My Whole Life is an Existential Problem!

Yes, there is a story behind that title. I'll get to that later. Let me apologize in advance for the length of this post. It's been a few weeks and there have been lots of adventures so it's gonna be a long one! So a few weeks ago, I got to go to Denver for work. I LOVE LOVE LOVE it when that happens. I get to see my friends and hang out in the city I love! Started with drinks and dinner with one of my fave people, Michelle. I know I don't normally call people out in my blog but since it was a relatively tame dinner, I figured it's okay. We had a great time though! It reminded me that I really need to make an effort to see the important people in my life more often.

I was in Denver for the second week of my leadership class and everything I (and my classmates) had been told about this week made it sound miserable. It's what we call the Management Assessment Center and is basically where we are thrown into "real life" scenarios and evaluated on how we handle them. We also got results from two other on-line assessments we had done prior to class. So basically, it was a week of lots of introspection and evaluation and here's what you do well and here's where you need to improve. It wasn't NEARLY as stressful as others had made it out to be but it was definitely exhausting! So, of course, we had to unwind every night. Tuesday was the most tiresome day as that was the actual assessment center day. So here's what we did that evening...

Yeah, that's us sitting by the pool having a few beverages. The young (I mean this kid looked 12) manager came out at one point and told us we could not have beverages by the pool and we needed to take it to our rooms. That was around 8pm. Yeah, we sat there with our beverages until the pool closed at 10pm. I'm not saying we are rebels but we had had a long day so we deserved a little R&R! The best night, though, was Thursday. It was our last full day of class so we decided to celebrate. By the way, I should add in here that my results of the assessment center were much better than I expected. The main organizer/instructor came up to me at one point in the hall and said that I "blew their averages". So that made me quite happy. Two of us started early...

We HAD to...$4 champagne cocktails for happy hour. They were so yummi!! I won't tell you how many we each had but I will say we left many unsampled from the menu. Then the boys decided to join us and it went down hill from there. But boy did we have a fantastic, amazing time.

I discovered a FANTASTIC conversation starter while out enjoying beverages with your peeps...Klosterman's 23 Questions. Okay, I'm not sure if that link will work so after I post this, I will post just the questions. Now remember, these questions are funny, offensive, deep (on some level) and are just flat out hilarious! Those of us that went out that night have all agreed that between now and when we meet in September, we will each create our own question and share. I can't wait to hear what they all came up with. If any of you have a good idea for a question, let me know! So at the end of the night, one of the people I was out with said "Hey...we should all have a word that we have to say in class tomorrow and whoever says it first wins." So various words were assigned..."virgin", "promiscuous", "algorythm", "flacid" and I can't remember the others. My word was flacid. Now I'm not sure how the heck one can bring this word into a serious conversation about leadership but I was up for the challenge. Unfortunately, when it was my turn to present, I completely forgot about using the word. So the guy who's word was promiscuous went after me and I kid you not, he used the word in the middle of what he was saying and it actually made sense! Now, you have to know that promiscuous has more than one definition but it was HILARIOUS as the whole class started cracking up! Lucky for me, the guy who won is not a big drinker so I will only have to buy him like one or two beers! Oh yeah...and then there was an attempt to draw tattoos with a pen...

So that was Denver...came home for about 72 hours and then left for DC. The beauty of flying out of Iron Mountain sometimes is that you have to leave at 6am so you get to DC around noon. So I got to be a tourist...

And of course I did my training run. Which was great because I ran in a part of DC I'd not been to before and it was a very trendy little neighborhood. So that's where I went Wednesday for dinner. I decided to rent a bike from the "bikeshare" that was across the street from the restaurant and ride back to my hotel rather than walk. It wasn't a far walk but I thought it would be fun. So as I was riding back trying not to fall over or run into anyone, I could not for the life of me remember where any of the "bikeshare" drop off places near my hotel were. I had seen at least four of them the previous day but do you think I could find any at that time? I literally rode around in circles for like 10 minutes trying to find one. Eventually, I found one and as I was walking the 7 or 8 blocks back to my hotel, what did I see? Two more drop off places! It would have been faster for me to just walk from the restaurant to my hotel. Sometimes I am such a blond!! Thursday, I went to the baseball game, of course!! Yep. George was my date!

Friday was another tourist day (there are benefits to a tiny airport with limited flights).

If you are ever in DC, I absolutely recommend the Ford Theater. It's a free, self-guided tour and completely worth the time. And I finished with the wax museum. It has always creeped me out but still fascinated me at the same time.

I know this post is getting long-winded. Big surprise that MK is long-winded huh? So I will finish by saying that the title of this post comes from a response to one of Klosterman's 23 questions that I asked one of my girlfriends this past Sunday at brunch. If you read the questions, you will know what I mean! Happy mid-week everyone!! I promise to post more often. Especially now that I am not traveling as freaking much. At least for August, anyway.