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5-29-08

The chaos surrounding mom's latest medical crisis has overshadowed what was a stellar weekend. Now that I've made the required bedside vigil trip, I can reflect back on the great weekend of climbing. I led Inca Roads at Royal Column, a very scary 5.9 that starts out as a 6 inch offwidth, and tapers to fingerlocks 80 feet higher at the crux. I could climb it all fine, but the fingerlock section was so continuous and long that I simply ran out of power and ended up hanging about 4 times.

Still, it was a ton of fun. When I do it again, I will remember that there are some sinker hand jams above the finger section, so really one just has to power though the finger section to the hand jams where there are rests. The finger section is about 15 feet and continuous, but not desperate. There are reasonable feet on the left, with a couple good stems on the right, even though it is slightly overhanging.

I also led a new climb called Ed's Jam, 5.8 at the Bend at Tieton. It's a stunning line when looking up from the bottom. The crack soars up the cliff with almost no breaks in the line. It's pretty much one long hand jam crack. The jams are almost all perfect for my handsize. It reminded me of the 5.6 hand crack at index on great northern slab, except it's 5 times longer, and a little steeper. There looked to be a lot more just like it but we ran out of time.

Fletch and Christine have a tremendous amount of integrity, coming from happy marriages and stellar careers as doctors. Most of my partners have been younger lately, which isn't bad, but they just don't have the maturity of two successful doctor/climbers. In addition to being a 5.11 crack climber, Fletch also plays a mean guitar and we put together some very sweet sounding blues: he on the guitar and me on my blues harmonica. By the second night, we had it down and were exploring some variations on the basic 12 bar blues theme. Christine was loving it and fell asleep on the bench as we played. We weren't loud and crazy, just two gray haired guys playing some sweet blues around the campfire after a day of climbing...it doesn't get any better than that.

I finally gave up on my old linksys router. I bought a d-link router at office depot and all of a sudden my home network began to work flawlessly. Before I bought it I picked up 3 books on home networking at the library. Didn't even crack them open. The wizard actually worked! I've even got shared folder access on both computers, and my printer is on the network. Wow! I don't think it's ever worked this well. Well, it's only been one day...time will tell.

5-27-08

Gone all weekend climbing with Fletch and Christine, my two doctor partners. When I got back in cell range I had a message from Brent that my mom was back in the hospital and not expected to live through the night. It's Tuesday evening after work and I'm sitting in her hospital room. She is looks on deaths door to my uneducated eyes. She stares at me with wavering eyes and very little recognition in her eyes. She asked me who I was and I told her I was "Mark, your son." "Which son are you," she asked. "I'm your middle son, Mark."

After a while she began fidgeting and trying to get out of bed. Eventually she pulled back the blankets revealing about a quart of blood on the matress. I walked out and got the nurse who cleaned up the bed and said she put a call in to the doctor.

I felt bad that I wasn't able to figure it out sooner. Now she is resting calmly, leaning on her hand on the pillow. I can't see how she can possibly keep on living like this. She has been gradually sliding downhill for a good ten years of dementia, diabetes and osteoporosis. Poor dad has been there every step of the way. I heard he went home for dinner, and Connie just left to drive back to Eugene.

5-21-08

Thursday at 3 I was helping a student with illustrator. She was having some trouble, and another student was waiting on me and I was having trouble tracking her trouble and focusing on a solution. I'd not slept for 6 days other than breifly on the couch due to my bad cough. I was taking prednisone, dayquil, nyquil and mucinex. I felt a wave of dizzyness hit me and staggered out of the room down the hall to the bathroom where I barfed a few times. Bruce came in and asked if he could help. He put my laptop away.

Eventually I was able to walk down to the office and lay my head on the desk until all the dizzies were gone and I could drive home. Friday I was fine and Sue and I went climbing. In the Pinnacles I was very week with asthma/bronkitis coughing every five minutes and resting on the steep trails. I led windward and windward direct quite well, keeping my cool despite being sick.

Next I led the second sunset slab route, but at the top I got hit by heat stroke and fatigue and had to run down to the shade under vertigo. I couldn't even move, just laid down and panted. Sue asked if I was ok, and I said I was, just wanted to take a nap though I never slept. I'm usually a lizard and can climb in blazing sun, but not that day.

Sunday we climbed at mad meadows and I flew up everything. The pinacles is an awesome training ground for getting strong at friction. My new canon pixma pro 9000 seems like a wonderful printer. Can't wait to print out some limited edition prints of Tacoma and take them to galleries.

5-14-08

Spent the weekend home sick on the couch. I caught Lisa's flu. I didn't have the barfing, but I did have the stuffy nose and weakness, which turned into bronkitis and has kept me from sleeping for four nights now. I thought I was getting better and even tried to climb at the gym yesterday (Tuesday) with Christine and Fletcher. That was a sad affair...I could barely get halfway up routes I can normally climb smoothly. I had to lower off after a couple falls. On the ground, I couldn't get a full breath of air and stood there wheezing for long moments while my friends looked on in concern. Oh, I led a couple eights no problem, and a 10 minus, but through in the towel early.

When I got home, I was so tired I couldn't even play around in illustrator on my newest safeway straws illustration, just balanced my checkbook and hit the sack at 10. I've been on a bit of a spending spree lately, have to rein myself in.

In the last month I've bought the following items:

• $56 - blue camalot:
• $56 - yellow camalot: (to replace a broken one)
• $25 - 40 ounce Keene Stainless Steel water bottle
• $380 Canon Pixma Pro 9000 13x19 printer (to replace a dead $170 5 year old epson 825, which is now running again. I should have canceled the pro 9000...but didn't)

I came very close to walking away from my cingular 3125 cellphone just because it was boring me, but would have had to shell out $150 and 40 a month for 6 months (full internet service) to do it. Managed to not fall for that, but was tempted. My only excuse is that we are getting the "economic stimulus payment" from George Bush soon. I have wanted to have a printer that could make sellable prints 13x19, since I did sell one recently for $30 unframed. And I could also make calendars to sell.

I did really have a gold camalot with a frayed main wire. I'd found the poor thing bent and abandoned on the top of castle and climbed on it for 2 years. My other two are both also in poor health. The oldest one is a first generation camalot that got dropped 100 feet from second pitch of canary. The newest one (third generation single stem) was abandoned back off booty in the pinacles and it needs a new sling. The water bottle was unessecary, I've got lots of those, but several are the #7 plastic, which is in the news as the latest cancer scare.

It's 3 in the morning and I woke up from my best sleep of the week with a coughing spell. Took a shot of nyquil and some codeine stuff of Sue's. Sucked on my inhaler for a while. Hope I don't get worse. Christine passed her oral boards, so she is now a board certified anesthesiologist. She is very modest for such a smart young woman. What I like best about her is that she is passionate about climbing, always ready to go. I need more friends like that. Plus she is very stable in her job, not my typical climbing buddy of late who is dirt bag poor and working weekends and or odd jobs. She is such a good partner in fact that I suspect she will meet someone much better than me, younger and stronger and go on to due great things...lot of potential there.

But that's ok, we will have some fun trips this summer at least. I can't wait until she meets Sue. Sue and Christine will get on like a house on fire. Lisa drove off at 9 to spend the night at her boyfriends house, who still lives at home. I know, I know, what am I supposed to say? She's an adult. Doesn't mean I'm supposed to like it. Clint got a job in the ER room at TG. He worked his first day but it was all just introductory lectures. They have to attend all these paid orientations before they can really start working. He missed the second one because he has clinicals at school that he can't miss. He's a full time student, and simply can't make all the orientations in the new job. His girlfriend also got hired, and she has the same problem. Weird situation as the people who hired them must have known about the conflicts.

Maybe I can get back to sleep. I think the drugs are working and I'm not coughing.

 

5-3-08

I've been neglecting this online journal. I used to wake up Saturday morning and write in it for hours. I wouldn't even be writing this Saturday morning but for Lisa getting sick and causing us to cancel our trip to the Pinnacles. I climbed last weekend with a new climbing friend from Edgeworks: Christine. She was a great partner, perhaps the best new partner I've met in a couple years. Well, Paul comes close, but Paul is tied up with his girlfriend in Portland and not very available. Austin is of course a great partner as well, but he seems to be busy weekends lately, and I worry about his increasing boldness. He is becoming so confident that he is getting careless...not wearing his helment, running out trad climbs, not tieing in at anchors...all the usual symptoms climbers show when they are young and over-confident.

I hate to say it but I think he needs to get shut down on something, maybe even suffer a minor twisted ankle or lose some gear backing off in the dark. Anything to take away that invincible aura he's carrying around so that he becomes a little more cautious. This is a dangerous sport, and anytime you start to think you have it all totally under control you can get cocky and careless. Maybe it's just that I'm an old pussy envious of his awesome talent. I could be totally wrong about all this but, sadly, I've seen this cockiness before...and it didn't end pretty.

Work is going well, though I have some hard weeks coming up. I have to write some new lessons for my dreamweaver 2 class since I tossed out 3 of the old ones. Not looking forward to 30 hours of unpaid lesson planning.

Sue finally saw her long awaited inheritance come through. When she worked at a nursing home before starting her school job, she befriended an old farmer who had suffered a paralyzing stroke. She got to know his son and mother and began taking the old guy out for drives when she had a day off and we weren't climbing. I think she was working weekends back then, so it was something fun to do on her day off when I was working.

She learned how to shoot guns, pick apples, milk a cow and ride a tractor on these expeditions to the famous Bradget farm. This is the same Bradget farm that was just in the news being sold to the Nisqually indian tribe, who are converting it into a wildlife refuge. The farmers son, Ken Bradget willed it to the indians, from whom his grandfather had stolen it back in 1890.

When Ken died a couple years ago, we were surprised to find that Sue was listed in the will and would receive a small percentage of the estate. Just goes to show, being kind pays off, not that she was trying to milk the old guy, he was just another one of her friends. Long story short, Sue just got a check for $22,000.

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