Aerials, Anchors, & Little Helpers

It simultaneously feels like time is flying and we're super busy, and that we're not doing anything at all.  I'm trying to remember everything that's happened since my last post.  At first, I didn't think it was much, but the more I think about it, it's kind of a lot.  Not all of it is interesting though.

Remember "Mark"?  He came over for a bit yesterday.  It was absolutely gorgeous out.  Just the right amount of sun and heat and breeze with no humidity.  He spent some time attempting to catch the cats, who had never been around children before.  They were understandably wary, but surprisingly well behaved.  They even ended up taking treats from his hand, though we had to help him hold still enough that the cats didn't start.  When it seemed like the cats had had enough treats, Sarah told me how much "Mark" loves watering plants.  She was not kidding!  I think he watered my tomato about 20 times.  It's a good thing I wasn't putting much in his watering can.  I had a little one hiding in the cabinets that I never use, and I was filling it up on the balcony from my big one so his wasn't too heavy.  After the big one was empty, we tried telling him he was done and the water was gone.  And then he discovered the cats' water fountain and attempted to refill the big one himself.  It would seem he doesn't quite understand water flow yet ;)

"Mark" attempts to refill the watering can.

DS has been taking me to Birdsboro Rock Quarry, which is now a sport climbing place and lake.  I've never been a serious outdoor climber, and what little I have done was mostly top roping.  I had some things to learn about proper technique for clipping and cleaning the anchor.  It makes climbing quite a bit scarier, because you typically have further to fall than you do with a top rope.  It took two trips, but I've learned enough that I can do everything.  Now I just need to work on my outdoor climbing skills (outdoor climbs are a bit harder than indoor ones typically) and my nerve.  It's really exciting stuff, and I love that DS and I have a physical activity that we can do together again.

In an attempt to motivate ourselves to keep working out, Sarah and I have decided to run a 5k this summer.  I've never run anything before.  I'm a horrible runner.  But I have noticed that in the year since I last visited a real gym I've gotten significantly better at it.  Not to say I'm "good", but by comparison, definitely better.  I'm nervous about the idea of running anything at all, though this race is not typical.  It's called Color Me Rad, (seems almost identical to The Color Run) and you can walk or run or anything you want.  It's not timed.  You wear white and get hit with "color bombs" which dye you all kinds of crazy colors.  I think it will be a lot of fun, and it seems like the perfect way to try out a 5k.

Monday DS and I checked out a gymnastics studio which recently put up a rock climbing wall.  We weren't expecting the wall to be very big, but we did have hopes about the studio equipment.  It was advertised as Open Gym, and their website indicated that they provide instruction on vault, bars, balance beam, and floor exercise.  Floor exercise alone is huge in terms of space.  Unfortunately, this place was tiny.  It had a bar, but it was for small children.  The trampoline wasn't much bigger than those individual ones people put in their houses.  I was pretty bummed, as I was looking forward to playing around with stuff I haven't had access to since high school.  But there was a slackline, which is harder than I imagined, and a mat laid out for a line of tumbling.  A few of us were attempting aerials.  I used to be able to do one, but it would seem that now I have trouble trusting my body to make it around without killing me; my hands kept reaching for the floor at the last minute.  It's a very strange thing to have muscle memory for things your body can't do anymore.  I remember in exacting detail how to do each aspect of a back handspring, but if I tried one now, I'd most likely break my neck.  I have dreams all the time about doing gymnastics.  I miss it a lot.

Oh, and I got my new glasses today!  Hooray for being able to see again! :D

Violin on Crack

Last night DS and I went to see the Philadelphia Orchestra.  They were doing La Mer by Debussey, which DS apparently really likes, so we snatched up some tickets while they were on sale for $10.  Whoo! to that.  They opened the program Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.  It was interesting, kind of creepy in the beginning.  Then the conductor's own Violin Concerto was performed.  Before the concert, DS was reading the program and said, "This sounds like it's just going to be the violin showing off."  Which sounded kind of cool.

And then it started.  Truer words were never spoken.  You guys, there is no doubt at all that the soloist was amazingly talented, but attempting to play every note at once on the violin does not a good piece of music make.  Seriously.  It was all over the place, with no anchoring theme except that the violin was on crack the whole time.  The only thing even kind of cool about it was the third movement, and even then only for a few minutes.  I felt so sorry for the rest of the orchestra.  Most of them just sat there looking bored.  DS said he caught people making faces at each other.  I think maybe, MAYBE, each person played for a minute and a half total.  Most of that was very spread out.  It was a 30 minute piece you guys.  *sigh*  I feel bad that I didn't like it, because I thought I liked contemporary stuff for the most part.  But this piece just didn't speak to me at all.  By the time La Mer started, I was getting sleepy.  I liked bits of the first movement, and the third movement, but I don't even remember the second...

Also, I would like to take a moment to brag.  Last night I wore a dress that I bought in high school.  It's a size 6*.  It was kind of amazing.  I must be burning a heck of a lot of calories with the exercises and climbing I've been doing lately, because I've been starving all the time and basically stuffing my face constantly, and yet I'm not gaining weight.  I'm most excited about the quantifiable changes, like going up a climb with ease when just last week I was struggling with it and falling a lot.  Some of that is practice of course.  A lot of climbing is just knowing how to move your body.  I love that there's so much thought in it, and not just strength.  But truly, I feel stronger every day.

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*I can only pull something like that off in a dress with a flared bottom.  I've always had a pear shape, and my hip to waist ratio is kind of absurd...  I'm still wearing size 10 pants. :P  But I will take this victory!

It's Spring!

Spring is here!  In fact, in PA it came early.  Starting March 7th, almost every day has been at least 60°, many of them in the mid-70's.  The average high for March here is only 53°, and on Friday it was 80°.  The 10 day forecast has temps returning to something a little more normal, but still on the warm side.

As much as I think this is probably not a good sign in terms of me hating this summer, DS and I have been very diligently taking advantage of how nice it is right now.  To start, as soon as I noticed that there was no indication of freezing temperatures anymore*, I set out for Home Depot to restart my balcony garden.  This year I have three kinds of lettuce, brussel sprouts, oregano, rosemary, catnip, cilantro, and strawberries.  I plan to have more stuff as soon as I can find it, but things like tomatoes weren't even in the store yet.  I have carrot seeds too, which I'm pretty excited about.

Clockwise from top: Strawberries, Cilantro, Catnip, Oregano

I've been spending a couple days per week visiting Sarah in Franklin Square park.  She's a nanny for this adorable kid we'll call Mark who is 16 months old.  He doesn't talk yet, but he knows sign language, so we can have conversations of a sort.  As a result, and because of my secret deep love of the show Switched At Birth, I've been learning sign language too.  This Thursday is the grand re-opening of the park, where they'll open the carousel, miniature golf course, and the shake place.  Sarah wants to buy Mark a milkshake.  I'm just excited to be going to the park so much.  It's a really awesome little place.  The best is when the Chinese kids get out of school (we're right by Chinatown) and come set up their boombox for breakdancing sessions.  Mark loves it so much that he's been making up his own breakdancing moves.

"Mark" plays peek-a-boo in Franklin Square Park.  He hid for like 9 minutes that time.

We've been looking into place to climb outside as soon as we get a new rope and some weekend days that don't include rain.  Hopefully in April.  To prepare, DS and I went hiking around Birdsboro, PA.  There's an old quarry there that is now a water reservoir, and the remaining exposed rock has been bolted for sport climbing.  It was a nice little place, and I especially enjoyed the two wire cable bridges you have to cross to get to the area.

If you'll recall from the Changes and Challenges post, we had two extra cats living here for a while.  They moved out right after we got back from the snowboarding trip, but last weekend we had them again while their owner was out of town.  Aside from some superficial hissing as the cats came in, it would seem that the forced cohabitation did the trick!  We had some actual getting along, and it was very exciting for DS and I.  Our cats have never before been okay around any other animal, and look at them now!

Johann and Winston share the bed.

Progress on Sarah's couch is coming along really well, though very slowly.  I keep meaning to take a picture of it, but forgetting.  She's only about a mile away from me, which is easy walking distance.  Thursday I met her at Llama Tooth, an adorable little bar near her house, for drinks on their patio.

The patio of Llama Tooth.  There are worse ways to enjoy an evening.

Today marked six days in a row of working out.  I'm trying to vary what I do every day so my muscles don't get overly sore and I don't get bored.  I can already tell it's making a difference in my climbing.  Yesterday I conquered a beast that I thought was just too big for me, and it was so exciting.  There are quite a few climbs in the gym that seem to be set by someone about 7 feet tall, so figuring out a way to get my munchkin self up them always makes me feel very accomplished.  Their setting initials are BJR, and I think their climbs are going to be my project material from now on.  I already have the next one picked out!

So that's what we've been up to around here, sprinkled with a lot of book reading.  Hopefully I'll be updating a bit more often now that I'm caught up!

Catching Up

One of my goals this year is to blog more, but here it is, the 16th, and this is only my second post.  I haven't even gone back and posted my holiday photos here yet, though I did manage to get them up on Flickr.  So I'm here, trying to write something.

I had a conversation with DS today about time.  Well, mostly I pontificated to him through instant messaging while he failed to respond because he was working at a real job.  Anyway, we were talking about how it was taking me longer than I wanted to write out some new flute parts for some new material the band is making, and I was worried about getting it done before practice tonight so I'd have something to play.  But also, there are like 15 other things I wanted/needed to do today, one of which was "spend several hours playing computer games."  In case you're curious, those games are Skyrim and Sims Medieval*.  Though I have to admit that it's mostly Sims Medieval, because I rock at that game (I think you have to be really bad not to), and I keep dying in stupid Morvunskar and it makes me mad so I quit.

Anyway, I was thinking about how whenever someone finds out I don't work, they look at me strange and almost always ask what I do all day.  Except they don't ask it in a way that would suggest they're curious, but more like they can't comprehend what a fully functional adult with any self respect would do with themselves during those hours of the day most people dedicate to "work."  As if not going to a job every day somehow means you are incapable of doing anything worthwhile.  This question always bothers me.  My snippy answer is, "All those things you wish you had more time to do but don't because you work all day."  It's a subject that I struggle with on my own anyhow.  There is a lot of importance put on what you do for a living in this world.  Or maybe there isn't, but some congruence of my childhood and upbringing and education caused me to be overly sensitive to the matter.  For a long time I felt like I should be working, even though I didn't really like the idea of working, because that is what an adult does.  Even now, when I'm mostly okay with things, I will feel the urge to find a job.  The idea of having to be up and dressed every morning and out the door by 8 or whatever shuts that urge down really fast.

I'm getting off topic.  What I was trying to say is that I was thinking about all these things I wanted to do today.  Not just things to do in general, but a long list of specific things that I wanted to accomplish on this one day.  And I found myself wishing for more time in the day.  Even though I have more time in the day for these things than most.  Which, as you can see up there, brought me back to thinking about how people are always amazed that I'm not bored out of my mind.  I wonder why it is that I'm not when so many people are sure they would be in my place?  What is different about me?  Do I just have that many hobbies?  It really doesn't feel like it, especially since I know I could spent several days in a row, all day, doing the same thing and be perfectly content.

I did title this post Catching Up, didn't I?  Well, DS and I have been spending a lot of quiet time at home.  He's most of the way through The Eye of the World, and not hating it, which is a big source of happiness for me.  I've been listening to audiobooks while chugging along on this cross stitch pattern I've had for 15 years.  Band practice finally resumed after a 2 month hiatus, and this time we had my new Zoom H2 to record our shenanigans, so we happily caught the impromptu new song on tape.  DS and I got a membership at the local climbing gym, and we've been twice already.  Their climbs are graded harder than they were at Boulders in Wisconsin, which combined with my several years of not doing it meant that I was struggling up 5.4's the first day.  This gym is quite a bit taller than my last one too, and I found myself afraid of doing moves at the top.  Also, it took a session and a half to really start trusting the rope and my harness to catch me again, even for little things like lowering me off the climb.  My muscles hurt in a good way, and I was up to 5.6's when we left yesterday.  I also have new beads and some jewelry making tools, and plan to really get into my Etsy shop again soon.  And I got a book for learning the violin, and hopefully I'll find the time and motivation to squeeze that into my schedule too.

So we've been busy, but also mostly by ourselves.  A bit different from last year.  I'm feeling very productive, and I like it.

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*It occurred to me the other day, in one of those thoughts that you think are excellent and profound but in truth probably only seem so as long as they stay within the confines of your own brain, an "it sounded better in my head" type of moment if you will, that any Sims game (not Sim City though, that's a whole other beast) mostly requires a strong dose of time management for excelling.  Which is funny, because anyone good at those games probably struggles with that in their real life.

In Search of Climbing

Today DS and I decided to explore.  We haven't really done this enough since moving here.  He had read that there was some decent climbing in Ralph Stover State Park, which is about an hour from here.  Today turned out to be crystal clear skies and a high of nearly 60, which is perfect hiking weather in my opinion.  We layered up just in case, grabbed the camera, and went off in search of adventure.

The climbing guide we were following took us to the picnicking and white water section.  This part was home to a late 18th century water-powered grist mill, and the park takes its name from its owner¹.  However, the climbing section is in the "High Rocks" section.  While there is technically a road that connects the two, there is a pedestrian only bridge in the way.  So we bundled back into the car and tried again.

The High Rocks area is, as you might have imagined, high.  It overlooks a horseshoe bend in the creek, and there are 200-ft drops down to the river.  The rocks were often a bit purple, and reminded me a lot of Devil's Lake because of that.  They didn't seem nearly so slick though, so they are probably not quartzite. There were quite a few climbers there, though not as many as we would have expected for such a nice day.  That looks good for us being able to find places to set up once we start going there to climb.  There were a lot of bolted routes too, which isn't something I've personally encountered much.  It will be nice to use their built in anchors and not have to spend 45 minutes setting up the rope just to get started.

The day was lovely, both because of the weather and because the leaves were still hanging on and beautiful.  I tried to get a good feel of the place for you in these photos.

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¹Ralph Stover State Park Recreational Guide