A great past weekend and another coming up

This past weekend would probably be considered a great weekend by most climbers' standards. On Saturday Colin and I headed out to Yamnuska. I'll just stop complaining about Yamnuska since I probably climb there more than anyplace else. So for one last time, the rock is LOOSE, route finding is tricky and the approach to the base his a lung burning affair. Suffice to say that in future posts when I mention Yamnuska the prior complaining should be assumed.

But back to Yam, Colin and I climb *most* of a fun 10b route called State of Confusion. I was in a state of confusion on the first pitch after Colin took a lead fall due to his hold breaking off. Colin is a big guy 6ft6' big and heavy too. His fall had me dragging along the base of the route until I was in line with his fall line. The trick of course is most belayers in the rockies would be STUPID to belay directly under a climbers' fall line, lest you get an unrequested present, called a rock or boulder landing on you. Hence why you belay off to the side. Since it was the first pitch I wasn't attached to anything as I would have been higher up. Once I skidded to a stop all was well. All Colin said was "Well that was a dynamic belay" Which means he kept dropping as I was being dragged closer to him, but slowly, geez. :-)

With that excitement over, we re-commenced climbing although it took another pitch for my nerves to calm down. The climbing was very good for Yam standards, some crack climbing, some slab oh and of course some scary loose boulders. I couldn't help noticing the happy hikers walking along the base of the cliffs oblivious to the hazards of rock fall above them.

I was enjoying the climbing until we get to end of pitch 7 and Colin starts to talk about pitch 8... an exposed 30ft traverse. I wonder what must be going through Colin's mind as he tells me about it.. he must be thinking "here we go..." Because as he says "traverse.." my eyes get big, I start shuffling and well, acting like a nervous nelly. He calmly lets me know if we're going to bail we have to do it now. I blink, blink, blink and then say OK! Again he reminds me "that's a lot of rappels down" I look up at the route, look down at the anticipated rappels, up down, up down and then say, "lets start rappelling". To Colin's credit he never expresses frustration, he never says "don't be such a baby, do the damn traverse". I fell on a traverse with him a couple years ago which sent me rocketing down the through the air with all the slack, ending up penduluming and swinging HARD into the rock face. After the fact I read that the force of falling on a traverse is just as bad as taking a lead fall. I did tell him "if you really want to complete this climb I'll do it Colin" but he shrugged his shoulders and replied "I can always come back". Perhaps he remembers the one time on Yam I started to cry just thinking about an anticipated traverse. I'd say 90% of the time I have good mental toughness when climbing, but traverses are my nemesis for sure.

Oh but I said this was a GOOD climbing weekend. Colin allowed me my jitters and we rapped down. While we were climbing Tom & Shannon and Nic & Karena were also climbing different routes on Yamnuska. That evening we met up at Toms and had a BBQ with hmm hmm Good food. Laughing, talking about our day, having a couple cocktails and we all sat down to watch a climbing movie. By 11:30pm I was done like dinner. We all crashed at Tom's.

In the morning we walked down to a breakfast place, ate food swilled down coffee and decided where we would climb that day. The local climbing crag Grassi Lakes won out as the weather looked dubios. We were the first set of climbers there so we claimed some great routes. About an hour later the area was full. There were a couple routes I was itching to top-rope.

It was a great blend of Trad climbing on Saturday and some happy social climbing on Sunday. At the end of the day we all headed back to Tom's to make short work of our leftovers from the night before.

By the time I got back into Calgary around 9:30pm I was exhausted, bruised, had tender bleeding fingers and a big smile on my face.

Climbing isn't just about the climbing, its about WHO you climb with as well. Hanging with my peeps for a full weekend is like hanging with the family that you actually like. :-)

Who says you can't have fun when you're not climbing?

Climbing plans dashed due to bad weather. Instead I turrn my attention to matters at home, namely the house, namely the downstairs bedroom which has been ominously causing me stress.

Calgary experienced torrential rain and I didn't learn from last year re: keeping my gutters clean. My downstairs basement carpet in the bedroom was soaked. Like squishy wet feet soaked. I ignored it for a while, not quite sure what to do. Well thats not true, I knew exactly what I needed to do I just didn't want to do it. I was enjoying some serious denial thinking maybe it would dry, maybe there were carpet angels who fixed this sort of problem. Ya, no.

So in the absence of climbing today I took a deep breath and got down to it.

1. Go buy a very nice wet/dry shop vac (and still lament the loss of my other brand new shop vac when my garage got broken into - get over it Lise) Found out that other people must be in urgent need of wet/dry shop vacs because there was only one left, and I was able to snag the last one. Not as powerful as my first beloved shop vac but hey, I'm sooooo over that now.

2. I pull everything out of the bedroom including dismantling the bed. But first having to rearrange the gear room so there is actually room for the bed. Then drag, curse, drag, stop, swear and eventually get everything out of the wet bedroom and into the now full gear room.

3. Start to use the new spanky shop vac in the squishy bedroom and realized this was like pissing on a forest fire. I know what needs to happen... accepting that I just spent $200 bucks on something that won't help (at least for today)

4. Begin to start pulling up the wet heavy carpet to be greeted by soaking wet underlay. This stuff was never going to dry and I couldn't even imagine how much shop-vaccing would get it even to the damp stage.

5. Decision time... call in the professionals to fix the problem aka which means they dry the carpet and replace the underlay, a repeat of the $600 solution last summer. But I'm not certain this won't happen again. I'm assuming this is in fact a problem with me not cleaning my guttters. Because if its not then that means there's a problem with the grading of my backyard and... well lets just say I am still firmly in denial and assuming this can be fixed by keeping the gutter clean but I'm not 100% sure. So do I want to spend money fixing a problem that might happen again...

6. I feel some relief that I finally did get someone to clean out my gutters in the hopes that this is the solution. I won't even think of the grading of my backyard unless I really have to.

7. Decision made, the carpet is toast, done, finito, I'm ripping it out and turfing it. So tug, tug, grunt, pull, swear at the squishy wet mess I'm in. Do you know how heavy wet carpet is? Fucking heavy. I manage to get the disgusting mess rolled in a fashion so I can pull up the underlay

8. Did you know that underlay is glued to the floor? Oh ya that is sooooooo much fun. I'm having a ball here, a one woman party.

9. Getting the underlay outside wasn't so bad, wet and disgusting but do-able.

10. However, getting a wet carpet outside is another thing all together, and I couldn't stomach a wet rolled up, mold inducing germ fest, sitting in my basement festering.

11. I roll, drag the carpet to the base of my stairs which leads outside, trying to ignore how wet I'm getting handling this mess. Not too many stairs... I can do this, grunt, slip, pull & push this fucker. No go, I'm halfway up the stairs and can't drag it any further, now it's wedged there. Take a couple deep breaths and think "serenity now Lise" that's gotta be better than swearing like a truck driver. Hmm what to do...

12. I manage to push it down the 6 stairs I just worked my ass off to get it up and it's sitting in a sopping mess on the floor again. I'm imagining this carpet has an evil personality and he's laughing at my inability to throw him out, I mean this carpet has a bad-ass attitude. I'll fix him. (Ok I'm abit delusional now)

13. I find my dull carpet knife and start hacking the sucker to smaller pieces which I can drag outside. And it feels oddly satisfying to be shredding him. (must discuss this with my therapist)

14. At this point, I'm wet, dirty, probably smelly, I know I've sucked way too many funky carpet fibres into my lungs for my own good. The back bedroom is empty with very old lino exposed, remnants of stuck underlay, its sticky from the glue - in other words a real prize to behold. But it's DRY!!

So ya who says you can't have fun at home, I mean I bet I got an equivalent work out of a climbing day, had to do some problem solving, deal with stress and probably put my lungs in severe jeopardy. Why climb when I can do this?

Now I just need to find the phone number for 1-800-pick up my wet carpet or more aptly called "Got Junk?" Anyhow the bad-ass carpet is now outside and it can do what ever it wants out there, have a party with the mold, make new germ friends, I don't care.

Damn, I sure hope I can climb next weekend, sticking around home is hard work.....

The Transparent Blog and 15min of fame

So here we are...all these happy bloggers rambling on about our lives for the world to read. If you're like me I assume that 3 of my dearest friends actually read my blog, when they're really bored, the TV has stopped working and they're tired of watching their favorite DVD's.

However do you really know who reads your blog? Last I checked there were about 400 clicks on my blog. I've received comments from people who live in other countries which is kind of cool. I even found my own blog when I was researching heated footbeds. I was blogging about footbeds before I wanted to buy them and voila this blog came up in my search.

Well the editor of the Financial Post Business Magazine was searching. Searching for people she might want to profile for the next issue devoted to summer adventure. Apparently business people want to do cool things beside work. And they're interested in the other cool stuff work-people (aka weekend warriors) do. So who did she find... but little ol' me pounding on the keyboard about my climbing adventures via blogger. Being a classic Leo, how could I turn down an opportunity to get my mug in a magazine? Well I couldn't and I knew my mom would get a huge kick out of it.

I just read the article that will appear in her magazine and was able to tweak a few irregularities that only me and a handful of climbers would care about but, still. I was paraonoid that it would appear like I was leading alot of the climbs I've been on and while the general public wouldn't notice the distinction climbers sure do. I may be a media hog but I like to think I'm not a poser. Perhaps this only makes sense to me. :-)

However what did strike a wee bit of terror in my heart is that they have referenced this blog. They didn't give out the address but with the name of the blog and my first and last name its not that hard to find.

I realized that what I write as an anomymous shmoe is a wee bit different then what I would write when my name is attached to it! I started to think.. hmmm do I want my work colleagues to be privy to my personal life? Hey don't get me wrong, I bet the people in my company are just fine and I sure LOVE the company I work for (no biting the hand that feeds me here - no sirree bob)

I'm not thinking that thousands of people will now be held fast to my meanderings and musings... hardly, but it does bring up the issue of transparency on the web. And being fully accountable for what we write or in my case rant. So I went through the blog and deleted some posts that while they were high on the amusement scale, they didn't rank so high on the "keeping some things private, TMI" scale.

SO... I will be waiting for perhaps the 6 or 7 new readers dying to find out what I think of climbing. But just to be safe I sure hope my 3 faithful readers won't leave me... will you? Promise???

Double Header Blog

This should really be two Blogs, but laziness applies so it will be ONE blog, I'll try and be succinct.

Blog ONE: 2 weekends ago I flew to San Franscico for some climbing punishment. Michele whisked me off on Saturday with Cherie and pretty soon there I was jamming my tender tooties into places they had no business being... like skinny cracks between granite rock. I do have to admit to liking the jazzy tape gloves we make. And they aren't just for show thats for sure... I missed a teensy spot by my wrist which was soon sporting a nice little abrasion!

The weather was about 30 degrees and I'm sad to say I was hunting for Shade. Most of the day I wearing a long sleeve shirt to avoid burning until it cooled off abit. Michele was being all BURLY in her tank top but missed a couple spots with the sunscreen, burn baby burn.

Michele was giving me excellent advice on technique getting up a crack although I wasn't always following what she wanted me to do. Cherie was an expert at lounging, she's a master at it. But she was up there climbing too!

Day two we were in Lake Tahoe and I thought that was pretty cool, to be in a place I had only heard about. Our first night after climbing we headed to this Rib BBQ place, a meat lovers delight and there's these 3 skinny chicks (us) CHOWING down, it was a beautiful sight, Cherie is a master eater too, she is a woman of many talents.

Blog TWO: Friday I wrapped up my year of study with Leadership Calgary. The last 2 months have been devoted to meeting with my study group (6 of us) as we prepared our Learning Day for the class. Pioneer Leaders + Adaptive and Malaptive capacities of communities. If the topic sounds vague well it sure did to us too! It took us quite awhile to even figure out what we wanted to speak about. Eventaully we got focussed that 2 people would teach about Pioneer Leaders, 2 others wanted to tackle Spirituality and Leadership, Holly and I decided to look at the Community aspect. I chose to Research the country of Bhutan. Holly looked at the Canadian First Nations community and virtual communities like Facebook.

I definitely did learn alot through "doing" and you really have to understand the material to get up in front the whole group and provide them with something insightful and informative.

So 10 months of thinking about Pioneer Leadership, the Human Venture, Tools of Wisdom and Judgement, thoughtscape, actionscape, adaptive and maladaptive positioning and a WHOLE lot more has come to a close. But I know that all this course did was stoke the fires of my own curiousity and my deep seeded discontent with the way things are in the world.

2 quotes from our teacher Ken Lowe will stay with me:

"You are always more ignorant than you are wise" and

"There is no room for dispair"

Lets hope I remember that.