whee

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(for the record the link is out of date, there is no longer oodles of camping at metcalfe rock, in fact you aren't allowed to camp there and should find somewhere that is else to tent. No I'm not telling you where I camped, too many yahoos trashing the place as it is.)

In case you missed it oh readers of my blog I went camping this weekend. Now since about half the people that read and comment on my blog were WITH me camping there really wasn't much missing me to be done. Most of the folks that would have missed me blogging were with me and got to listen to my rambling first hand.

Which of course means that there were several conversations that went like 'so the other day this thing happened...' ... "oh yeah, i read about that in your blog" ... *silence*

The good news is that since I spent the majority of the weekend playing with rocks with hubris and light strikes a deal there were other things to talk about. It went sort of like this 'yeah that looks good and pinchy' "left foot up" 'move your right hand' "i gotcha" 'nice!'

not the most enlightening or scintillating conversation it's true but very useful when you're stuck to a rock face going 'where the fuck do i put my fucking foot???'

i learned a couple of new climbing things, one is that when you're working a move and you're feeling really uncertain it can feel REALLY fucking good when someone just kinda lays their hand on your waist or your back or the edge of your hip or wherever it is that's feeling particularly vulnerable. Not a push. Not like when your belayer pulls you up the wall, just a sort of 'i got you' touch that makes your body feel safe enough to try something. it's freaking cool.

i have also discovered that real rocks and fake rocks are very motherfucking different and that climbers have got to be the most boring people to be around. Get up, eat, go boulder, eat, talk about bouldering, play poker, sleep, get up, eat, go visit some caves, go boulder, eat, talk about bouldering and caving, sleep. Like for serious I'm not sure I would want to hang out with us!

That said, I have also learned that climbing builds great asses and backs. Yummy.

*clears throat*

So light showed up at like 1am on thursday which necessitated talking until 4:30am before passing out for like 3 hours and then getting up to teach. I don't know who's the bigger sucker, me for teaching two classes on 3 hours of sleep or him for taking them! Headed north singing along to my mixed tapes at the tops of our lungs and landed wet and soggy in a campsite.

I'm telling you i don't think I've seen two people set up two tents faster in my life. We had our tents up, flys on and doors shut in under five minutes. BOTH tents. It rained all day. I just kept looking at the sky and going 'scattered showers motherfucker, this looks pretty organized to me!'

In dribs and drabs and a lot of damp the rest of the friday night crew pulled up until it was hubris, lividviv, light, othercat and tna. tna needs to pick a nick a lot. So we ate and we polished off a bottle of whisky and had a really good time sitting under a tarp under a tree. This is funny because it took us like two hours to notice that it had stopped raining as a result and at that point we were all pretty hammered and just passed out.

[pause to admire othercat's pictures. what you can see them too, go read his blog]

After that the weekend just improved. svdw and e&lm showed up on saturday morning as we were finishing off our breakfast and then after a snooze in the sun with my sister the boys and i headed off to play on some rocks. [Read: walked for at least an hour]

It took a while to get into it. light and hubris like jumped right on and played but it all seemed sort of impossible and crimpy and weird to me and it took me pretty much all day to start to really dig it. Which meant that the next day after we hit the underground stream and the guys are like 'i don't know, let's go back' i was like 'no, no, more bouldering! more!'

Which we did. It was much better the second day. I sort of got my rhythm and lost the fear of the rock. The first day I would only do really easy things and I wimped out really fast. In fact it didn't really improve until the very end when i found a problem to work for a while. I would like get on the wall, feel around for a while and find no holds that I liked and then fall off cause my other arm got tired. By the second day I had learned that what looks the least like a hold is the most likely thing to actually hold you. In nature jugs are just giant things that slope and hold nothing... in other words, there are very few jugs out there in real rock land.

Yeah counterintuitive and strange. Still cool.

All in all it was a really fantastic weekend. The weather was great, i didn't run out of weed, i didn't fall out of my pants while caving [much bigger chance of that than I ever imagined], the company was congenial and I don't seem to have lost any of my stuff. I may have forgotten to rhapsodize about the food though and damm it was worth rhapsodizing about. When othercat camps the eating is freaking divine.

I'm sorry I don't have any exciting tales to tell. My pants tried to fall off. I got covered in bruises while caving. Light wandered around with his shirt off. hubris and tna told a lot of ribald jokes, othercat and svdw ignored our disgusting ways *snerk*, i hardly saw e&lm and lividviv was her usual marvelous self. No one got laid. No one got punched. No one killed anyone for a cigarette although they came close since they ran out on saturday night. No clothing was ripped. No one fell in the fire. No tents got toppled. No one lost an eyebrow or was caused to pee by having a hand dropped in warm water. No one got so drunk they embarassed themselves [or did i? :)]

I had all sorts of thoughts caused by this weekend that I wanted to blog about but they're sort of gone and must need to percolate a little more before they're willing to come out.

The only difficulty of the whole weekend was trying to teach today. Damm that shit is HARD when you're exhausted and burnt out. So of course, I went bouldering after work.