Friday, September 4, 2009

Last Day, Triathlon, New Table, Noah's Ark, Cooper gets coned!

My last day of work was August 7, and I took almost 4 weeks off before starting graduate school on September 2. I was really sad to leave my job at the AIDS Vaccine Lab :o( I really enjoyed working there, I had made some great friendships, and I hope that my new lab is as fun as this one. I'm going to miss you guys! Luckily I'm still going to be in Madison, so I can always meet up with them sometime!

After my last day, the first thing Tim and I did was take a long 4-day weekend up at his parents place in Spicer, MN, 2 hours west of the Twin Cities. It had been quite some time since we had visiting their house on the lake, but the main reason we made the 7-hour drive was to compete in the Green Lake Triathlon with Tim's Dad John, Tim's mom Jennifer, Tim's brother Dan, Dan's girlfriend Sarah, myself, two of our friends from college Ben and Alex, and several of John's friends from Spicer. Two of our other friends came to cheer us on, thanks Brad and Katie! The triathlon was fun because it was in a small town, so most of the people doing it were doing it for fun, and in our group John and I were the only 2 who had ever done a triathlon before! It was a blast doing the race with so many friends. I was secretly hoping to win out of our group (not the entire race), since I'm a good swimmer and a decent cyclist, but I'm a terrible runner and wasn't able to catch Dan (who completed his first marathon last year). We all finished in a great time and had a blast! Then we sat by the lake for the next 3 days and played on the jet ski! Rough life. Cooper even became more adventurous and waded deeper into the water than ever before!



Our group getting ready for the big race!


Our cheering squad wasted no time getting their drinks, and Dan was excited to cross the finish line!


Jennifer did the relay, and she did both the swim and the run! Ben was kind enough to let me run with him most of the way back in the run. Thanks Ben!


Now that I had so much time on my hands, I decided I would use it to organize the apartment and cleanup. We've been living here for over a year, and I still can't get Tim to unpack some of his stupid boxes, so I'm going to start throwing things since he clearly doesn't need them. I also decided I couldn't handle our Walmart kitchen table anymore! So Tim and I finally bought a grown-up puppy-resistant table from Steinhafels, and sold our current table for $10! Our current table was so unstable that when you used a knife and fork to cut a piece of food, the whole table rocked back and forth with each cut! I couldn't take it anymore! So here is our brand new, beautiful table!

Our old table compared to our beautiful new, counter-height table!


It has stone pieces on top, which gives it character, and the counter-height level means that the dog can't jump into our labs and put his head on the table! However I did discover that 2-year old can still climb onto the chairs. So it is not child-proof.


I also wanted to use my time off as a chance to do some Wisconsin activities that I had not done before. One of the biggest one on my list was going to Noah's Ark, America's largest waterpark!! Tim and I finally found a day when he wasn't working and the weather was fantastic, and we drove up to the Wisconsin Dells and spent a day splashing on the slides and in the wave pool! It was sooooo much fun! Luckily it was close enough to home too so that we could leave Cooper for the day, but he wasn't alone for an unreasonable amount of time! It was so much fun! Now I need to get to Six Flags sometime!


And next on my little update, it Cooper got coned! We're still not sure what happened, but we started noticing a few lumps on his neck and he wouldn't stop scratching them. We took him to the vet, and she shaved down the spot to get a better look (and charged up $10 to do so, what?!). Looks like he got bitten or stung by something, and had kept scratching at it until it made more scratches and got even worse! We tried to be vigilant about keeping him from scratching, but it wasn't doing the trick. First we tried putting a sock on his foot, but we eventually decided he needed to be coned. He's getting used to the cone now, but it's super traumatic putting the cone on and taking it off, it totally freaks him out! He looks pretty sad in it, but again he is getting used to it so it's not so bad!


He looks so sad, but it's for his own good! Hopefully he won't need to cone for very long!

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