I had to distract myself from a little work to take pictures of the great sunset tonight!
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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.
My friends and I are going to try it out when we go bouldering at Red Rocks in February. I have heard good things about it.
2008 was a long year or so it felt at times. Hope I can improve in all aspects before this year ends. I feel like I have been a little stagnant for a while, so I think will push myself a little harder. I think this will include blogging more, it is good I have this great new iphone application to do it, so now I don’t have any excuse not to. That probably means more blogging about climbing because I am not doingmuch else with my free time. I digress. I went to dinner with Kagan and Eric tonight. I hope Kagan has another good year of school.
I made it into some of the photos on the Stone Gardens site for the bouldering challenge. None of them were climbing though … sad face.
David and I went exploring today. He had heard there was some sport climbing development, so he was excited to check it out. No one else could make it, but we had a blast hiking through the woods to get to our destination and we were pleasantly surprised when we arrived. It took a little extra time to find the place, but with his preparation before hand (online map searching and drawing of topos) and my iphone GPS we found where we needed to go. We ended up taking a wrong turn, backtracking, finding our desired path, jumping creeks, crossing rivers, tromping through mud, climbing up and down ropes to get there. We didn’t climb, so there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for us, but the hike turned out to be a great adventure in and of itself. The fog was beautiful at sunset, but creepy in the dark.
Enjoy the pictures!
Dmitry convinced me to climb in this years bouldering challenge at Stone Gardens. I was going to do intermediate, but got convinced to do advanced. I placed 15th overall! See Results.
I could have placed higher if I hadn’t falling when trying to flash a problem, but one of the judges smiles made me bashful.
Pictures coming soon …