feet and you can't see the sky all while you can touch both sides of the canyon with your arms spread out, this is a cool feeling. I had a tired cranky moment about 7 hours into the hike where I thought, "I am tired of this dark narrow feeling and I just want to see the sky for for a minute". Then I promptly punched myself in the face and started to appreciate this amazingness of the above ground tunnel I was hiking through.

Without further ado, I present you a picture story...my best writing.

We started the day a little later than planned so the sun was up bright and hot. We dropped into Buckskin Gulch via the Wire Pass entrance. The hike quickly drops into some small narrows and past huge red stone rock walls. Here is our group of 10.

After the Wire Pass trail head dumped into Buckskin, we quickly learned of the challenge of the weekend. Mud holes. Yup, the water spots I envisioned wading varied more from chocolate pudding to chocolate peanut butter consistency. It was ice cold and would try to suck your shoes off. I gave up trying to get clean after the second one when I realized that there was no water to wash off in and that another mud hole was lurking around the corner.

We stopped for lunch and hoped that the worst of the mud was over...it wasn't. The next section of Buckskin Gulch is unbelievably narrow, high and beautiful. There were some fun down climbs, a lot of loose travel over boulders and then a whole series of fun deep mud holes to explore.

We finally rolled into part of the canyon that widened out enough to safely camp in about 8 hours after we started. It was a long, hard but amazing day and we were ready for food, a shower and bed. Except there was no water to wash in...so muddy we stayed. We saw a small rattler snake near our camp but we were too tired to care. My knee was a little achy by the end of the day, but overall held up to my 35 lb pack with 5 liters of water quite nicely.

Most of the better photos by Dale Wiggins).

Day 2 to come....I am off to Moab Utah now for more adventures and will be back sometime next week.

When Everything Falls Into Place

Tomorrow is my last day of work. It sounds so crazy to me.

Almost exactly two years ago, on May 7th 2007, I posted my first official blog entry (after my introductory post) as seen here.

In this post I wrote about my feelings of unsatisfaction I had with regards to my job and my purpose in life. This was one of the main reasons I started blogging, to force myself to analyze and confront emotions that I am very good at ignoring. This is what I said then.

Life, $, and the Pursuit of Happiness:

This is something I struggle with frequently. I work in a very 'high tech' company at the top of its game. Its competitive, corporate, political, and incredibility results oriented. We call ourselves a 'meritocracy' which means that your success at work is based upon the work you do and not who you know. While the entire concept of this is very questionable (is this ever completely true?), there is no doubt that they pay you well in return for sucking your soul out in your 6x6 cubicle. The question is, is IT worth it?

Money makes the world go round. Stop kidding yourself, its important. I deposit a lot of credits in the bank of happiness doing activities that are paid for by my soul sucking job. But sometimes I wonder if is isn't the cause of what is creating the large void to be filled in the first place. And maybe part of the missing passion of my job comes from the feeling that I don't really deserve the money in the first place.

I go back and forth over my thoughts on this but here is the bottom line. Money can't buy you happiness, and maybe some day I will quit my job and get paid badly to do something that really inspires me, but in the meantime, I will just take my pay check and use it to counter balance my life by reaching out and grabbing at opportunities that cross my path.

Now, on the eve of actually quitting my job, to pursue my new dreams, it is all becoming full circle. I am incredibly proud of the effort and resolve that I put in to make this happen. I am incredibly thankful for all the support I have received from my family and friends both physically and emotionally. And most of all, I am so lucky to have a best friend and husband who is willing to let me take this journey even though it impacts our life in many ways. So here's to being sentimental for one minute, and really appreciating that life sometimes works out just as it is mean to. I really believe that.

Black Canyon Biking

Two weekends ago, before I hiked 21 miles down Buckskin Gulch (which was awesome btw, pics and recap coming soon), Sarah and I took a trip up to Black Canyon to do a little biking. I had never been up to this area before, but it is only about 30 miles north of the Phoenix metropolis so it is a nice quick drive up there.

We took off from the northern most point on the Black Canyon Trail and rode south. The trail immediately starts to climb up a ridge along tight switchback along a canyon with sheer drops on one side. It was instantaneously beautiful. I can't believe that I have never been to this trail before.

The trail then drops down and crosses the Black River before climbing once again up a large switchbacked ridge. The trail was created to be totally rideable as long as you are decent at navigating 180 degree turns. We got slightly heated during this climb as there is no shade here and it was a pretty warm day. I think more riding on this trail will have to wait to either cooler or much earlier in the morning times.

The trail drops back down to the river level and we decided to turn around at this point. As we neared the high point again, Sarah's somehow broke her derailer which made for an interested ride back to the car. She was able to ride the long downhill before resorting to pushing up the last couple of ridges. Overall, a great day on the bike. I was a little less comfortable on my clipless pedals with a narrow trail and a cliff on one side so I had a couple of nice tip overs in some rock gardens. Ah, oh well, live and learn I guess.

Bees Knees

Things are looking up my friends. I can count the days left spent in by 6x6 personal box on less than two hands and I have a 3 day trip hiking the Buckskin Gulch Canyon this weekend which I am pretty jazzed about.

I had a very laid back but nice weekend wherein I learned about the death process of bees. It may sound traumatic, and actually it was. I know the bees rights people may send me nasty letters and I can only hope for a PETA sponsored youtube ad, but I was responsible for the complete devastation of literally hundreds of bees this weekend. See we have a slight bee infestation problem. They built their honey comb nest in a unaccessible part of our attic right above our master bathroom. For over a year now, we have had honey residue dripping down onto our toilet. It sounds worse than it is, because we never had any bees in the house or outside to really bother us, only our neighbors. But this past spring, the bees invited their friends to come live with them due to probable bad mortgages they had made on their other houses. And all the sudden bees dead and alive started appearing in our house.

This my friends, is a problem for me. I have the good luck and appealing smell necessary to always get stung by bees. So when our neighbor's yard guy came over and complained on Saturday that he had gotten stung 5 times because of the bees covering the wall of our house, I wasted no time in calling for the bee murderer, aka Jimmy The Bee Guy. He came, he sprayed, he told me we need to cut our ceiling out in order to remove the giant honeycomb sitting on it, and then he took my hard earned $175 with the pleasant refrain that it would take a couple of days for all the bees to die. What he failed to mention is that all the pissed off angry bees who had been gassed with nerve toxins would fly into my house and run crazy like into walls, the tv, windows and the floor all the while making terrible distress sounds which freaked me out.

I of course was home alone this weekend with my lovely husband being out of the state so disposal of the bee carcus job came down to yours truly. I don't like killing most living creatures, but let me just say that I don't feel sorry for bees or rats based on past experiences. They are basically all dead now, and Tom has promised to be in charge of honey comb removal project before new bees move into it.

Anyway, all in all it was a pretty beeeusy weekend and I did some wicked awesome 'cliff where you could fall to your death' biking on Sunday. Beeeusy...haha. Get it?

GPTW & Chasm Creek

Still kicking it. T MINUS 9ish days and counting. I am starting to wrap up things at work and beat people into submission until they agree to take over my projects. I am not that important in the grand scheme of my company but I have met with great resistance in transitioning my projects because I am the only one in my team doing what I am doing and it may be *gasp* 'a lot of work' to try to do what I do. Vindication I tell you. And you thought my job was blogging. That is only a part of the day I tell you ;)

I have also had a bunch of my coworkers express real and true sorrow that I am leaving their humble abode. This gives me warm tinglies all over. Afterall, I am a valuable member of the party planning committee and part of the GPTW (true acronym for "great place to work") value system. When you work at large machine companies, they actually have to have GPTW as one of their core values in their mission statement. I always have been of the opinion if you have to say it, it just might not be true. Like how all the generic brands have the word "Quality" in them...hmmm....

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Since I have been negligent with my blogs and/or photos lately, I thought I would add some pictures from a recent Sierra Adventure Race near Campe Verde Arizona that I volunteered for.

AB and I volunteered to test the orienteering course during the long paddle portion. Rick (RD) was even nice enough to show me how to actually use a compass to take bearings. It was pretty cool.

The Great Verde River.

I also got to play on the course photographer for the orienteering section which was at the end. I was amazed at how fast some of these teams blew through it.

Yoga Slackers on the move...they came in 2nd I think.

The winners Team Big Fish sprinting to the finish. I could barely keep up on my bike they were moving so fast.

Cooking meatball subs as the post race meal.

After we finished volunteering, we decided to go check out Chasm Creek which was the far point on the course. It ends at a little waterfall area in a canyon that was just beautiful.

Great light and beautiful colors on the hike back to Chasm Creek.

Dead trees = nice nature's sleeping bags.

AB checks out the little waterfall at Chasm Creek Canyon.