Overwhelmed

I'm just a bit overwhelmed by everything right now. We moved into our new house and have found a TON of problems. The landlords are "hill womps" (as Dan likes to call them) and they pretty inflexible on understanding other people's desired quality of life. The first thing that we've approached them on is the stench of the water. There is terrible sulfur water in the house. We looked up everything we could on Sulfur water and found that it's not deadly and that it can be fixed. We pretty much just have to have the water tested, then the tank shocked. Unless there is septic leakage, which is an entirely different story. But we're pretty sure it's just sulfur bacteria and it can controlled. Dan wrote a very long, well worded e-mail about how we want it tested and fixed. Basically their response was that they've been living in the house since 1949 and no one has died yet. No concern or respect for maybe the fact that we don't want to waft the smells of rotten eggs as we sit in meetings at work?!?!?!

We're having the test done any way and if it's something they can fix we'll press further to have them fix it.

Second major concern with the house is the murder basement. There is an area of the basement that they didn't show us on the walk through of the house and it's where the washer and dryer hook ups are. I can't even describe the shambles and condition of this area. First, there is no sub-pump in the basement so it's a swamp. This leads us to our concerns of black mold, which will be our next testing requests. Second the foundation is ruined and falling to pieces. So one day the whole place is just going to crumble in. There's massive holes in the rotting insulation where you can see right out... Pretty much we could have a Halloween party down there and not have to do much "decorating."

Then there are just a ton of little things that we didn't notice before we signed the lease, like the bathroom door that's off the dinning room doesn't close. The door is about a half inch too long. The whole entire house is one bad weekend project gone WAY wrong. There are electrical shorts and sockets that don't work, the stove doesn't get hot enough to boil water. The list goes on...

This house is pretty much everything that I've hated about Wellsboro. Cell phone signals are spotty so we'll have to get a land line. We don't think we can get high speed internet. These are just think that even in the most rural areas should not be an issue in 2008.

The plus sides to all of this is that Dan is closer to work so we're saving on gas. I just have to drive about five miles and I can take the bus in. All our furniture fits in. The living room and bedroom look very nice.

Other stressful things are that my class is ending this week. So we had our final today and tomorrow we have a final presentation. I really enjoyed the class but I didn't have the time to commit to all the readings like I would have wanted too. It's also extremely hard to take a class call the Psychology of Social Commuting and have to try to study and do projects with no internet connection! First it was in Ocean City and now it's at our house. So I just feel like the world was against me performing my best in the class.

Work is just really sucking right now. I'm not passionate about it anymore. The task feel very meaningless and I'm to disconnected from the productions and the art work. It's really sunk in that we're slaves to the faculty and nothing more. They don't want staff members to be free thinking, creative, or productive. That's left up to the faculty only. Staff members don't need to think they just need to be servants to the needs of the faculty. It's really demeaning. On top of that we got a new chair for the department. I was really excited for this change, but I don't know that it's going to be as good as I would have wanted. The personalities of the other people on the administrative staff just make me sick and uncomfortable. Especially the way they suck up to the new chair. Everyone is just acting so fake and playing so many mind games. It's really emotionally exhausting to be at work not even counting the actual work.


Since this is a running blog, I'll talk about that. Running is not happening right now. My legs still hurt. Not in the same way and I've stopped wearing the braces. But they just don't feel right yet and I'm scared they're never going to heal. It would just be nice to be able to have my time to go running back, especially since I'm so stressed out.

Moving

I had my doctor's appointment on Thursday and it didn't go as planned. I have one more week with the braces. I was feeling really good but the past two days I've pushed it really hard with moving and I'm scared it's set me back. Before I was feeling no pain at rest or walking. Now I'm back to how I was a few weeks ago. Dull aches at rest and sharp when walking...I'm not liking this one bit.

So at the moment I'm not much help with the moving, hence I'm sitting here blogging.
:(

Tomorrow

I have my check up appointment tomorrow with the doctor! Hopefully I'll be able to ditch the air casts. I honestly don't think I'm going to be able to start running for another week or so. My legs don't feel the same kind of pain they did before. Every now and then it's just a dull ache of a reminder that I'm injured. Walk at this point is completely pain free. I think one more week off from running and slowly working back into it will do me good.

I've been swimming a lot and running in the water. But it's just not the same. So tonight I plan to re-write my training plan with a slow two week phase to work back into running. Getting injured has probably also been a bit of a blessing in disguise. I'm taking a summer class that's really interesting but time consuming. It's call Psychology of Social Computing. Six week courses are so intense and there's so much reading. But it's really opened up my eyes to the kind of work I'll be doing if I'm accepted to the M.S. in Communications. It's very exciting and very different from anything that I've done before.

The Sexiness of the Air Cast.

So I've been wearing the air cast for a week now. My legs are defiantly starting to feel better. I woke up this morning with pretty much no pain. Usually the first few steps in the morning are the worst. I swam 1500m this morning and they felt great after that!

But as I've been hobbling around all week I've noticed how others react to seeing the air cast. The reaction on their face when they do a once over is priceless, especially kids. One guy this morning caught me noticing him staring at me and he waved. My legs are the parade and I'm the princess in the float.

Then another stranger actually stopped me and asked "how did you break both legs?" I said running and that it was stress fractures. I really need to come up with a better story than that. Something like, "well when I was flying in my private helicopter over the amazon..." Alas, I was not that quick.

Well I'm off to Ocean City for the weekend to relax!

$1000

Thanks Aunt Mollie for setting me over $1000! Thanks to everyone who has donated so far. It's keeping me positive through my injury. I can't wait to get back out there and train for real!! There's still plenty of time to make a donation if you haven't