Weekend Recap
Jul. 19th, 2010 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaPleasant weekend.
Spent Friday evening at a friend's house, helping him weed his garden and try to get some more weed block set up to protect his plants, then we sat in his hot tub for a bit and chatted. Kinda glad to be rebuilding a friendship with him. had forgotten what a super neat and nice guy he is.
Saturday I did a bunch of projects. Soaked a big batch of cardboard to make a new set of oyster mushroom spawns and then spent most of my day cleaning/organizing the small room we've been using a walk-in closet. ... I'm _STILL_ not done but it's a lot closer.
Though I spent a lot of time just figuring out where I wanted to put stuff and moving things from place to place and trying out different container solutions and thinning my wardrobe. I'm trying a bit of a psychological engineering project here too. I took all my bluejeans and tee-shirts off the hanging rack and moved them to a storage bin underneath everything else, out of sight, out of mind. They're available to me as yardwork clothes but since they're a bit less convenient to get to and they're not in my field of vision when I'm looking for stuff to wear. When I'm in a hurry, I'm bad about defaulting to 'safe' clothing (jeans and tee-shirt, the official dress uniform of the dotcom generation) and I hate that because they're generally somewhat unaesthetic.
Sunday: Got up early and hiked down to Ciao Bella for breakfast with some friends, then went up to castle rock and hiked a couple miles down to Goat Rock and did some rappelling and climbing. I hadn't rappelled since 1988. o_O It was about like I remembered. Kinda fun but not terribly exciting either. It's funny. I tend to think of myself as having a mild fear of heights but this didn't bother me at all. all in all though, the climbing was a lot more fun. Really let me feel just how much stronger my body is and how much my balance has improved in the past few months. Though it probably also didn't hurt that this was probably the easiest to climb set of rocks I'd ever encountered in my life. I made it all the way to the top without any difficulty. I even tried taking a couple of more difficult routes for my own entertainment. Made it through one fairly easily. The other one, I started but didn't have quite enough strength/reach to do it without jumping. I think I probably could have made it but my confidence wasn't high enough to do it and generally speaking, jumping when thirty meters off the ground is likely a bad plan anyhow.
The part I had the most difficulty with was the last 3 or 4 meters at the very top. It was kind of smooth with thin handholds and long reaches and the rock was blistering hot (Actually it was all pretty intensely hot given it was about 2PM and on a face that was directly in the sun.) My hands are pretty heat resistant but I couldn't really hold onto stuff for any length of time. Just too hot. Also, there was sand in what few handholds I could find.
Ironically, I would get to climb this part twice. These weren't my friend's ropes. There had been a class there teaching climbing and their first class had left and their second wasn't due for an hour so we traded off. On the way back down, their rig jammed at the top and would not budge. So I had to climb back up (now quite exhausted from the heat and the climb) with a slack rope. DOH! Entertaining, I guess... It was a bit easier the second time, I think.
Basically the backup anchor they had was loose and it'd tangled under the main anchor, locking the line. Also, it seemed their anchor was too short and too much of the line was dragging on the rock face before going down but I'd seen people going up and down this route all day so I supposed it _must_ be fine once the backup was untangled... Right... ? ... About 15-20 meters down it jammed again. Fortunately though, this time I was at a shelf so I pulled in and sat down on the rock while someone else fixed it at the top. Apparently the combination of their dodgy setup and the heat was causing a friction problem that hadn't been there earlier in the day. Heh. But aside from being baked alive, no real harm done. I suppose I should have been scared or feeling foolish for making assumptions about the competence of others that put me in a potentially dangerous situation, but really at that point. Lesson learned, will be more careful in the future and I'm quite happy that I stayed calm throughout.
The heat exhaustion however, was less fun. Especially since we still had to walk the 2 to 3 km back out, uphill, in the heat, with no water left. Heh. The ground was so hot that I could not stand on it barefoot for more than about 5 seconds. Awesome! ^_^
We went back to my house and rested/cooled off a bit, then they headed home and I got back to work on sewing. As part of my cleaning/organizing from the previous day, I'd pulled a pile of stuff that needed to be mended and started working on it. Hee. I got a little fancy with how I patched some of my old jeans. I made patches using a press of heavy canvas, interfacing, and calico, and then embroidered them... I was watching a program about Woodstock at the time so... Yeah.
Also, since I have declared war on tee-shirts, I decided to edit a few of them to make them into something else.
Pictures coming soon. :) But first, I have a lot more sewing to do. I've got WAY too much scrap cloth and old projects right now and I am going to just spend a few evenings working through it.
Besides, since we're starting work on the stairs tonight, I figure it will be nice to have some relatively low-energy work to do afterwards.
Spent Friday evening at a friend's house, helping him weed his garden and try to get some more weed block set up to protect his plants, then we sat in his hot tub for a bit and chatted. Kinda glad to be rebuilding a friendship with him. had forgotten what a super neat and nice guy he is.
Saturday I did a bunch of projects. Soaked a big batch of cardboard to make a new set of oyster mushroom spawns and then spent most of my day cleaning/organizing the small room we've been using a walk-in closet. ... I'm _STILL_ not done but it's a lot closer.
Though I spent a lot of time just figuring out where I wanted to put stuff and moving things from place to place and trying out different container solutions and thinning my wardrobe. I'm trying a bit of a psychological engineering project here too. I took all my bluejeans and tee-shirts off the hanging rack and moved them to a storage bin underneath everything else, out of sight, out of mind. They're available to me as yardwork clothes but since they're a bit less convenient to get to and they're not in my field of vision when I'm looking for stuff to wear. When I'm in a hurry, I'm bad about defaulting to 'safe' clothing (jeans and tee-shirt, the official dress uniform of the dotcom generation) and I hate that because they're generally somewhat unaesthetic.
Sunday: Got up early and hiked down to Ciao Bella for breakfast with some friends, then went up to castle rock and hiked a couple miles down to Goat Rock and did some rappelling and climbing. I hadn't rappelled since 1988. o_O It was about like I remembered. Kinda fun but not terribly exciting either. It's funny. I tend to think of myself as having a mild fear of heights but this didn't bother me at all. all in all though, the climbing was a lot more fun. Really let me feel just how much stronger my body is and how much my balance has improved in the past few months. Though it probably also didn't hurt that this was probably the easiest to climb set of rocks I'd ever encountered in my life. I made it all the way to the top without any difficulty. I even tried taking a couple of more difficult routes for my own entertainment. Made it through one fairly easily. The other one, I started but didn't have quite enough strength/reach to do it without jumping. I think I probably could have made it but my confidence wasn't high enough to do it and generally speaking, jumping when thirty meters off the ground is likely a bad plan anyhow.
The part I had the most difficulty with was the last 3 or 4 meters at the very top. It was kind of smooth with thin handholds and long reaches and the rock was blistering hot (Actually it was all pretty intensely hot given it was about 2PM and on a face that was directly in the sun.) My hands are pretty heat resistant but I couldn't really hold onto stuff for any length of time. Just too hot. Also, there was sand in what few handholds I could find.
Ironically, I would get to climb this part twice. These weren't my friend's ropes. There had been a class there teaching climbing and their first class had left and their second wasn't due for an hour so we traded off. On the way back down, their rig jammed at the top and would not budge. So I had to climb back up (now quite exhausted from the heat and the climb) with a slack rope. DOH! Entertaining, I guess... It was a bit easier the second time, I think.
Basically the backup anchor they had was loose and it'd tangled under the main anchor, locking the line. Also, it seemed their anchor was too short and too much of the line was dragging on the rock face before going down but I'd seen people going up and down this route all day so I supposed it _must_ be fine once the backup was untangled... Right... ? ... About 15-20 meters down it jammed again. Fortunately though, this time I was at a shelf so I pulled in and sat down on the rock while someone else fixed it at the top. Apparently the combination of their dodgy setup and the heat was causing a friction problem that hadn't been there earlier in the day. Heh. But aside from being baked alive, no real harm done. I suppose I should have been scared or feeling foolish for making assumptions about the competence of others that put me in a potentially dangerous situation, but really at that point. Lesson learned, will be more careful in the future and I'm quite happy that I stayed calm throughout.
The heat exhaustion however, was less fun. Especially since we still had to walk the 2 to 3 km back out, uphill, in the heat, with no water left. Heh. The ground was so hot that I could not stand on it barefoot for more than about 5 seconds. Awesome! ^_^
We went back to my house and rested/cooled off a bit, then they headed home and I got back to work on sewing. As part of my cleaning/organizing from the previous day, I'd pulled a pile of stuff that needed to be mended and started working on it. Hee. I got a little fancy with how I patched some of my old jeans. I made patches using a press of heavy canvas, interfacing, and calico, and then embroidered them... I was watching a program about Woodstock at the time so... Yeah.
Also, since I have declared war on tee-shirts, I decided to edit a few of them to make them into something else.
Pictures coming soon. :) But first, I have a lot more sewing to do. I've got WAY too much scrap cloth and old projects right now and I am going to just spend a few evenings working through it.
Besides, since we're starting work on the stairs tonight, I figure it will be nice to have some relatively low-energy work to do afterwards.
