Works, meet wrench.

Last Monday, my grandfather passed away.  We'd been halfway expecting it for a while, but it still shook me up a bit - more than I figured it would.  I'm ok, work and school are fine, but I've been more than a little distracted this week.  Still, I made a conscious effort to do scary things (as outlined in my last post), even if I didn't write about them.  Here are a few:

1.  I changed a way-high-up lightbulb at work.  It was in a pendant lamp hanging over a table, so approximately 7-8 feet above the ground.  Recall, if you will, that standing on a chair starts to give me vertigo.  But I hopped on up there like it weren't no thang, and hopefully looked just as nimble getting back down, although it was more of a tactical fall.  But isn't that exactly what parkour is all about?

2.  I cried in public.  Tuesday morning I had work early and was still pretty shaken from the previous night's news.  Now, I don't like ANYONE to see me cry, not even family or close friends.  Why?  Partly vanity.  Red face and eyes, and also the fact that my nose turns unto a faucet when I cry...not very attractive.  I also think it shows weakness, which is the last thing I want to do.  But I went in, even though I probably could have called off.  And I got through my whole shift and did some damn good work, because I'm good at what I do.  And there were more than a few times that I couldn't see what I was doing because of the damn onions people kept cutting* but I kept working, and got a bunch of hugs from my awesome boss and a bunch of kind words from everyone else.  The owner of the restaurant, who was there to unlock the doors when I got there and saw the worst of my crying jag, came back to the kitchen later on and exuberantly asked me to tell him something awesome about my grandfather.  A lot came to mind (Ensign Papageno?  The rajah (and everyone else in the world that he knew)? Quick-As-Scat and Tail-In-Air?), but I told him the reason we called him Papageno, because that is pretty much all due to me :)

*No one was actually cutting onions.

3. I did 100 squats, 100 push-ups, 500m row and 400m run for time last Monday.  I was sore for  literally the entire week, but I didn't sandbag a thing and got some decent times: 2:18 for the squats (second to finish of the women, approximately 3rd or 4th overall), 6:34 for the push-ups (the first 30 real ones and the rest on my knees, not 25/75 as I wrote on the board), 2:05 for the row (I've done better but not too bad) and a slightly depressing 2:48 for the run because my legs were pretty much completely seized up.  Fun fun.  Why was this scary?  Because it was a lot more arm-and-shoulder-type things than I've done in over a year, and I wasn't sure if my shoulders could take it.  But they could.  So there, brain.

4.  I texted that one guy to see if he wanted to hang out and conversate.  He hasn't answered yet.  Meh.  His loss.

That's it for now.  It wasn't every day, but I'm working up to it.

Any suggestions for more things to do?

-N