Awesome

This week was filled with more awesome than I can really even explain! It turns out I have some awesome friends and roommates here who are an absolute blast to hang out with and they make our time together pretty much nothing short of spectacular. The fun started on Thursday.

My roommate wanted to go camping for his birthday (and a lot of the group really like to go camping) so I told him to throw something together and I would get the tents and food squared away.

We left Friday after work and headed out of town just a couple hours away. I the car, everyone said that our antics have made them really good last-minute packers and takes all the stress out of going out of town. One of the girls said she was asked at work where she was going camping and she realized she had no idea. She had just thrown some clothes and a toothbrush in a bag and was going to get in the car with us wherever that car was headed.

When we got to the town near the campground, we stopped for food at a local Mercantile and met a person we promptly dubbed Steve the butcher cowboy. We have no idea what his real name was, but he was wearing a cowboy hat and working behind the tiny deli counter (this is a small town, the grocery store wasn’t much bigger than the downstairs of the house). We got tons of food and headed to the one checkout counter. As we were checking out, the sweet lady who was ringing us up asked if we were going to the street dance tonight. Not knowing anything about street dances, we asked what it was. Basically, they close the street down for the evening and have a live local band play music while everyone just listens to the music or dances. We also found out that the campground we were staying at had a dance that night at the pavilion on the water. Now, we had our CHOICE of dances to go to!

We went back that night to the street dance after an awesome chicken dinner and had a great time there!

Saturday, we got up, cooked breakfast (a delicious bacon wrapped, jalapeño and cream cheese stuffed pork roll that Steve the butcher cowboy sold us) and headed out for a 3.25 mile hike. We came upon a cave with crystals in it and spent a few minutes looking around. Before finally packing up and heading down to the river to laze in the water for a little while before heading home. We stopped at Chick-fil-a on the way home to finish off a great camping trip.

That night, we went and saw the new Transformers movies which more than made up for the epic talk-fest that was the second movie. There was more than enough spectacular alien robot battles to keep everyone satisfied!

Today, church was at a local homeless shelter as part of my church’s outreach program. After church, we had lunch with all the residents and then I started heading home. As I pulled into my driveway, I got a call asking if I wanted to go for a bike ride with two of the people from small group. Heck, yeah I do!

We turned it into a swim/bike/run with 1500yd/13mi/2mi and then went to get some fruit smoothies to cap off a phenomenal weekend!

All of that plus we have two more days off to celebrate this nation’s freedom and independence!

Settle

Back home and settling in after finding out it takes a long time to out away all the stuff you lived in for a month without quickly running out of room. When I was in the garage, I had no closet which was a convenient excuse for why there were things all over the floor. After all, people can’t get mad at you when they realize you only store things on the floor because levitating shelving hasn’t been invented yet. Now that I’m in a real room, it is a lot more complicated to put things away all at the time. I don’t think I like it as much.

Because my travels had an indeterminate ending date, I was required to do a lot of things at work in order to leave. Now that I’m back, it takes a certain amount of patience and understanding to go and get everything turned back on and working before I actually go into the office. The past week has been remarkably similar to when I first arrived at work a few years ago and no one really understood what they needed to do with me. I doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in the systems we use, but they are all we have at the moment so I have to have some sort of faith in them.

I got the opportunity to contact a few of my friends who are overseas for various reasons be they for work or pleasure and once again technology pulled through for us. It always makes me grin when someone can be a nation or ocean away and I can still keep up a conversation with them as if they were in a room right down the hall. I don’t often get to talk to a lot of them, so seeing them smiling and laughing is always a good time!

Done

We are finally done our work here!

I would say it is going to be hard to leave, but it’s remarkably simple to hop on a plane and get out of here without even thinking too much.

We actually got done a few days early which is good because it will give me some time to get home and get things all settled in my new bedroom before the folks show up for a visit.

Oh, what’s that?  You are confused why I said bedroom?  You must not have heard.

That’s right, my roommate’s moved me into an actual indoors bedroom while I was away.  That means I now have all the benefits of air conditioning and electricity within just a few short feet of a bathroom.  Fewer bugs, more lights, less heat and more outlets; this could only be good.

It’s going to be a big day folks; I will soon have my own bedroom inside the house.  This hasn’t happened since I was in college.

While we were here, we were given a lot of stuff.  I went to the post office to get some of it in the mail to alleviate/solve two problems.  First, I would have had to pay for more luggage on the airplane and second, I don’t want to have to lug all that stuff around the airport.  When you have three or four bags, that’s more luggage than hands and it usually doesn’t end up working out as well as it sounds.  I’m all about paying someone else to carry my bags across the country for me!

Uniforms

We have been going through a lot of uniforms here because of the weather and it turns out free laundry services make a world of difference. We have around 15 or so washing machines in the building and they are practically always running with someones clothes getting squeaky clean. If we didt have those washers and dryers available for us, I am fairly certain none of us would smell near as pleasant as we do right now.

On the packing list for this trip (yes, I realize we are adults and having a packing list may seem kind of belitteling), they recommended you bring four sets of PT gear to wear when you work out. What they DON’T tell you is that you will be burning through those four sets at a rate of two to three a day. Basically, we were having to constantly wash clothes to keep from having to rewear sweaty clothes. Almost all of us took a trip to the store and picke up three or more sets to keep from having to wash tiny loads of laundry each and every day; now we can go at least two or three days each.

We are nearing the final for the class which should be bittersweet. My team is awesome and has a lot of fun people that are all headed back to their respective homes when we finish up. Thankfully, almost all of them have Facebook or Twitter so we will be able to keep track of one another once our jobs take us our own separate ways once more. Thank goodness for tehnology; what did old people ised to do when they were little?!