this morning i had an appointment with a sports medicine orthopedic surgeon about my left foot/ankle/leg. got some x-rays done, he poked and prodded at my foot some, and the verdict is… stress fracture of the left fibia! he says that he doesn’t think that my shoes could be an issue, and that it’s likely because of increasing mileage. i dunno, though… i got these running shoes only maybe a month or so before the injury occurred, so maybe they’re partially to blame.

he said also that when i’m ready to resume running, to build up to 3 miles maybe only a quarter to a half mile at a time. that’s when i had to say “oops” and tell him that he’d probably want to hit me over the head since i just ran the annapolis 10 mile run this past weekend. he didn’t seem too concerned though when he heard that it hurt about the same before as it did afterwards, maybe a little more hurty but not as intense as it was back in july.

so after the appointment i went home and cleaned up some stuff and sold some old textbooks online and then went off to work. my coworker that sits next to me knew about my appointment, and i thought that my boss knew about the appointment, and i had a message on my calendar that i was going to be out of the office from 8 until 12 or 1 or so, but when i got in to work my coworker that sits next to me said how there was a manhunt going on for me earlier since our boss and our boss’ boss didn’t know where i was. she tried telling both of them that i was at the doctor’s, but that didn’t stop my boss’ boss from calling my house and leaving a message for me – i got home this evening and mom was like “uh, lee anne called and left a message for you…?” and i had to groan and roll my eyes.

i don’t know if my boss forgot about my appointment or what, but she was working from home since she wasn’t feeling well, and i got in touch with my boss’ boss over the phone at work this afternoon, so everything’s all straight. it’s annoying, when i used to be on the “online” (call-taking / email queue) teams, if we wanted to schedule time off we would schedule it through this particular website so we couldn’t exceed the number of hours taken off per day for the team, and if we were sick or couldn’t make it in, we would call resource management to let them know. when i started on the systems team, since we’re an “offline” team, if we wanted to schedule time off we just told our boss about it, and if we were sick or similarly couldn’t come in then we would just call our boss to let him or her know. well, about two months ago or so, we got a new process where (apparently) we call in to resource management when we won’t be in. maybe we’re supposed to call in too when we want to schedule time off. i’m not even certain what we’re supposed to do now, the change wasn’t explained very well, and so whatever it was we’re supposed to do i didn’t do today. oops.

notice how i like things a lot better when they’re not micromanaged? reference that previous post about the class syllabus.

years ago when i started in this office on our internet response team (an “online” team), i once woke up on a friday around 1 PM if i remember right (or maybe it was 11 AM, i just remember a ‘1’ in there), and the first thing i thought was “ahh, i sure like saturdays”, which turned into “OH FUCK IT’S FRIDAY AND I’M EXTREMELY LATE FOR WORK”… even then, i don’t think anybody called me wondering where i was. (i remember i ended up calling resource management and said that i’d be taking a sick day, because my logic was that i just slept through about half of my work day – or more! – and so i must be sick.)

after work i went to umbc for a graduate student association picnic from 4-7. i ended up getting there about 5:30 and made my way to the picnic, but i didn’t really see any food out for the taking (though they were still grilling, it seemed), i didn’t see anything that confirmed that i was at the right event (the flyer i saw online mentioned that student ids and photo ids would be checked since it was at the pub on campus, and i didn’t see anything like that going on, much less see anybody who appeared to be in charge), and i didn’t even see any flyers or information about the GSA there either (only some pamphlets these girls were looking at for WISE, and that was it). so, i ended up spending the next few hours in the library getting my read on.

once i got home i realized that the race results have been posted! here’s the specifics:

1:53:27 total time

3976th out of 4585 total runners

147th out of 155 males age 25-29

not bad for someone with a fractured fibia! 😛 i think i can do better, though. especially since…

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want to know who came in 3975th? with a time of 1:53:26? just barely faster than me?

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an 8-year-old girl. talk about embarrassing. and if that wasn’t bad enough? a 5-year-old came in almost twice as fast as what i did. that can’t be right.

why did i look at the results? why!