I took a mini-vacation last weekend to play in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego. I kayaked, snorkeled, surfed, and swam. But the best part of the trip was eating at In-N-Out Burger. I even tried a few items from their (not so) secret menu.

Swimming in the ocean is pretty cool. Charmaine and Julie were in an ocean kayak paddling from La Jolla Shores to the caves around La Jolla Cove. I was swimming along behind them. The water was fairly clear. I could easily see the sand along the bottom when it was more than 15 feet deep. At one point we ran across an old anchor and some kids who said they saw a leopard shark. After further questioning, they admitted they hadn’t seen a shark since the day before. I think it would have been cool to see a shark, but I didn’t think there was much chance of it.

I did manage to step on a stingray, though. That freaked me out. I guess they are in the area this time of year. I jumped off my surfboard once and landed on something the wiggled and wiggled to get free. It turned out to be a small stingray. I was very glad not to have been hurt by it.

I’m not much of a surfer, but I really enjoy it. The waves were fairly small at Pacific Beach and at La Jolla Shores Beach, but there will still 20 to 30 surfers enjoying them. I have a hard time balancing on my board, but I think it may be because I’m renting such a big board, so it rides higher in the water. Maybe I just suck at balancing, I’m not sure. But I can pull myself onto the board and get up to speed to catch a wave as well as most of the surfers that were there when I was there. There weren’t many “good” waves, so I only ended up riding about 15 waves in 3 hours, but it was still better than working.

The snorkeling wasn’t all that impressive. I liked what I saw just outside Avalon on Catalina much better than the stuff around the kelp beds outside the La Jolla Caves.

I got to hit In-N-Out Burger twice in my 3 day trip. That was awesome. The first day I got a 3×3 Animal style with a chocolate shake. I think that’s the perfect combination, but I was willing to try for better the next time. When I ordered the 4×4 Animal style and a Flying Dutchman, the cashier confirmed that I knew what I was ordering and that I really wanted it. That was good, but I think the 3×3 was better. If a 3×3 isn’t enough food for me in the future, I’ll just get 2 of them.

It’s been 3 days since I’ve been to the gym or the pool.  That’s pretty pathetic.

Yesterday we closed on our new house.  Today we pick up the keys.  Tonight and tomorrow we’ll start moving our stuff from our “temporary” apartment to the house.  It seems strange to think we’ve been in Utah for more than a full year now.  We hoped to be in the apartment for 3 months, but somehow we’ve been there a year now.  It will be really nice to be in a house again.

After signing all the papers yesterday, we decided to go out and celebrate.  We ended up at the Outback Steakhouse in Orem.  I got the Ouback style Prime Rib.  It was really tasty.  Charmaine got the Alice Springs Chicken, which was also quite good.  The BYU-TCU football game was on all the TVs in the place.  BYU was man-handling TCU.  At the table next to us was a fairly large family that included Merrill J Bateman (former president of BYU).  I thought it was interesting that he didn’t seem to pay any attention to the game.
We went to Training Table for lunch today.  I got a Hawaiian burger, an order of cheese fries with dipping sauce, and a huge rootbeer float.  I probably ate too much.

After we’re done moving I’ll have to come up with a new excuse for why I keep skipping workouts, or else I’ll have to get back to working out.  One thing’s for sure… I can’t keep going out to eat twice a day if I expect to stay in good health.

Having Lasagna for lunch counts as working out, right?

One of the meetings yesterday was between our CEO and the members of my team. Joe and Alex have been fairly vocal about their unhappiness as of late and Martin (our CEO) wanted to discuss it. We talked about the individual items that were contributing to their unhappiness, the ways we can go about solving the issues, etc. The consternation isn’t limited to Joe and Alex, of course, but they are some of the only people voicing their unhappiness in public. In this case “in public” means in my office, with the door open, while other people walk by and wonder what all the commotion is about.

Today our office manager wanted to take my entire team out to lunch, presumably so she could add her two bits to the ongoing conversation. I told her I thought it was a bad idea, but she still wanted to do it. I imagine her boss (our director of HR/Operations) put her up to it, because it seemed fairly out of place for her to even take a break for lunch.

Joe called in sick today, so it was just me, Alex, and Tracy. I drove us all to Spaghetti Factory. I had the Lasagna, a garden salad with pesto dressing, and a bunch of the complimentary sourdough bread.

The lunch conversation was sort of interesting. We only spoke briefly about the issues facing my team, before Tracy vented a bit of her own steam. Alex seemed to be in a better place today, so maybe it was helpful after all. I hope so.

On a side note, both Alex and I were extremely sore today. I think this is the worst of the pain from our pathetic leg workout on Tuesday. Hopefully I’ll feel like swimming again by tomorrow morning.

I got to work pretty early for me… about 7:50. I already had messages from Alex and Joe that they wouldn’t be coming in to work. Alex’s wife was very sick and up all night, so he was staying home to get some rest and continue taking care of her. Joe’s brother-in-law had a heart attack in the middle of the night and was in the hospital. He was helping watch the kids for his brother-in-law while their family was at the hospital. He planned on working from home.

That put me in an interesting position. Would I work out on my own? I knew that Jeff and Steve would be at the gym wanting to work out with us (we had talked previously about them working out with us on Tuesdays and Thursdays). I figured I would do a back and biceps workout with them.

When 12:00 rolled around, DaveM suggested we all go to lunch together as a team. I guessed (correctly) that he (Bungee Labs) would be paying. So I ended up working out at Thai Chili Gardens. The food was great. We ordered everything with 3 or 4 stars. That wasn’t hot enough for DaveM, so he added a lot of cayenne pepper to his plate.

As we were sitting down for lunch, I saw Kevin Baker walking up front. I called him over and we talked for a minute or two. Things are going well for him. His ACL is getting stronger. He’s even started to do some jogging again to help it out. He has a minor case of Bells Palsy on the right side of his face. He said it really freaked him out when he first noticed it. He was brushing his teeth one Sunday morning and thought he might be having a stroke. He noticed that it was only in his face and not in his hands, so he figured it wasn’t a stroke, but still went to the hospital. It seems to be healing now, so he’s happy about that.

The food and interaction with the dev team alone probably made it worth it to skip my workout, and seeing Kevin made it that much more worth it. I don’t want to miss 2 days in a row, so I’ll probably have to swim tomorrow morning.