Last eat and meet, dude where is my stuff, Big Apple

Last night I attended a planning meeting for next weeks Thanksgiving race which is the largest of the year in terms of attendance.  Of course things are a lot different for me this time around.  I have withdrawn myself from a lot of the details that I used to be concerned with outside of simply timing the race.  (which isn’t that simple)  Before the meeting I drove over to the course since it was changed this year.  I identified the new start and finish lines and got a rough idea of the distance between them which was just under 300 strides, a little long but since the club golf cart will be there I should be ok.  The meeting went pretty smoothly until the end where there was an awkward exchange that reminded of some of board meetings I used to attend.  It made me quite content that I was not involved in those anymore and that I was going into the sunset of my running club timer career.

So when I got home I checked my email and saw two delivery confirmations for race bibs I ordered.  I asked Cindy where they were?  She said nothing came.  I looked out the door to confirm, nope the doorstep was empty.  WTF? So I get on the phone and call up FedEx.  They confirmed the packages should have been delivered and I confirmed they were not.  They suggested I check the gates and next door neighbors as well.  Cindy and I did that and came up empty.  The FedEx rep opened a case to find out what happened.

This morning the house phone rang before 7AM, it was my neighbor ACROSS the street.  They said they had two boxes with my name on it that were thrown over their gate, how nice.  Cindy went over and picked them up and confirmed the contents inside were undamaged, mystery solved.

Last night I completed the second phase of an idea that popped into my head early in the week.  Instead of spending a lot of money on conventional presents for Christmas this year I thought it would be neat to take Cindy on a quick trip to NYC the week of Xmas.  When I mentioned the idea to Cindy she was very excited, although I had not made any arrangements to that point.

Yesterday during the day I locked in the flights and last night I reserved the hotel.  The trip is being made more expensive thanks to my commitment to time GCR races until the end of January.  There is a race in Marco Island the morning of the 19th that I have to time.  It meant we couldn’t leave until mid-afternoon Saturday with us scheduled to return on Wednesday.  If I didn’t have that race I could have shifted the entire trip back one day which would have knocked down the airfare by 200-300 dollars, which is frustrating.

Long time blog readers may recall I did a similar trip with Ali years back.  I am very much looking forward to showing Cindy the city which she has only flown through up until now.  She has such a sense of wonder and appreciation for things that it makes it fun for me to be able to show her new things.  The one thing I am not looking forward to is the possibility of BRUTAL cold.  I recall last time I went I may have been as cold as I can ever remember being. Even so, it should be fun.