Back to climbing

This weekend C had the wheel on my 15$ cruiser bike fixed. That cost him $35, which is more than my bicycle lock and basket cost together. I feel more comfortable on it now that the front wheel doesn't swing to the sides. So, we took me and my bike to the farmer's market Saturday morning after breakfast and after I talked with my sister on the phone for an hour. Somehow we always manage to show up there at closing time. They close at noon. But we snapped a little basil plant and another variety of tomatoes (we already have one on our front porch with three flowers, and it's been growing pretty fast since we got it) before they cleared the tables. Also got a couple corn cobs, and strawberries. The strawberries this time turned out to be watery, much unlike the ones we got last time.

C went out sailing with a buddy from the lab, but I stayed inside. Wanted to work on my Matlab and my approximation algorithms homework and make some advances on my phylogeny project. Sunday however I was forced to take half a day off! And we drove up to Mission Gorge for climbing. Spent four hours and I finished two routes out of the three I tackled. One 5.6 face route, called Ramaghast, had a couple of tricky spots but many hand holds. Then I did a 5.7 called Gandalf on the same rock, but this one was a crack route and aside from two moves at the bottom straightforward. The last one we did was a 5.8, and I probably knew beforehand that I wasn't going to finish it. C did it and fixed anchors, I did the first few moves, sort of for shows, but then stopped at the crux and asked to be lowered. Maybe I could have done it, it was a smearing face route with some nice disks, not many proper hand holds, but it was quite high up and intimidating in that way. C tried a 5.10+ on the other side of the rock but couldn't make it. First time I really had to hold him with my weight as I belayed him when he fell on the rope. The rock face was partly overhanging and the anchors fixed in such a way that he would each time swing over the corner to the other side of the rock and hang there. The first time that happened I jumped up in the air too, then I placed myself where I would have better foot holds and more weight.

The sun was out and I would have gotten a bad sunburn had I not had a double layer of sun screen. It was almost too hot at times. As soon as one leaves the beach front here in San Diego one loses the ocean breeze of course.

It was a good climb session though. We were all sweaty, sticky, dirty, nasty and tired as we returned.