FeralBlog

Paul and April sent me the homemade DVD they put together of their climbing trips in the spring. It made me even more excited to get out there than I was already.

It’s a cool video, and I’ve probably only seen the first 1/3 of it. You’d swear it was a BigUp video; all kinds of cool slo-mo stuff introducing you to the area in the beginning… good music soundtrack and some great problems that I can’t wait to go send. It even had a real DVD case with pictures and stuff!

Update: Copies available for $5. Post a comment and I’ll get you info.

If you see that basically a frickin’ tornado has blown through the night before, chances are the climbing at Coopers will be wet. No need to drive down, park and hike in to see.

Good weekend, overall. Nothing too exciting happened Friday night, except I went to happy hour with some coworkers at Kaya. Some belgian white was drunk, and probably some inappropriate comments were made. All in all, a fun night.

Saturday was an alleycat race around Pittsburgh. An alleycat, for those of you who don’t know, is an underground bike race, organized and mostly run by messengers] Everyone met at The Point downtown around 2, we each paid $5 ($6 if you didn’t have a helmet), and we were off at 2:30. The format of this race was a little different than the one I did last time the previous one laid out your route along with your checkpoints, but this race you were just told what your 15-odd checkpoints were, and your final destination, and you had to figure out the most efficient route yourself.

Brian was there, which was good, because I had someone that knew parts of the city that I didn’t, like the North Side. Also, he was riding his fixie, which meant that me riding my bike with all the gears had at least a chance of keeping up. There were checkpoints in all of the neighborhoods near downtown, so we hit them in this order: South Side, back Downtown, Strip District, North Side, Bloomfield, Squirrel Hill, and then ending in Oakland.

We got a little lost on the South Side, and ran into a messenger from Columbus named Randy. He had gotten separated from his buddies somehow, and was totally lost in an unfamiliar city, so he came along with us. Actually, it was Brian and Randy leading, and me gamely puffing along behind. Randy also provided me with the heart-stopper moment of the day. While going over the 16th St. bridge he was riding no-hands and hit a pothole and veered right into the bridge guardrail. Somehow he managed to straight-arm the guardrail and snap himself back upright, but I had visions of him getting splattered all over the road.

The rest of the checkpoints were uneventful, and it was a nice tour of the city, going from the “historic” adult Garden Theater on the North Side up to the beautiful campus of CMU, and everywhere in between. I guess our route wasn’t the most efficient, because there wasn’t anyone there to give us paper slips at the last two checkpoints, so we just headed to the finish, which was in South Oakland.

The finish was at someone’s “house”. I use quotes around “house” because it was a “house” only in the sense that it had a door, walls and a roof. Inside it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen. “Utilitarian” would be way, way too kind. There was a half-assembled bike on the living room floor. That was the only furniture. The back porch had about 5 trashbags full of empty PBR cans. The stove was beyond description, which is why I took a picture. I braved a trip inside to get us some “victory” beer. The “victory” was in that we didn’t come in last in any of our particular categories: fixie, regular, or out-of-towner. (BTW, pounding a beer as a water substitute is a Bad Thing™)

Yesterday Brian, Jen, Seb and I went bouldering at Pioneer. It’s not my favorite place to climb, but the weather was so beautiful for a change that it didn’t matter at all. Didn’t do anything exceptional, save for a cool V5 cave problem that involves doing a long throw to a small crimp edge and pulling off of that, pretty much one-handed. I was feeling the effects of the race still, so a pretty low-energy day. Stopped at Sheetz on the way home (MTO, baby!), and then settled in to watch Sopranos and Deadwood. I’m still not convinced about Deadwood… the characters are really starting to develop, but I don’t know if the underlying story is going to be enough to hold my interest.

And finally, I slept like utter poo last night. I think the stress of last week finally caught up with me, and I had fun sinus issues Saturday night and all day Sunday that finally turned into a cold last night that kept me up most of the night. Argh. I can’t wait for spring to be here for good. Every year I have sniffles pretty much from October through April, but I’m hoping that the clear Boulder air will do me good. Oh, I have news on that, too… but that’s for another update.

¹ If you want to see some alleycat footage, check out this guy’s site. Of particular interest are the “drinking and riding” and “NYC” videos. The NYC one especially is some of the scariest footage you’d ever want to see.

This applies to crappy Matrix movies as well as other things.

Right around the time that the local gym was completing their new bouldering area, we got a letter from the building owner where we were sub-sub-sub-leasing our space. There was a new tenant coming in; they wanted the whole floor, and we had to vacate. Luckily, we were able to sell all our holds to the gym, and just in time for a big climbing competition. It worked out perfectly for me, because with the new area open, there was much less reason to go to the co-op, but I certainly didn’t want to back out, because I still went in to campus on occasion, and also didn’t want to leave the remaining folks with a larger share of the rent.

So, last night was the first big night of trying to tear down the wall, which was highly over-engineered when we first put it in. All the nasty cummy mattresses were moved before I even got there, but we managed to get all but one piece of the plywood off, as it had like 4 stripped screws in it, and then called it a night.

From the Fark Photoshop Contest entitled “The last thing you’ll ever see”

I put up a 2nd gallery of photos from Bishop; these were taken by April and Paul on a film camera and scanned in at the developers. They looks great!

Well.. the climbing competition at the gym was yesterday, and I had a really good day. I paced myself well to get 10 good problems complete. Having thick callouses from my Bishop trip helped a lot, I think. It was a pretty crowded event, but no real ringers from out of town. I think I placed 4th, but that’s just a guess.

There was one last problem at the end of the day (that I should have tried sooner) that I kept getting closer and closer, but couldn’t quite get. It was getting me so frustrated that I was pounding the wall and screaming with each failure. I never care about problems that much, but this one was dancing just out of reach. I know I can do it, and when I go in on Tuesday and warm up, I know I’ll walk it, but it would have been a nice capper on the day to get it. I’m feeling pretty strong these days, and with the new area of the gym open, I’m hoping that over the winter I’ll be able to get some work in. Then, when I go back out to Bishop in the spring I’ll be able to put my projects to bed without too much difficulty.

Diary is going slower than I thought, but I figure if I post a link, that will drive me to work on it faster. Plus, I have a buttload of new pictures from Paul and April that I can use to illustrate and make pretty.

So, here is where I will be making updates/revisions/etc. while I get everything all commited to 1s and 0s.

Still working on my trip diary, but in the meantime my pictures from the trip are up, and Brian has already posted his impressions of the trip.

Sitting in the coffee shop on main street. Climbed the last two days, and going out today, weather permitting. I’ll have more in-depth journal entries when I get back, but just wanted to let everyone know I haven’t died.

Oh, and Las Vegas has the Weirdest. People. Ever.