Friday, February 22, 2008

one of those days at the office

Worked on a plan for an athlete who I hadn't heard from in awhile. Sent out the "just checking in" notes, left a couple voice mails, but wasn't getting anything back, not even files, which is pretty much the whole shibang when working with a powermeter.

Not 30sec away from hitting save on the updated training plan, I get an email with 25 files attached from this client. That's good news and bad news, but I was glad to get the files. I went through them and did the crunching, figured out where he was, is, and crossed that with the current plan I'd just finished. Some changes needed made.

It was a bit frustrating to have done the work for naught, but I was glad I could send out something that fit better. So I got to work on that and took steps to stay focused. Busy day here today. Need to stay focused.

A barage of emails came in at once, and at that point I was stuck for a bit trying to sort out how to get a square peg in a round hole of a thing, so I checked the email. One was from this client. He said that he wasn't sure if he wanted to race and train anymore.

Knowing that he must be near the phone if he was emailing at the time, I called him. "What's going on? How are you doing?", I say. He responds, "Oh, I was just messing with you. You told me a long time ago that when you don't hear from someone in awhile that it means they either quit or everything's fine. Everything's fine here."

Ooohhh. So I sent him his updated and revised plan (adding an extra 1 minute interval just to be spiteful, but not really. But kinda).

Needing some air after working a half day on that, I went out to put up a fence for the chickens. We let them free range and forage here, and the only protection we really give them is to close the coup at night. we open it again first thing in the morning. However, we're heading out of town this weekend for racing, so we can't close the coup at night, which means they are fair game for the beasts in the night.

Now, we like to feed folks out here, but the coyotes and other critters don't bring us coffee or wine or anything, so I'd rather not just serve them up chicken, you know? So we put up a fence to keep the chickens in and the critters out. It's a temporary thing, but still took some time and work.

I wanted to make sure we didn't leave any spots unsecured, so I went to putting the chickens in their new pen for a few hours to see if there were going to be any issues. But to my amazement, one chicken was already in the pen...? Thinking that perhaps she flew in there (they'll get over a 2-3 foot thing if motivated, but this fence is 4ft tall, so...), I was tempted to just pull the fence down and take our chances. Chickens aren't exactly super smart, so they won't necessarily remember to get in the same way they got out and vice versa.

I sat out there a bit trying to clear my head from the run around I had at work and sort out this problem. At that point I decided to just go ahead and put all the chickens in the pen and just see what happened until it was time to go. No real time to come up with another solution. If it didn't work, we'd probably lose some or all, but I didn't feel like spending the rest of the day on it, either. They're just chickens who don't even lay eggs yet.

Catching chickens isn't real easy. Especially when Buddy is around. But they'll come to food, usually, so I set some out and took to grabbing them and tossing them over the fence into the new pen.

We have 8 chickens. After the 10th time of throwing a chicken over the fence, I did the math.

Because I know you have to get to work or have other stuff to do, and I need to get back to work myself, I'll make the long story short...there was a gap under the fence, and the chickens were walking right back under it to the food that I was using as bait to catch them and put them over the fence.


My mood for the day is: treadmill. working hard, but not getting anywhere.

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