A few pics and a new PR!!

Here are some pics from the wine tour that Kevin and I took our Georgian friends on a couple weeks ago. Any time that Kevin and I are in Tbilisi, Temuri and Ivane not only make us feel at home, but also include us into whatever they have going on with their friends and/or family. These visits have really taught both of us a lot with regard to the importance of the time that you spend with your friends and family. With that in mind, we felt it was appropriate, during their visit to Rochester, to take them on a wine tour in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region with some of our close friends and family. Some pics:

Ivane, Kevin and I. One very successful businessman and two aspiring businessmen.

Nancy, Jason and Anne (Jason's girlfriend).
Ivane and I. For some reason, Georgians don't seem to smile too often in pictures, but believe me, Ivane was very happy on this particular day.

Kevin, Nana (Ivane's sister) and Kate (Kevin's sister).
Right to left - Anne, Temuri, Alice (Temuri's wife), Nana, Brendan, Alice's friend (She's a Georgian living in Toronto, so she came down for the weekend to visit), and Jason.
Nancy and I with Temuri and Alice.

Overall, it was a great day spent with friends and family. According to the famous Georgian philosophy, time spent with friends and family doesn't make you any older. I truly believe that none of us aged that day (although, I will say that my liver may have needed a little recovery).

In other news, the Romanians left yesterday, and that was also a great visit. I am continuously amazed by the great friendships that I've developed over the years and developed a few new friends over the past several days.

Final note, I have been very (cautiously) curious about my fitness level going into ski season given that the past month has been spent hosting customers and getting slammed with other work. My weekly training volume has been a little bit down and my weekly sleep hours have been very much down. I have been working out a lot, but also spending too much time in bars and restaurants with customers. Given that, I figured, for better or worse, I needed to get a baseline, so yesterday, I did a roller ski time trial on a course by my parents place (it was opening day of deer season, so I went hunting first thing). After reviewing my training log, my previous PR on this course was 22:57 (coincidentally on opening day of deer season in 2009). Yesterday, I was happily surprised to see 22:08 when I passed the "school bus stop ahead" sign that marks the finish. Not sure what that means, but it definitely gave me a nice mental pick-up going into the final weeks of training before the snow flies and it's time to break out the spandex!!