Play Day in the Snow

The best part of working in the field is that I get every Friday off! Yesterday I took a little trip to Royal Gorge over by Tahoe and went x-country skiing for the first time. I drove over with my friend, Sonia, and we met two other PG&E ladies who live in Sacramento. We drove the rest of the way to Tahoe with them and went skiing. I was the only one who had never done it before, but I caught on pretty quickly. I really liked it and can't wait to go again!

On the way back, we stopped in Sacramento again to drop off Carol and Mary and had dinner at Carol's. She's a Land Agent out of the Sacramento office, and quite an interesting person. She's had a lot of adventures. Mary's husband and daughter joined us for dinner also. We had some really great dinner conversation. I always like having dinner with new people because I am always learning something new and hearing a lot of interesting stories. It's just neat to see the different ways that people grew up and how their lives are different.

The hard part about going skiing Friday was that this morning I had a 10 mile run with Team in Training. I was afraid I was going to be very sore for my run, but I actually wasn't too bad. I had a little soreness on my outer thighs, but it didn't really bother me until about mile 8. I struggled the last two miles, and now I can hardly walk. That's ok though. I like feeling the effects of my body working really hard! ...but I think I'll be doing a lot of icing and using my foam roller today.

Oh yeah, and Sonia and I found some cool vintage posters in one of the lodges that showed our heritage.

I ran 14 miles today!

I know, I can't believe it either. This is the longest distance I've gone yet. I only stopped after mile 1 to stretch and after mile 7 at one of the water stops. Other than that, I ran a consistent 10 min/mile pace. That's 2 hours and 20 minutes of continuous running! Can you believe I'm going to run almost twice that amount in a couple months? It's hard for me to imagine running any farther than I did today, but that's why we train up to it.

Wish me luck, and pray that my joints don't give me anymore problems!

In the Field

As of January 4th, I've started working in the field for a six month rotation. We have two survey crews at work for our area, well two party chiefs anyway, and people have been rotating out from the office to get the field experience. And finally it's my turn. So each week, I travel somewhere in California to do survey work with my party chief. It's basically what I did during my summers with the BLM when I was in school. Well, it's actually a whole different kind of surveying, but the traveling part of it and working four 10-hour days is the same.

I just finished my first week. We started out traveling to Ureka, then to Livermore and then Antioch. So basically, I never know where I'm going to be until about a day in advance. But it's really exciting and I'm loving it! The company pays for travel expenses, hotel rooms, and meals. So far, I've stayed at the Hampton Inn and gone out to nice dinner including a nice steak house all in beautiful wine country! I love my job!

I'll mainly be traveling in our area, which is along the north coast: from just north of San Jose all the way north to the CA/OR border and west of I-5. However, if other offices need our help, we can travel to other areas as well. So basically, I could be going anywhere in California. Here are a couple pictures my party chief got of me setting up the base station before doing some GPS topography.