fun with art

The climbing season is over here. It snowed in Boston on Saturday. So I had a family day at the MFA followed by High Tea. When I got tired of sketching I took a few pics.



Christ as the Man of Sorrows is one of my favorites. The frown on his face and the inward gaze in his eyes capture his sadness in a way that seems unique to religious art of the Middle Ages.

I also like Stella's Old Brooklyn Bridge. It is colorful, geometric, and confuses me to no end.

red rocks summary

Paul wrote a nice summary of our Halloween trip to Red Rocks. He links to all the photos from the trip and lists the cliffs we climbed at.

roommate brunch

Ben and Eduardo joined our roommate brunch last weekend. We had a fabulous meal of oatmeal, fruit, fresh bread and waffles.

(Kathy took this photo so she's missing from it!)

I'm thinking about taking next summer off and going on a long roadtrip. On this roadtrip, I want to:
1. see my geographically scattered friends
2. hike through beautiful places (like the Redwood forest)
3. climb! climb! climb!

Combining #1 with #2 and #3 would be fabulous. My short list of places to visit is:
Seneca, West Virginia
Red River Gorge, Kentucky
South Dakota: Black Hills, Needles
southern Idaho (City of Rocks)
Pacific Northwest???
Califonia: SF, Yosemite
Colorado

I'm open to expanded/narrowing/reducing this. Other ideas includ Wyoming, Utah, southern California (Santa Barbara, Joshua Tree, etc).

Any suggestions?

Anyone interested in joining me for parts (or all) of this?

the BEAST!

Charley and Greg took me up the first two pitches of Recompense with the Recom-beast variation today. I was the Monkey-in-the Middle.

Recompense/Recom-beast winds up the Prow of Cathedral-- the tall, pointy bit of the wall. The second pitch is a giant white flake. You can see it if you looks closely at this pic.


Here is Greg leading the first pitch (5.7).

When I followed him up this route, I found the friction on the textured (yet somehow slippery with rain, lichen and polish) to be non-trivial. Here is Charley coming up the first pitch (looking for footholds)

I like this pic but somehow it feels like Charley should be wearing chaps in a horse corral, flicking the rope like that.

Charley leading the second pitch-- the Beast Flake (5.9).

These moves were EEK! committing and technical. I had to stop for a mini-meditation in order to keep my cool. This is the hardest multi-pitch trad route I've ever done (by 3 grades).
Greg following that pitch. Check out this flake!

From the bottom, it looks like you would lay-back the flake. But that was really only the first move. The rest of the flake involved fist jams, some foot jams, some horizontal buckety bits, some smearing...
Scott, in the trees on a nearby ledge, saying hello.


We decided to bail. Here is the rest of the route (1.5 pitches). It looked wet and the air was getting damper and damper.


The rap down. Wheeeeeee!

Here I am waiting to rap off the first belay ledge. Glasses are a bit fogged up.

I have a whole new kind of soreness in my hands. They're swollen and the bones in my hand, especially below my pinky and index fingers, feel bruised.

jammin'

I spent a lovely weekend in North Conway climbing at Cathedral. I had never been there before (even though it is so close!) and it sure was a treat! It is rare to have warm & dry enough weather to go climbing this late in the season so this was true bonus climbing. (By "warm" and "dry" I mean 50F and misting & foggy)

On Saturday after a long breakfast, Scott, Wanda and I headed for the North End and did some crack climbing. I'm new to crack climbing so this crag gave me lots of opportunities to practice my jams.

Scott leading They Died Laughing (5.9):



Here I am learning how to jam. On these routes, you can't get away with 5.10 moves on the face or lay-backing the crack. Its either jam or don't move up.





I took this at the top of Birds Next (5.9).

Here is Wanda getting ready to lead Childs Play (5.6). (I was going to lead this route but chickened out when I tried the committing opening moves. Eeek. Someday...)

knitting porn

birthday mittens for sarah:

birthday socks for jeremy:

moose pics

halloween pics

dazed and confused

On Sunday night, feeling worn out and pretty brain dead, we headed out to the casinos to wander around and see what we could see. It was utterly overstimulating. Any mental and physical strength we had left was wiped out. On Monday, we were reduced to clumsy, bumbling, gigglers who could never come up with the word they were looking for. LV is big and bright and wasteful and strange. And its gotten more so since the last time I was there, six years ago.











Halloween pics will come soon.

I'm back, safe, in Cambridge, after cuddling with a yucky old man on the red-eye. The up-side of that was that today I had a fantastic nap. It placed high in my Top Five Naps Ever.

finale

Photos and stories will come soon.

I am in Las Vegas airport, waiting for the red-eye home, sleepy and mildly brain-dead. It was a fabulous weekend, complete with sunny, warm days, plenty of Elvises and Hunter S Thompsons (Vegas on Halloween weekend is a special treat), gobs and gobs of silly laughter, hot-tubbing when sore, deep, exhausted sleep, and singing. Oh, and I got the guys to watch Seabiscuit. I think they liked it.