More Pics

I got my CD with all my sky diving photos.  These are extremely cool--I never thought I'd be looking up to see at plane :-)

Ashley has not yet committed to do a jump...we'll see if we can wear down her resistance.  Pleasant week to all.

Sky Dive Photos

I received some of my sky-dive photos.  Here are some of them.

Gotta love the hair in this one.

 Probably my favorite one because you can see how high up we are.

 Here are the happy jumpers following our successful landings.

Tons of fun--trying to get Ashley to do it :-)

Sky Diving

Now that I'm 39, I decided it might be a good time to exorcise some demons.  A few friends at work were talking about going sky diving.  I decided, why not.  Of course, after the decision, I was terrified, and have been so for a couple weeks, but I certainly could not back out considering two of the people going were girls.  Even though I'm the ripe old age of 39, I still have some pride.  There were four of us that went:  Me, Claudia, Lorenzo, and Adrienne.  We are pictured below BEFORE the jump.  We're smiling, but I think we are quite nervous.

After we arrived, it was a lot of waiting around i.e. plenty of time to think about the (bad) decision we made to come sky diving.

After a bit of a wait, it was time to suit up.

Obviously we were still laughing.  

My neighbors were watching Bode, and they decided to come and watch.  They were able to take some pictures.  First, here I am getting on the plane.

As of right now, I do not have any pictures of the jump.  I am awaiting a CD from the company, so I hope to post those later this week.  Here's a picture of Bode watching the plane get ready to go.

My neighbor was able to snap these as we came in for a landing.  The first one looks like we are about to crash :-)

Claudia had the foresight to bring champaign for the after-jump celebration.

It was quite an experience.  I hope to post action photos later this week.  For now, I'll just say it was quite a ride--50 seconds of free-fall!  Amazing.  Pleasant week to all.

Grey Beard

For those of you into dendrochronology, if you were to count the rings on my trunk, you'd find another one has been added.  Yup, I turned 39 on Friday--not quite in the "old" category, but getting close.  The week prior, I travelled to St Louis, returning the Friday before Memorial Day.  While in St Louis, I didn't shave (we wear civilian attire).  Therefore, due to the holiday, I went eight days without shaving.

I was so proud...until, upon closer examination, I noticed a surprisingly large number of grey hairs in my beard.  Ashley had to restrain me from making an emergency run to the drug store to get the Just For Men hair dye.  Oh well.  I suppose I might look old, but I'm certainly not getting any slower.  In fact, today, I ran the Strawberry Festival 10k.  I surprised myself with a best-I've-ever-run (aka PR) of 39:15 (6:20 / mile pace), finishing 30th out of 587 people, and second in my age group out of 30.

We are three weeks from moving from Ohio.  The fact we are leaving hit hard this weekend, and we went into panic mode, packing, organizing, and figuring out travel plans.  We'll all be happy come the 4th of July :-)  Pleasant week to all.