The Lucky One

Posted by on October 26th, 2012  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

I like to to ride my Schwinn Aerodyne exercise bike while watching a movie. The movie keeps me on it far longer than I would normally ride, especially on a work night. Today I watched The Lucky One on Amazon for $3.00.

It’s about a soldier who finds a photo of a girl in the rubble after a firefight. On the back of the photo it says: “stay safe”. It becomes his lucky charm, like a guardian angel. When he gets out, he is physically whole, but scared emotionally.

He looks up the girl. It sounds like a chick flick, and it was written by Nicholas Sparks…but it’s very well done, awesome acting and plot lines. I found it very moving.

Karate Crack, Smith Rocks

Posted by on October 20th, 2012  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

I led Karate last weekend. It may have been my best effort ever. I hung once at the very top, right before the traverse. I could have run for the anchor, but it’s downhill, and I had to protect my follower. We went down there as a big group from the local gym to celebrate my buddies last trip before his hip surgery.

I’m 63 pages into my new textbook on Web Design, I will post pictures later. I have to write 20 new pages this weekend, and they take an hour a page. It’s 10:30 on Saturday and I haven’t even started. The class will have no lesson if I don’t get this done.

This new version of my textbook is 80 percent new material, and covers html 5, and CSS 3.

Here is a video I recorded on my lunch break about using the Photoshop CS6 healing brush to remove a climbing rope from a photo.

my textbook, cover page

 

bookpage8

 

bookpage46

 

story time after climbing at smith

 

Lisa following me up karate, photo by Kyle

A little climbing, a lot of Overtime

Posted by on October 5th, 2012  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

I broke away from lesson plans Sunday to climb at Index for a day. Sue belayed me up Toxic Shock, a 5.9 finger layback and splitter crack. I’ve been climbing that darn crack for 30 years, and it has spanked me many times. Sunday though, I climbed it easily. The finger layback at the bottom went nicely. It’s muscular laybacking on fingertips, but it’s over quickly, and the pro is awesome all the way up. The upper splitter hand crack went smoothly too. As long as you keep raising your right toe, and jamming it in to support the less than perfect hands at the crux, it’s a blast. At one point, I had two manky hand jams, and a manky toe jam, and had to stretch for the nice jam at the end…but again, the pro is awesome.

We went down to K cliff where I was not impressed. The routes have discontinuous cracks, so you are face climbing on runnouts between placements. The really nice one on the left has one piece in about 40 feet. I backed off it. I don’t do runnouts with ledges, I don’t care how easy they are.

Later we ran into Kyle and Lisa. They offered to follow me up Princely Ambitions, which I also led cleanly…for a change. It was a lovely day of climbing for me, though Sue was frustrated at not being able to climb. Her toenail hasn’t grown back yet after a long hike with bad shoes, and she can’t wear rock shoes.

I have written 36 pages in my new book on web design. I’m staying ahead of my class, which eats pages at a rate of about 16 a week. All of today, and most of the weekend I will be creating more pages in my  textbook.

The only way to make this quarter survivable is to simply hang in there and get the work done. Had I been willing to stay home on my vacation and work, I’d not be in this situation. But that I was not willing to do.

The good news is that I will be able to use this book to teach for a couple years, and it’s customized to exactly what my students need to learn. My classes in web are meant to give them both a finished modern website, and prepare them for the advanced classes that are coming their way in future quarters.

It’s a fine line I’m treading. I can’t step on other teachers toes, I can’t get too advanced, and I can’t make it too simple. And it has to make something functional, and pretty that can be used for a portfolio web site, should they decide to buy their own domain name. I’d best get to it. We had a saying back in my previous career as a pressman when faced with a huge project that wasn’t going to go away, and required massive overtime: The only way to it, is through it.