‘work’ Category
Summer cycling
Kat and I bought bicycles last weekend, and are hoping to use them to get outdoors a bit more than we usually do. So far it’s been quite fun, and we’re looking forward to exploring lots of the W&OD trail and other areas. I took off work Thursday and we had our first test-ride with Scott, going around 12 miles on the trail, from the Rt 28 / AOL entrance, to the LuckStone Quarry overlook and back. Of course we had to finish it off with a chocolate malt and food at Cheeburger Cheeburger!
Today we left the car in the garage and rode from the house to my office in Herndon. I’d been toying with the idea of biking to work occasionally, but Kathie had the good idea of trying it together during a weekend first. It was 7.1 miles each way, and surprisingly almost all of it was on residential roads, the Fairfax County Parkway Trail (really just a wide sidewalk along the parkway), and the W&OD. There’s also a short jaunt through the woods at the end of our street, a 100-yard path that saves 1.5 miles and eliminates “roads you’d be crazy to bike on” like Seneca Road, Georgetown Pike, and Rt. 7.
The last mile of the trip, on Van Buren St. was more of a challenge, since we had to choose between the sidewalk or the road with no shoulder. We tried both, and while the road was fine on a Saturday morning at 9am, I’m not sure if I want to do that during rush hour on a weekday. Fortunately the speed limit on the road is 25mph and it’s aggressively enforced (don’t speed in Herndon!). Bicycles are allowed on sidewalks in Virginia (yield to pedestrians) so I’ll have to try both. It was a fun morning, and we’re both looking forward to a lot more biking!
Doing real work
My job was in a bit of a holding pattern my first month as we worked out answers to some questions about how my team was going to fit into the company. That was straightened out a couple weeks ago and now we’ve started doing real work. Two weeks ago (the week of February 18) my team and I spent the week in Denver getting a crash course on “how things work” from the operations team there.
The trip was very productive, and Denver (“Tech Center”) seems like a pretty nice place. It’s not that unlike much of Northern Virginia, in that everything is pretty much brand new and squeaky clean. The weather was great, reaching almost 60 degrees most days, while it was in the 30s in Virginia. And of course looking out the office window and seeing the Rocky Mountains covered in snow not far away was a beautiful sight.
Back in our temporary Virginia office, we’re getting more and more overcrowded. We’re in a temporary rented room in an office building, sitting at a couple rows of desks (no cubes or offices). The room is sized for 17 people, and we’re at 20 so far, and have some more people starting work soon and often have visitors, so it’s really cramped. We’re scheduled to move into our new “permanent” building down the road on April 2, and we’re all looking forward to that.