Goodbye Summer, Hello Fall (Friday Five Edition)

Today is the first day of fall.  I thought I would look back to see the highlights of the summer.  The sad thing is, I had to really think hard to get five things.  I'll have to try better next summer.

1. One of the main reasons I am having a hard time thinking of highlights of the summer is because of work.  One, I don't get paid time off, so it kinda is hard to justify to take off a day or there to do something fun.  Don't get me wrong, I will be taking time off, but I feel I really need to justify it now.  I also go thrown into a huge project the month before go-live.  Meaning I was working tons of hours.  Good for the wallet, bad for fun extra things.

I also got a new job title of Scrum Master.  Basically that's a glorified Program Manager in the Agile world.  I might do a post to explain all of that in a week or two.  It's a position I have been wanting to get for the last year and a half, so I'm glad that I finally have the title.  I still work with my original team doing the things I did, but I also joined a second team as the Scrum Master.  I know it sounds like I'm doing two jobs, but it's worked out.

2. I decided that I needed to take some time off from running.  So at the beginning of the summer I got myself a new bike.  This was something I have been talking about for the last two years.  It was about time I got off my butt and get one so that I could enjoy some time on it.  And I did.  Minus a few weeks when work was crazy and my IT band really was bothering me.


I was able to get out for many beautiful sunrise rides.


I mean a lot.


Really I should say tons.


3. With this new bike, I did a triathlon.  It had been a couple years since I had done one.  On top of that, I was very under-trained.  But getting out there and doing it, I forgot how much I enjoyed it.  The training can be hard to fit in, but even with very little, I was able to put everything I had out on the course.  Before the race I swore I wasn't going to sign up for this one again.  After, I knew I had to as I love that course.


4. We have been having a friend stop by the back door almost every day before summer started.  She came by every day and just sat at the door.


My cats loved when she came by.  They would just sit there and watch her.  Sometimes they would claw and hiss at the windows, but mostly they all just stared at each other.  I ended up naming her Duibhe (Doobie), which is black in Gaelic.  All of my cats have Irish names, and since I didn't know if the kitty was a boy or girl, I thought this would work.  Since then my neighbor had said she believes the cat is a girl.  I don't quite know how she knows, but she does a lot of work with cats.


5. As summer hit, it was getting very hot in my upstairs.  Every summer I hate being upstairs during the day because I have two skylights in my bedroom.  With full sunshine in there for most of the day, it was very hard to keep the upstairs cool.  I had heard of shades for your skylights a few years back and kept meaning to get some.  But, like my bike, I'm very good at putting things off.  I don't know why as it was the best thing for my house.

What did you do this past summer?  Anything fun?  Anything productive?

I'm linking up with Fairytales and Fitness and Running on Happy for Friday Five 2.0