I finally was able to downsize the video of Mexican Chicken from Hueco. Now I will start posting a new video each week for a few weeks of our trip to Hueco last winter. Now for your viewing pleasure, me seizing on another boulder problem.
Jon v Mexican Chicken from Jon Keto on Vimeo.
Thanks for Vu for filming.
I had the chance to do a little bouldering at Mt Erie this weekend. The only ‘gem’ I found was this. On the upside, there is some harder stuff on the boulder and the approach is very short.
Jon v Donkey Punch from Jon Keto on Vimeo.
If you are interested in more climbing in the area, check out Mountain Project. http://mountainproject.com/v/washington/mount_erie/mt_erie_and_fidalgo_island_bouldering/106525855
First overnight trip to Leavenworth in a while occurred this weekend. We met up with the usual rag tag crew. We lost some skin, had a few good laughs, enjoyed a fire and lost lots of skin. I can’t wait to go it again. Until then I will be sore … I am old man that never dies (Takeshi I hope you read that).
Why no bouldering in the picture here? You will have to go to flickr for those. This is Dylan, apparently we have dozens of friends in common that we have known for practically a decade, but we didn’t meet until climbing at Stone Gardens. Life is funny like that and Seattle is definitely funny (and small) like that. Chatting about all of our mutual friends makes me want to my high school yearbook next time we go climb.
On the opening day of boating season in Seattle they open up the Montlake cut for a parade of boats. Despite the outerspace theme my favorite was the undecorated float plane.
This weekend I went up to Leavenworth again. We rolled deep this time, I think I counted 15 people at one point. I wish we could have that many pads all the time. I found some more new projects to add to my existing list of Leavenworth projects, but I was finally able to get back to the sword with some unwilling spotters who were willing to watch my potential demise. I am exaggerating, The Sword is not that bad, but it sure is tall as it is an old top rope route. I thought the tree descent was far more dicey than the ascent. Here is a video of someone else on The Sword to give you an idea of the problem. I am glad I won’t ever have to go back to it.
I finally got around to some outdoor climbing this year. I made it out to Leavenworth and had a great time. We started at Swiftwater and warmed up where I was convinced to get on Premium Coffee. I didn’t really want to get on anything hard since it was the first outdoor trip. I really just wanted to enjoy the fresh air and sun to get my ‘sea legs’ back for outdoor climbing. I had see the problem a couple times walking around the area, but was never really keen on coming back for the problem or even trying it in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking because that is one heck of a good problem. Nice slopers, not too many skin stealing crystals and some neat beta. I didn’t get the send today as I didn’t work the problem well. I should have given myself longer rests. I will certainly be going back to that problem.
I also finally go to visit Twisted Tree. This is yet another area I have not been to. We got on Twisted Tree and Twister, both good problems and worth the drive up Icicle Creek Canyon. After getting these two problems we found Scrambled Eggs and Angeline Jolie (a project that finally got sent recently, uncertain what the original grade was and what the consensus is now on the grade). Angeline Jolie is hard and I am nowhere near getting anywhere on it. Scrambled Eggs will go, but I melted down because of the cold weather and my endurance for climbing at my limit all day is gone, but I will go back for that problem too.
All in all it was a great day (except for my total media fail, no photos or video). It is good to get back out and boulder again. I was feeling like I had forgotten how to do it. I can’t wait to go out again!
I think it is about time to give up Pandora. Recently I purchased a Grooveshark account on my brother’s recommendation. I figured for $3/month I could afford it by giving up 1 latte a month. So far it has been worth it. Not only do I get no advertising (which you can get if you pay for Pandora), but I find I have much more control over the music I want to listen to and the music seems to be more varied than Pandora. Granted I may not have worked with Pandora enough, but I found myself listening to repeat tracks too frequently. In Grooveshark rather than creating a station I can pick songs I want add them to a queue and continue to do this all day or just click the radio button for the Pandora effect of the player finding more similar music for me. And if I really liked that song I listened to 20 minutes ago I can just drag it to the front of my queue and listen to it again. If I want to make a playlist from the last hour of music I listened to I can select all, drag and drop the songs to it, NEW PLAYLIST IN SECONDS! If you pay for the VIP account you also get a neat Adobe AIR desktop application plus the library feature which lets you keep the music you listen organized by artist and album. You won’t have to search through playlists to find that awesome track by the band you just started listening to.
What really sold me on it was the integration between Last.fm and Grooveshark. I setup an account a while back when I got my iPhone, but I didn’t really play much music with since I was still using Pandora. But since I have found Grooveshark, which has the built in integration already I can play advertisment free music, which gets saved on my Last.fm account. Because my music gets scrobbled to Last.fm I can always go there and find event information for specific or related bands based on my location. I do not go to too many shows, but I could see this as being super useful for people who do.
I have started to use Hype Machine lately as well. There is no integration between Grooveshark and Hype Machine, but it would be really neat to be able to queue up music from Hype Machine …. which would then get scrobbled to Last.fm. Neat. For now I will just Hype Machine to find some less mainstream music that I won’t be able to find on Grooveshark.
But what about imeem? It was bought by MySpace music (a collaboration between MySpace and recording labels). I used it for about two seconds then I saw they had an iPhone app, but stopped soon after. Between corporate firewalls which block MySpace, MySpace’s downward spiral (read as inability to compete with MySpace) and historically controlling actions of record labels this is guaranteed to make it suck quick.
I hear Hype Machine has an iPhone app coming out. I have heard this for the past 6 months, so I don’t know if they will suffer the same fate of Grooveshark where Apple would not allow it’s player in the store. Since Android has a Grooveshark app I need to decide whether I move to an Android in hopes they get a Last.fm app or not. If a Hype Machine app comes out for the iPhone and not Last.fm app comes out for the iPhone I might stay with the iPhone, but not having a Grooveshark app is killing me now. Maybe I will just write a simple app for each of them on my Zune HD. I did see Zuse already, which I will need to investigate more.
Oh well, enough music site spam for now. Hopefully someone finds this useful.
While working today I kept the TV on Animal Planet. They were playing some sort of marathon of themed shows, like Shark Week, but only for Sunday afternoon I guess. Today’s theme was ‘I should be head, but luckily I am not’, but not in the sensationalist Fox When Animals Attack shows of the last decade, but a more analytical view of events. They introduced the participants, gave same character background, described the day, re-enacted the events and throughout the re-enactment had interludes from experts describing why something happened. There were two that stuck out in my head.
The reason these two stuck out in my mind were because I have found myself in two similar situations. I never felt in any immediate danger, but looking back things could have turned out worse. Fortunately they did not.
When my brother and I were in high school we stayed at a cabin with our friend Kagan on Hartstein Island. Since we had run around the woods, dug for clams on the beach, went in the public swimming pool and played basketball we decided it was time to take the boat out on the water. When I say boat I really mean inflatable yellow raft. As soon as we launched the craft we decided to row to the other side of the channel to another island and come back. Great idea, right? …. right. As we worked our way across we noticed that we had gone aways down shore, but no big deal on the way back we just find ourselves roughly twice the distance down the shore as we crossed the channel to get back. This just meant a little more walking, but unfortunately they don’t build those plastic oars very well and of course, the one we had, broke at the base of the head. We now had an oar head and oar handle to paddle with. Keep our arms dry and paddle with the handle or get wet up to our elbows and paddle with the oar head? Neither were getting us very far, so we decided to take turns jumping in the water and pushing the raft back. Awesome idea and worked well at the beginning until we got cold and the entire raft wet jumping in and out of it. As it became later in the afternoon it got a little chilly which only worsened with the wetness. Eventually we made it back to shore, put the raft on our heads and walked down the road back to the cabin. Needless to say, this adventure could have turned out worse had the weather turned, the currents were stronger or the islands were further apart. Today’s show of the two boys who ended up at sea for more than 5 days reminded me of how fortunate we were in our situation. If I was to choose two people to find myself in a bad situation with it would be both Kagan and Eric.
The wolf attack story reminded me of a time when my borther, dad and I were camping in Canada while on a road trip. Late in the afternoon we had finished setting up camp and with two hours of light left my brother and I decided to explore the woods surrounding the camping area. There was a slight hill within eyesight of our site, so we decided it would be neat to see what was on the other side. We went up the hill and found ourselves in a small meadow bounded by the hill we ascended at our backs and aspens on all other sides. We approached the tree line, but didn’t enter. We heard a few deer running in the opposite direction of us. Pretty typical of deer in the woods, so I didn’t think anything of it. As we walked around the waist high grass some more I noticed the tip of a cougars tail and it’s ears as it slinked away about 40ft out. In a stroke of brilliance I decided to follow it. My brother agreed, so we followed slowly and quietly. In reality the cougar probably put a lot of distance between us and him pretty quickly, but as we were stalking our prey I kept running through scenarios of what would happen if it was stalking us and attacked us. Plus, I had a big stick, so we were safe. After 15 minutes or so, we turned around and headed back to camp disappointed we didn’t get another glimpse of the cougar. I don’t think it was hubris, ego, or overconfidence that led us to follow the cat, but just being naive about the consequences. Fortunately luck was on our side again and nothing bad happened. Watching the show on wolves getting used to humans and attacking in campgrounds made me realize we could have been hurt pretty bad if the cat decided to attack instead of leave.
Finally, I will leave with a good note of caution for anyone around Wolves. Typically they do not like water (or so the experts on Animal Planet said), so if you can get into water when a wolf is attacking it probably won’t follow.
