Choi and I tried to climb in Goldbar this weekend, but we everything was seeping, there even some snow and someone had cut some trees down, so nothing was climbable. We turned around immediately and came back to take pictures at the zoo. The tigers were pretty active, so I snapped a few shots of them.
It has some new pics and a brand spankin’ new look!
http://mycatlovesmyshoes.wordpress.com/
I am trying a new little experiment to see the investment it takes to get another cat blog started. Who knows what will happen. I won’t be able to compete with icanhascheezburger or cute overload, nor do I intend to. Just want to post some more pictures on the interwebz.
For the last month or so I spent a day each weekend in Leavenworth bouldering. The weather has been consistently getting worse each time and that was emphasized with a slight drizzle last Sunday. It is probably time to just hit the gym and get fitness before heading to Hueco in December. It wouldn’t be good to try and send something hard and reinjure my hand before heading on a trip. At this point I think I will call it and be a gym rat for the next month.
On a good note, Eric sent a sweet V6 in Forestlands called Cruise Control. As much as we have different climbing styles he ending up climbing it very similar to the way I did it. He is getting stronger because I am not climbing like a tall person. This will be good for Hueco.
Back to staying up late, blogging and making panoramas! And integrati g flickr with my blog.
I had a great epiphany this morning. Why do some work I am behind on when I could convert my blogger blog to wordpress? Obviously I didn’t come up with a good answer, so hours later, my blog has been converted. Here are the steps I followed.
1) Created an account on wordpress.com
2) Published my old blogger blog to blogspot.com as opposed to ketox.org
3) Used the cool import tool to convert my blogspot blog to wordpress
4) Exported the wordpress blog to and xml file
5) Imported the wordpress xml export to my wordpress blog at http://ketox.org/jon/press
I tried using the import tool on my hosted server ketox.org, but there were some errors, so I went through the additional step of exporting to a blog on the wordpress.com servers. This reduced any potential problems with servers and configurations that I saw on forums when I was trying to troubleshoot why it would not work my from my hosted server. I would actually recommend this method to others as well since the wordpress and blogspot servers can communicate with each other and if your wordpress version is up to date then the import and export should not have any issues either.
The second technical problem to tackle (or first maybe, since the conversion task simply involved clicking buttons) was to get all of the traffic still going to http://ketox.org/jon/blog to go to my new url at http://ketox.org/jon/press/. Using some simple mod_rewrite all the permalinks to posts and archive links permanently redirect to my new wordpress blog. For example, an old link to a post like this:
http://ketox.org/jon/blog/2009/01/new-year-2009.html
Will go directly to the new WordPress version! Awesome! The same is true for old archive links like this:
http://ketox.org/jon/blog/archive/2004_09_01_archive.html
Double Awesome!
After getting the redirects to work I spent some time going through the comments to delete spam and other comments. It was both good and bad, made me happy, made me sad. I got to look at the last 5 years of my life. It made me super glad I started this thing and has reinpired me to continue doing this. That way when I am 80 I can go back through it and remember all the funny little things that have happened to me.
Anyways, the new theme can be temporary. I chose it pretty quickly, so I can change it. I also have to go back through and fix up some images that have become broken over time. I figure this is just as good of a time as any.
I had to distract myself from a little work to take pictures of the great sunset tonight!
So I finally clay barred my car and waxed it. It is super shiny and smooth! I am not sure how quickly I will do it again, however. The process was fun for the first couple hours, but by the eighth hour I just wanted to be done. Here is what I learned:
1) Don’t worry about spots that don’t get too dirty, i.e. underneath the spoiler.
2) Surprisingly the front bumper is not too bad, the larger horizontal surfaces are the worst.
3) Addendum to #2, do the large horizontal flat surfaces first. You get the hard work out of the way.
4) The clay bar takes up the most time by far.
5) I should get a machine to help buff out imperfections next time.
6) Don’t clay bar and wax if you park on the street, wait until you get a garage. My car already has pollen on it. It hasn’t even been 24 hrs!
7) Talk to someone who has done this before on a ca like yours without help.
Having an extra set of hands and a smaller car with less features will make the process much faster.
9) Only in Seattle while cleaning my tires in a Safeway parking garage will I arouse the suspicion of Seattle Police.
10) I really need to get a 5D MKII to take pictures of my car at night …. but not really … I just need another way to justify it in my head.
All in all, it was a fun experience and I will probably do it again sometime.
Since it has been a while since I have been cycling and I need some motivation to go out I have been thinking about a couple projects
1) repaint my current bicycle
2) convert it to a fixie
I am not sure how far I will go, but since my car project is done I will at least paint it. I bought some spray paint at Fred Meyer today, so now I need to do some research online on how to repaint my bicycle. I had been toying around with the idea, but after seeing Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France when it started in Monaco I got more excited about actually starting this project.
Here goes nothing … I will try to get it done quicker than my car project too!
An email I sent talking about the my first trip to Squamish this weekend:
Yeah, I fell at Eric’s head first landing at Eric’s feet and all he could say was ‘Jesus Jon!’. Apparently he didn’t want to be bothered by my falling.
The back story, so early on Saturday I hurt my hand. I spent the rest of that day following everyone around the forest feeling sorry for myself … still super psyched to see everyone climbing hard and destroying the 8 point total I had for that day. With high hopes for recovery after eating prime rib for dinner I woke up the next morning with pain still in my hand. Pulling a marbarian I decided to bring some alcohol with me into the woods as it would be another day of spotting. Not to waste the Kokanee we had picked up at the border I brought a 6 pack with me. Thanks to EJ for convincing us at duty free to choose such a fine beer 
. Needless to say I was drinking by noon. Eventually we made our way up to Black Slabbath. With EJ and Choi’s progression through the problem and the awesome sunlight coming through the trees I decided to take some photos. I started by shooting from the bottom and then from the right hand side. Always wanted to find a new angle I scouted a sweet vantage point about halfway up the problem on the left hand side. I climbed up and approached my perch. I took a moment to suss out the danger level … mind you I was 4 beers in already. I determined there was no danger and slowly made my way underneath an overhanging boulder to my position. You know, nothing more precarious than anything I had scrambled to for taking photos before. I didn’t realize that I was stepping on black slabbath 2 (the mini version) covered in two inches of dirt and moss. Instantly everything I was standing on gave way. I started to fall feet first and thought everything was going to be a-ok. I was just going to land on my feet and Eric would spot me, no problem. The only thing was my left foot caught a root and I fell head first. All I could think to myself was ‘FUUUU#$@!’. Then I heard Baisy scream, ‘oh, Jon!’ I crumpled at Eric’s feet, half on a pad and half not, and heard him say ‘Jesus Jon!’ in a tone as if I had disparaged our family name. I got up, brushed myself off and noticed Choi was still perched on the problem looking at me with a very confused expression on his face. I laughed and he continued to climb. See the attached picture for perch and fall line.
[smoke bomb] But, let us not forget about the time Eric almost slipped off the top of the boulder in Leavenworth. That was hilarious too!
By the way, on the way out of the forest I bashed and bloodied the top of my head by jumping into a branch on a fallen log. Somehow this weekend I managed to injure myself more than any other climbing trip and I didn’t even climb.
