Webster Art

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.