this and that

Well, what's been going on with my life. Work has been busy, busy, busy, but when is it not. This far north, we're rapidly loosing our sunlight, in consideration of which and work stresses, I've started back on the feel nothing prescription. It was a tough call and I wonder if I could have just done without them this year. But now I'm suffering under the slings and arrows of side effects, primarily migraines and nausea. After about 10 days of headaches the migraines seem to have eased off, but my stomach still wants to be somewhere else. The one thing that seems to distract me at the moment is playing games on the computer, which is completely and absolutely useless.

I'm looking forward to apple season. I'm even looking forward to the relative quiet of winter this year. But in the meantime their is the faire this weekend, Alisadar Fraiser & Natalie Haas in Portland on the 19th, Common Ground and apple picking on the 24th, and vacation the first week in October.

climbing, but not the corporate ladder

Last week I took one of the guys from work out to the South Freeport boulders rock climbing. He wants to take his kids out climbing, so I volunteered to show him some of the basics. There is one small slab that's good to demonstrate top roping because it's easy and only about 15 ft high. I showed him some of the basic setup, we rappelled, and then tried to climb the slab. The bottom of it was covered with wet pine needles and the rest was sprinkled with pine needles, lichen and moss. I hadn't brought the climbing shoes so we were both in sneakers. It was basically a low to the ground slipfest with neither of us getting up even that short easy slab.

But being out there under the trees by the rock reminded me how much I like messing around on the rock.

So last weekend derien and I went out on all three evenings, roped up and climbed. On Friday and Saturday we climbed different little routes on the slab. As I climbed up and as I came back down I cleaned the holds along the way. Now almost the entire rock is clean to climb. On Sunday we tried a different rock, that I'd never climbed before. I made it up that rock once, though not by the route I first thought I would take and derien made it almost to the top.

It's been years since I've climbed and I didn't realize how much I missed it. We haven't gone this week because derien has been working until after dark, but if she gets back on her regular schedule we'll probably go in the evenings again.