Ceramic rabbit at the Rochester Arts Fair

M’s foot and a Banana Slug.  M has a long standing and vociferous worm paranoia, based around the perceived unpleasent experience of squishing them.  Watching her walk down an Iowa sidewalk the morning after a heavy rain is amusing.  She was horrified to discover how fat and prolific Olympic Banana Slugs are.

Rainier from the plane.  At least we got to see it at all.

I thought I was going over backwards on this one, but it seems I had a bit of room to spare.

The other surf flip, not caught on video.  I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but presume they were very similar.  I like the 2010 removeable spray deck quite a bit.  So long as one is careful to keep the zippers clean it seems like it should last a long time, and thus you can select the benefits of a decked or open boat at will.

This is inside the huge cedar featured in the first scene of Surfing Olympic.  One of the most remarkable trees I’ve ever seen.

Hoh ranger station.

It’s been a difficult return to Montana.  I’ve been sick (bad gut do to stress and/or some bad hotel breakfast on Monday), the job search and its lack of discernable progress is disheartening, the weather’s been rainy, and I missed the ride last night due to all of above being added to a series of mechanical follies with the Lenz.  An hour wasted trying to fix the shifting was finally resolved by buying a new cassette, then the ancient rear housing splintered and had to be replaced, then the shift cable got repeatedly stuck in the shifter (yeah, I should get real cable cutters one of these days instead of continuing to use wire cutters) and by the time I got it through it had been cut too many times and was too short.  Stupidstupid.  So I put the bike away for the day, and will get a new cable, when I get around to it. 

Unfortunately, when I contemplate writing yet another good cover letter, I find it hard to be motivated to do anything at all.  Which furthers the self-feeding, downward spiral of no energy or interest.  If I didn’t have M around things would get truly ugly and you’d find me in a dark corner spending even more time on the net.  Thankfully, no.

What does this have to do with memory?  Only that so much of what I’m doing recently is, more obviously than usual, driven by and intertwined with it.  Lots of, perhaps too much, time and cause to look back and contemplate what I’ve done and how it has shaped what I’m doing now and hope to be doing in the near future.  Sometimes pleasureable, sometimes onerous, occasionally painful.  Few if any regrets, almost all of my present discontent is due to near future uncertainty.

I did have a more concrete than is typical experience with recollection this past Monday evening.  Not quite 17 years ago I learned to climb on the then brand new indoor wall at Miami University, and through high school was able to develop as a climber under the guidance and example of what I imagine was the strongest crop of talent to ever grace MU (Tim Steele, Ted ___, etc).  This was in the pre-commerical crash pad era, right as indoor climbing was beginning to establish itself nationwide.  The Radwall wall at MU was cutting edge at the time, and still holds up well.

We visited it on Monday afternoon, hoping to let my 9 year old nephew try climbing.  Unfortunately child use of the center is restricted to Friday-Sunday or before 2pm, which seems arbitrary, and certainly did not exist back in the day.  So Nate didn’t get to climb, which was sad, but being the amazingly chill kid he is caused no drama.  He wandered around checking things out and I did a bit of bouldering.

The MU wall has a large number of natural pockets and edges molded into the wall, enough that some routes could be done without removeable holds, and thus be preserved for revisitation.  I nabbed the FA of a dyno on the secondary bouldering wall, right as it was opened to the public.  An obvious jump from a two handed natural pocket to the top of the wall, something like 3′ up and 6′ out.  Attempts that hit the top but didn’t hold it sent us flying to spotters arms 6-8′ out.  If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t believe I had done it, as it looks impossible.  The R-L all natural traverse of the main wall is another jem, one I struggled mightly on when I was 13.  It’s not super hard, but is sequence dependent.  I hadn’t been to the climbing wall, or done the traverse, in over a decade, but memory was vivid and immediate and the moves flowed smoothly out of my head.  Until I tweaked a finger on the crux pocket.  I have to remember that I don’t climb anymore.

But maybe I’ll get back into it.