Time ain't on my side

It seems I'm kinda forgetting what my house looks like I'm home so seldom lately.  I did get a good bit of work done on the canoe early last week, but haven't touched it in a week now.  The patches all took and look pretty good, but the gunwales still need to be shaped and riveted on.  I headed down to Chicago to watch my friend Erik run in the Chicago marathon this past weekend.  I took off right from work Friday for the cities to meet with my carpool crew down to Waukesha.  We stayed with Kyle and Kelli, a couple of high school friends.

Saturday was a nice relaxed day, just hanging out, fielding a couple calls from work, and getting in a short run with Erik.  Saturday night a few of us headed into Chicago so we could more easily get to the race the next morning without needing to hop on a train at 2:00 AM.  Elena and I stayed at one of her friends and got to sleep in until 5:30, not bad considering.  We biked the 7 miles to the race start, a really great ride along Lake shore drive.  There was a heavy fog over the lake, and a great view of the skyline.  I tried to take a couple pictures, but they came back very grainy.

Erik was hoping to run in the low 2:20's for the race, which is around 5:20 mile pace.  He started at 5:17's to keep with the women's pacer who was running a 2:18 pace.  This would have gotten him an Olympic trials qualification.  

Biking was a spectacular way to cheer, but Elena and I really had to book it to get back ahead of him, since he was on a closed course and we had to deal with traffic, stop lights, ect.  It was a lot of fun flying around on roads closed to cars and weaving around through roads with slow traffic.  I would not have wanted to be driving a car near the marathon course, but biking afforded a lot of latitude in where we were able to get to.  It was a bit worrisome running red lights and weaving through traffic with police all over the place, but they were too busy controlling traffic around the race course to bother with a couple bikers.  We caught Erik every couple miles or so for the first 8 miles, then headed to the halfway point to catch him there.  He was a bit off the pace by that point, and looked like he had backed way off.  Next we hopped ahead to the 17 mile mark.  We waited there and didn't see him, and didn't see him.  We met a few of the other people who were down there cheering and all kept an eye out for him long past when he should have finished.  We finally got a call that he had gotten bad cramps and ended up dropping out.  Very disappointing news considering all the training he has put in and how great his race start was.  We headed back to the finish area to watch the race leaders come in.  For much of the early race there was a pack of about 10 at the front.  Ryan Hall was dropped by the half and at mile 17 the pack was about 6.  At the finish Moses Mosop had easily left everyone behind and cruised in to take the win in about 2:05.

We grabbed some great Chicago deep dish pizza then split up so the train goers could get back and Elena and I stopped by Millennium park on our way back to her car.  I got some great pictures by the bean.

 We headed Picked up Erik and headed back to Waukesha to celebrate a bit.  It was Elena's birthday so we had something exciting to celebrate, even if Erik's day didn't go as well as he hoped.  We didn't start back for Minnesota until 11:00, so by the time we got back to the cities, got unloaded, and I drove back to Northfield it got pretty late.  I got home at 5:30 and crashed for about an hour before getting up and going in to work.  Normally I would have slept in a bit but there was a major maintenance project going on at work that I had to be there for.
 The rebuild project moved along pretty well actually.  I was awake and mostly cognizant even, until I sat down for a meeting for a bit.  I bet I didn't make it 5 minutes before I was nodding off.  I ducked out early to "go check my machine" so I didn't flat out fall asleep.  I finally got home a little after 6:00 pm, had some supper, and got about 2 hours of sleep before work called me back in.  We replaced a conveyor frequency inverter, and it was not commissioned correctly, so the speeds of the two conveyors did not match.  This leads to very bad material very fast.  I recommissioned the inverter, and it started going in the opposite direction, how does that even happen?  I changed a couple of the wires around and got it going the right way at the right speed, then spent some time searching for a leak from a bad seal.  I finally went home about 5:00, making it 3 days in a row where I was awake at 5:30 AM, and two of them coming from the wrong direction.  I slept until 7:00 and then back in to work.  Things were going well, but I had a lot to catch up on after a couple days of not spending any time at my desk, then had to go to the cities to run a couple errands.  It was 10:30 by the time I got home, just enough time to put away groceries and eat before going to bed.  Finally a full nights sleep.  Still pretty tired today.  Headed up to the cities again today for Erik's going away party.  He leaves for Ethiopia on Saturday for a few months.
 Just to make this busy week more fun I found out yesterday that one of the four engineers in my group is leaving for a different job.  This means 30% more work for those of us who are left, if my math is correct.  This should keep things from getting boring at work, that's for sure.  They should get even more fun yet when our new process equipment starts coming in next year...