checking in

i thought i'd take a moment to give an update on what's going on in my life these days.

1) my landlord went to thailand for the month, and his girlfriend had some sort of visa issue and had to go back to Suranam to get a new one, and i am now living alone in a kinda creepy house in the woods. i'm not sure how i feel about that, but i guess i'm getting used to it. it's a lot different from living by yourself in a city where it is never really dark and in which horror movies are never really set.

2) on a nicer note, i did a half ironman triathlon last sunday. here's me with about six miles left to go on the run.



it was up in new hampshire, so it was a bit of an adventure to drive up there. i rented a car for the weekend and drove up saturday with a friend from church. i didn't want to go through the hassel of reserving a hotel room or campsite, so we slept in the car about 100 yards from the race start. the race went really well. i was shooting to finish in about 5:45, and happily came in at 5:39:58. next time i will go under 5:30, which shouldn't be too hard to do. anyway, the whole thing was lots of fun.

here's a picture of the swim start.



it's deceptive though because that doesn't look like very many people. they had us start in waves, and altogether there were i think 750 people racing. and it stayed that foggy pretty much all day and luckily didn't start storming until after i was done.

3) work is still really good. i think i'm getting a pretty good handle on the case and am able to contribute to the work pretty well. i think the highlight of the summer events schedule is going to be the polo game next weekend. i'm not kidding. i didn't even know people actually still played polo, but apparently there's some big game nearby and one of the partners is into it, so we are going and i'm eager to see what its like.

so all in all, life is good. i want to come home sometime soon, but i'm not sure when that will be. hopefully before august, and definitely not later than that.