Same 'ol Grind

We're going to QA in July, which means we work every Saturday through June to hit the date. I'm sure my other coder friends have been through this before as well. The fun part is trying to make your one day off actually feel like a full weekend.

This past Friday we went to a place called "The Satisfied Frog" -- a homestyle bbq restaurant out in Cave Creek, Arizona. It's about a 20 minute drive north of Phoenix, and it's like going back in time to an old desert town, with added kitsch. Their green chile soup was so thick that if you moved it with a spoon, it didn't drip! Absolutely delicious. Also made me so stuffed even before the main meal arrived. That more or less knocked me out by 10:30pm on Friday.

Saturday was work. Blech.

Sunday we got up at 6:30am (the sun creeps up over the foothills and hits my eyeballs around then anyway these days) and hiked Shaw Butte. We hiked it backwards (going the opposite direction of what the popular route is), and I daresay it was easier that way than the front, uphill grind way. My muscles were doing pretty well, but I'm still fighting the heat. Even at 8am, it was in the high 90's already -- between 96 and 99 degrees. And even with sunglasses, a hat, and lots of water, it makes me struggle to breathe. I'm definitely feeling the effects of the Arizona summer since it's my first season here. Hopefully next summer I'll be skittering up the rocks like a chuckwalla lizard, but this summer I'm wheezing worse than an asthmatic in a hayfield.