Back in the Saddle(ish)

The last couple of weeks have been a bit crazy. I’ve been pretty stressed out and exhausted due to the launch of a new project at work. The good news is that this marks the fourth major enhancement initiative that I’ve lead since the first of the year and also the last for a while as our team’s focus will be on doing what is necessary to maintain our current functionality while Penn State switches over to a completely new student information system in the fall. During this time, I’ll be stepping back into a more supporting role while the more technical and data quality team members focus on the conversion.

The upshot of that worky-work blah blah blah paragraph is that I haven’t had much mental capacity for blogging lately, but it’s looking like I should have a few months where I get to rest my mental capacity a bit. Hopefully, I can use that excess capacity on bikes and wedding planning.

The other bummer of the week was that we were really stoked to secure a couple of local mountain bikers’ soon-to-be-built mountain bike centric lodge/B&B with an on-site pump track as our wedding venue for next May. Unfortunately, a couple of days after we worked out the details with them, their contractor gave them the bad news that the construction would take much longer than originally planned.

This meant that we would have to find a new venue or wait 2-3 months longer for the wedding. After a night of being super bummed and not sleeping very much after the already stressful two weeks before, we Googled away and found a pretty good venue that was available for April 30, 2016. It costs more than we had hoped to pay, and still falls into the more “traditional” venue category among the State College wedding scene. I did, of course, go through a pouty phase where I kept saying that #gnarwedding2016 would have to be changed to #basicbitchwedding2016, and that we should probably just serve Pumpkin Spice Lattes. However, I’m starting to feel a renewed since of energy about it, and hopefully we can find a plenty of fun (and cost effective) ways to make it “us” even without an on-site pump track.

I'm starting to get my rock skills back, and I had my first-ever clean run of Chicken Peter on Saturday.

Taking a back seat to all of this was the fact that I did finally start riding bikes again after my two-week hiatus to try and heal up my inflamed sit-bone. The bad news is that two weeks of no riding didn’t actually didn’t help it much, so now I’ve just been riding as much as I can stand to, sitting on an ice pack for 20 minutes twice a day, and taking a lot of turmeric supplements to try to cool the inflammation.

I actually got to ride mountain bikes both days over the weekend, and the pain stayed within a tolerable level. All training plans and racing plans are kind of out the window for the summer. Right now I’m just going to ride as much as I can, start doing intervals once a week when I obtain a power meter with my next paycheck, and hopefully be ready a cyclocross season that is better than the last. Once again, the past two weeks have been a lesson in the futility of getting too attached to plans, so I guess I’ll just keep doing the best I can with what I have for a while.