lasik, part 2

At the surgeon's office the morning after my lasik, I still had my dark mask on. I could see through it, but it scared me a little that I would hurt my eyes if I left them open, so I would look at the world and then close my eyes again.

Then I went into the exam room and they told me to take my mask off, and then they turned on the lights. 

So much for protecting my eyes. 

When I went back out into the waiting room, J. told me that the woman who had surgery right before me the day before and the appointment right before me that morning had a problem with the flap. Her person left her there so that they could fix the flap.

Me? I was fine. Not even an itch in my eyes. 

It was a beautiful sunny day, and I walked out into the sunshine without sunglasses. I wasn't supposed to spend much time looking at screens, so I didn't go to work. Instead, I walked to the tea place. I wore sunglasses out of an abundance of caution, but my eyes didn't hurt.

I was supposed to sleep in the dark mask for a week so that I did not accidentally rub my eye or stab myself in the eye during the night (a legitimate concern, since I stabbed myself in the eye with my finger while turning over just this week), and that worked for a few days, but as time went on, I found myself ripping it off sometime during the night. In the morning, it would be under the pillow, or on the floor next to the bed. I was, apparently, getting less cautious about my eyes.

I was also supposed to wait at least a week before climbing (chalk dust is everywhere). I made it six days, but it was cool. I just took tears with me and used them when someone above me knocked chalk dust down into my eyes, instead of rubbing my eyes and dislodging the flap.

Two weeks after surgery, back at the surgeon's office, after reading the 20/10 line, I asked her if the flap was ok. (I was a little paranoid about the flap.)

"You wouldn't be seeing 20/10 if there was a problem with the flap," she said dryly. 

What we've discovered, J. and I, by comparing our experiences, is that lasik seems to exacerbate whatever sensitivities your eyes have. J. is still, 10 years later, more bothered by light than I am. I am a little more light sensitive than before, but my real issue is air blowing at my eyes. This has always bothered me, but now I can't stand the air blowing through the vents in my car or standing by my coworker's desk when the little space heater is on.

I now wear sunglasses in the car, even in the dark rain clouds, to block the blowing air (the vents are off and closed and pointed down but some gets through), and I wear layers in my office so that I don't have to turn on the space heater.

It's worth it. It's so worth it. 

I can SEE.

The strangest thing, after 21 years of taking my contacts every night, is going to sleep without taking my vision out of my eyes. I am still using tears at night, and allergy eye drops, so I'm using that ritual to convince my eyes that it really is okay not to take anything out of my eyes before I sleep. It's weird, though. It's really weird. 

It's also the best money I've ever spent.

lasik, part one

I wasn't sure until the morning of surgery that I really was going to get lasik, because at my pre-op appointment two days before, I tested as needing an entire diopter of correction less than I had needed in October. 

It seems that some people with myopia will accept just about as much correction as they can get, and I am one of them. 

You know when they keep switching the lenses in front of your eyes and asking if 1 or 2 is better, or 3 or 4? Some of us nearsighted people will keep saying that a stronger prescription is better, even after we can see 20/20 with a weaker one. This is because, the doctor explained to me, the stronger prescription makes the shapes darker, and we mistake the darker shape for a clearer shape. 

So I brought in my contacts and glasses prescriptions from the last ten or 12 years, digging them all out of my wee little filing cabinet, and the doctor re-tested my eyes herself the morning of surgery, rather than having her assistant do it. "It's valuable information for me to know if something is darker or lighter, even if it isn't clearer," she said, "so just tell me what you see." 

I kept making her go back and forth, leaving each one for longer than usual, to make sure the prescription we came up with was exactly right. Lasik is a permanent change, after all, and if you do too much correction for nearsightedness, you might need reading glasses sooner. 

We settled on the same diopters as my contact lenses have been for a decade, and the middle of the astigmatism correction I've had. My astigmatism correction has, shall we say, fluctuated. Probably because, "which is better, 1 or 2? 3 or 4? 5 or 6?" always goes so very fast, and it feels like there should be a right answer, even through there isn't. There is only what is right for your eyes. So I've had a bunch of different astigmatism corrections - my glasses and contacts were not the same, even though they came out of the same eye exam - and they've all worked.

J. and I walked up the hill to the main hospital cafeteria and got some fish and chips. We took some photos on the deck overlooking the city, commemorating my last few hours in glasses.

After I checked in and paid crazy quantities of money ("your card isn't working," the lady said, but I looked at the machine and said, "It's a connection problem, not my card," and it eventually went through fine), I took the valium they had given me and went to the bathroom one more time. There were people in the lobby waiting for all kinds of eye surgery. A mother and grandmother waited for news of a child.

They called me back right at 1:45, and explained all the post-op procedures, which I promptly forgot. 

For every other surgery I've had, I've been half-asleep, even if I was talking. I can't remember any of them except a snippet of the wisdom teeth removal. But for this one, I was awake. You have to be awake so you can direct your eyeball. I remember it all.

This is where you should look away if eye surgery makes you squeamish.

.

.

.

The surgery takes place in two parts.

First, in a room with a big laser, they numb your eyes and put betadine in them. "I bet that would sting if my eyes weren't numb," I said, as the brown washed over my vision.

They cover one eye and move your chair so the other is directly under the machine. A round piece lowers onto your eye and suctions the middle up. Everything goes dark, but you try to look at a light. The laser does something that you can't really decipher, and when the machine moves, everything looks like you are looking through a foggy glass. 

What's just happened is that a laser has made a bunch of little air bubbles in your cornea (pulses of one quadrillionth of a second!), creating a flap at the front of your eye.

The second eye, the left, hurt more than the right. I felt like someone was pushing through my eye into my sinuses. Instant sinus headache. But that was the only real pain of the whole thing.

When both eyes had been air-bubbled, they had me stand up and walk into the other room, looking through the fog.

I lay down on a padded bench, and the assistant moved the knee rest under my knees. 

They put more numbing drops into my right eye and wedged it open with a little eye speculum. I looked up at a diffuse green light that pulsed. I could see the doctor working on my eye with a little tool that looked like what the dental hygienist uses to scrape your teeth, sharp on one end and folded like a spatula on the other, only the surgeon was gently lifting the flap that the first laser created. 

I had to look up at the green light, which sometimes disappeared for an instant and then came back red, and then green again. Red lights moved around the edges. I could smell burning eye. It only took 15 or 30 seconds before it was done, and the surgeon was patting down the flap, smoothing it into place and tamping down the edges. 

The longest part of the whole thing was waiting for the flap to re-adhere, it seemed. Finally they took out the eye speculum and let me blink, then re-checked with a bright white light to make sure it was smooth.

The surgeon and the assistants kept telling me how calm I was, which surprised me, because they seemed surprised, but who would flinch while someone has a sharp tool and/or a laser near their eye for surgery purposes? That would end badly.

Between eyes, I asked if they had any blankets. It was so cold in the room that I was struggling not to visibly shiver. I had even expected that and worn a warm fleece jacket, but it wasn't enough. Fortunately, they had pre-warmed blankets, and the second eye was much more pleasant just because I wasn't so cold.

After the second eye, they put a flexible sunglasses material mask on my face, rubber band around my head, handed me a stack of papers, and walked me out to J. 

It was 2:15. 

I tried to keep my eyes mostly closed, but I snuck peeks. At the first stoplight, I braved opening my eyes a little, and I could already see better than before the surgery.

When we got to the house, I deliberately walked into a telephone pole on video for posterity, and then I took a vic0din and went to sleep.

They had warned me that some people feel a sensation like red pepper in their eye after surgery. I was one of those people. By the time I got home, my eyes were burning. The vic0din fixed it, though, and it was gone by bedtime when the second vic0din wore off. 

Sometime after I went to sleep, I woke up and sat up, wondering what time it was. The alarm clock was across the bed, and I looked over at it and read the time perfectly clearly. It was 4:36. I never could read it from there before.

I tried not to get too excited, but I woke up in the middle of the night, since the pain pills had worn off and I'd been sleeping off and on since 3 pm, and laid in the dark with my dark mask still on, looking at the tree branches outside the window, silhouetted against the street light, and smiling to myself. I couldn't see those tree branches before.

The next morning, my vision was 20/15. 

I do not yoga (I do Mexico)

I do not yoga, as we know, but somehow I found myself signed up for a yoga retreat in Mexico.

Re. Mexico: I also never really had Mexico on my radar for travel purposes. It's so close to the States, and so many people go on vacation there, and I tend to want to go further afield for my adventures, so I wrote it off. I mean, I figured I would end up there someday, because it's next door, but it wasn't on the list of places to go because, well, it's close.

I loved Mexico. We stayed at a little resort at one end of a beach that had a park in the middle and a town on the other end, where foreign tourists sat drinking margaritas at the beachside bars and Mexican families played in the surf. 

"I forgot how much I love riding in the back seat of a crappy taxi through a new country while the driver plays pop music way too loud," I texted T. 

The days were warm and clear, except when it poured down tropical rain. 

J. and I played in the Pacific Ocean waves like kids. The only person who played in the waves as much as we did was 12 years old. We skipped yoga class to jump over and through waves. The other J., the 12 year old, taught us to angle into the waves so that we launched out the other side like dolphins leaping above the water, and we compared how successful our launches were after nearly every wave. 

We went scuba diving along the edge of a rocky island, with battered gear and three older people, two of whom flailed even more than I do, beginner that I am. On the first dive, I bit off the edge of my mouthpiece and had to hold the regulator in my mouth with my hand. My depth gauge didn't work. On the second dive, my mask kept fogging up. But M., my diving instructor, taught us to deal with those eventualities, and I was fine. 

We saw a cornetfish lingering motionless in the water, and schools of thousands of fish swam between us and the light. We swam down through a tunnel in the rock. 

On the way out to diving, we saw a whale breach, and on the boat ride back, dolphins swam under the  boat. 

There was yoga. We did yoga from 7-9 am and from 4:30 to 6 pm. 

"Set your intention for the week," said the instructor peacefully the first day.

"My intention is not to kill anyone while doing yoga this week," I thought to myself. 

I managed that just fine the first day or two, so by day three I thought I was ready for more. I upgraded my intention.

"Don't hate everyone while doing yoga," I thought. That one didn't work - halfway through the class, I wanted to cry or quit - so I went back to resolving not to kill anyone. Turns out I'm pretty okay at not killing anyone while doing yoga. I am less okay at not hating the world while doing yoga. 

I survived six days of yoga, although, to be honest, I was down to one class per day for the last three days. 3.5 hours of yoga a day is a little excessive for a beginner. I did a shoulder-stand thing, though. (My neck has been bothering me, so no attempts at a headstand.) J. did headstands galore. 

Between yoga and eating and playing on the beach and taking a few naps (they made me get up at 6:15 am. On vacation. There were naps), a week flew by.

I quite like Mexico. I'd like to go back. 

I don't know about the yoga, though. Maybe. I've gone to a couple of classes since I've been back. (Shhhhhhh. Don't tell anyone.)

glasses

"I love your glasses!" people keep saying to me, and I say, "Yeah, I like how they look, but I can't see through them at all." 

I started wearing them the day after we got back from Mexico. I made up my mind that the day we got back from Mexico would be the last day I wore contacts, and so when I took out my contacts after flying all day, I put the case in the cupboard in the bathroom and put my glasses case on the nightstand.

I have worn contacts for 21 years. 

I have worn them in the muck of a South Sudan rainy season, when I had to put them in before I could crawl out of my mosquito net, because I had to be able to see if there was a poisonous spider or snake in my gum boots. 

I have worn them in the dust of the desert in State of Happiness, where I had fine granules of blown-dry clay on my hands that I couldn't get rid of, so I had to blink the grit off my eye before I could see clearly.

I have worn them through the fine blown dirt of roads in Rwanda and Liberia and Kenya and Tanzania and Honduras and Cambodia, always finding a bottle of water to clean off my dirty hands first thing in the morning. 

I have kept them warm in my pocket in a freezing tent, put them cold into my eyes at 3 am after 5 hours of sleep before climbing a mountain, washed my hands with sanitizer before rinsing in water. 

I have put them burning into my eye when the hydrogen peroxide solution wasn't fully dissolved. 

For 21 years, I wore contacts an average of 365 days a year. I never had an eye infection, so I occasionally tried a pair of glasses - I got a pair in 2006, and one in 2016 - and wore them for half a day, or even a day, and then went back to contacts. 

T. used to laugh, because for many years I always had a bottle of the same kind of multi-purpose solution, the one from the store in the Mitten. 

Meanwhile, for 20 years, eye doctors have told me that I would get used to my glasses if I would just wear them more. If I just kept trying, if I wore them for a day or two or three, my eyes would adjust. The prescription was right; I just wasn't patient enough. 

This is a blatant lie. I've been wearing glasses for almost four weeks (tomorrow will be Day 28), and I am not used to them. 

I'm better at wearing them. I've figured out how to keep them clean. I've figured out how to look right through the middle if I need to see something clearly. 

I haven't figured out how to keep them from hurting the back of my ears, no matter how they are adjusted.

My phone isn't a rectangle when I look down at it. 

I feel dizzy when I walk down stairs - I can't quite tell where the steps are. 

I have to leave extra space in traffic, because I can't tell how far away the car in front of me is. 

When I take off my glasses and put them back on, I still feel disoriented and unsteady, even four weeks in. By the end of the day, my eyes ache from trying to find a way to see clearly and my head hurts from trying to make sense of what comes into my eyes. 

This whole month feels like a dream, fuzzy around the edges, because I couldn't really see what was happening. 

I have a list in the back of my journal, a countdown. I'm crossing off days. There are five of them left. Five days of glasses. SaturdaySundayMondayTuesdayWednesday. And only two of them involve staring at a computer. 

So close.

Next Thursday, I'm getting lasik. 

certified

I had lofty goals of blogging at least once a week this year. That was my plan. Not a resolution, exactly, just a plan. 

(My other plan for the year, signing up for and using digit, is thus far a success. I have finally begun to train digit on the fact that I want it to save more than $0.17 at a time by forcing it to save $10 or $100 at a time. If you want to try digit, by the way, let me know. I have a referral code. It is addicting.)

So anyway, blogging. I was going to do it. I was going to do it regularly.

Then I realized that if I want to scuba dive in Mexico at the end of February, I should get certified now. I figured this out the day before the first of five Tuesday night classes that culminated in open water dives last weekend. This means that I had class from 6:30 - 10:30 every Tuesday night, and also homework. 

I loved, loved, loved the scuba classes. I got all excited every week when I knew that I was going to get to go underwater that night. 

On the first pool night (which was actually the second class, because our first pool night got canceled due to the apocalypse snow), we had to swim 400 yards. I started off slow, because 8 laps is a lot of laps. By my return on the first lap, I had switched to the time-honored swim stroke of the women in my family: the side stroke. By the third lap, I was way out ahead of the other two students. Tortoise and hare, people. It pays to be the tortoise.

On the second pool night, we had to take off our masks and sit underwater without them for a minute, then put them back on. People panic over this, mostly because you just about have to keep your eyes closed lest the chlorine destroy them. It didn't bother me at all. I knelt sightless underwater for a minute, just enjoying the feeling of being underwater. I knew that the regulator wasn't going to fail me - I could breathe - and I knew that the surface was up there if I needed it. (I would worry if I were in 50 feet of water without my buddy, but this was not that situation.)

At the end of the class, we drove up to Other PNW State for the open water sessions. J. came along, because he's a diver, and the dive shop said there are usually other people up there diving.

To dive in 36 degree water, you need a serious wetsuit. Actually, you need more than just a wetsuit. You need a 7mm farmer john (a sleeveless wetsuit) covered by a 7 mm shorts/long-sleeve combo. You also need 5mm gloves, hood, and boots. And you will still be cold just about every second you aren't moving. (For comparison, in Honduras I dove in a 3mm shortie - shorts and short sleeves.) 

It's really pretty down there. The sea anemones stand a foot or two off the ground, orange and white, faces turned into the current. There are tiny jellyfish the size of a baby's cupped hand floating through the water, opening and closing slowly. Schools of fish swim between you and the sky.

By Saturday night, after three dives and a lot of standing around in and out of the water, I was chilled through. There was no reprieve out of the water, with the wind blowing on the wet neoprene, except the few minutes when we could stand directly in front of the propane heater. Sitting in the hot tub and taking a hot shower in the evening did not raise my body temperature back to normal. I went to bed still cold. 

I guess it probably didn't help that I was in the worst days of a cold. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck - and that was before I doped myself up with Sudafed and Afrin and ibuprofen to get my congestion to the point where my ears would not explode with the underwater pressure, and then jumped into freezing water.

Sunday morning before the final dive, standing out in the 33 degree air in a still-wet wetsuit, my hands were so cold they burned. J. had to run inside and get a bottle of hot water to pour into my gloves before I could move them enough to get my gear on. My instructor's regulator was frozen, spewing air in free flow when he tested it. 

When we dove, I had an extra 3 lb weight on one side of my BCD (the diving vest) to make up for the different air tank I was using, so I kept tipping to one side. I couldn't get warm. The water was so murky that I just followed the orange fins of the instructor. All I could think was, "Is this over yet?" I'm usually pretty good with air, but I tore through it trying to stay warm and not give up. 

And then we were out of the water, and we were certified, and I took another hot shower and put on layers of clothes and slept in the car most of the way home. 

So I'm good to dive in Mexico next week. I'm guessing that will be a little more pleasant than the frigid waters of the sound.

Christmas in Honduras

I've been back to Honduras four times since I studied there, but I keep wanting to go again. I especially wanted to go again after nearly back-to-back ice/snow storms in Gone West during December.

We had all the usual travel problems. Flight delays meant that J. and I got the last evening shuttle to our hotel from the airport in Houston. But bright and early, there were our parents, eating breakfast in the lobby.

J. sat with his parents in one row on the flight to Roatan, and I with my parents in the row behind them. I made my mom sit by the window so that she could see the Caribbean below us.

"It's so hilly," she said, as we flew over the spine of the island. I had forgotten that, too, but I had not forgotten that the plane flies in over the water along the coast or that the runway starts right at the edge of the water. We flew past all the colorful houses along the bays, lower and lower, until suddenly the wheels were on the ground.

I also neglected to mention that it would be hot. Not as hot as Liberia, but it is the tropics. 

We'd rented a house back in the jungle down some of the steepest roads I've ever driven. (We didn't know that at the time, of course.) 

It rained on Christmas Day, and we exchanged presents in the morning. Not much - we couldn't bring much with us - but everyone got a little something. 

J. and I brought Hydro Flasks for everyone. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out which of the six blue-green-purple colors to give to each person. J. and I each had a favorite, but we decided that we would be happy with any of them. In the end we (okay, J.) just wrapped them all and handed them out at random. 

When we opened them, J. had my favorite color (mint) and I had his (pacific), so we immediately handed them off, without even saying anything. Then our dads switched so that my dad had dark blue and his dad dark green. Our moms got the apple green and the purple. Which is, in fact, just about as close as possible to what we would have given them if we'd had to pick. 

In the afternoon, I read in a hammock for a while, and then we walked down to the beach with snorkel gear. J. and I swam out, looking for the reef.

As it turns out, we picked one of the spots where the coast curves in and the reef out. J. didn't have fins, because I was using his scuba fins, which didn't fit my feet very well. It was a lot of work. By the time we found the reef, we were ready to turn around and head in. 

My parents met us on the beach, and we walked down to West Bay, over a funny little bridge high above a channel. 

"Hey!" I said when we got there. "This is Bite on the Beach! T. and I ate here in 2002 when we were here!" and I made them take a photo of me with the sign. Beyond the restaurant, though, the beach was unrecognizable. What had been a long stretch of empty sand lined with jungle and one long pier back when T. and I were the only ones on the beach was instead a mess of beachside bars, beach chairs, and jet skis. Sigh. 

For dinner, we drove up over the hill and down to West End. The restaurant we wanted to visit was serving a $60 prix fixe holiday meal, so we ended up at an Argentinian restaurant. 

As one does, on Christmas Day in Honduras. 

below the surface

For a long time, all I could do was work. The job that I had in Universe City and then back in Gone West was all-consuming. I managed sometimes to take a weekend off, but work sucked so much energy out of me that I felt like I had nothing left to give. 

Then I was unemployed, and that takes everything you have to give, too.

But this last year was good. 2016 was so, so good to me. 

I have a job that I love. I hate the commute, but I love the work. 

I have a cute boy to kiss (hi J.!!). I flew to meet up with him one of the times he was in Spain, and we went to Croatia.

I climbed mountains. I camped. I hiked. 

At the end, we went [back] to Honduras, to Roatan. Back for me, the first time for J. and his parents and my parents. 

We ate frijoles and tortillas at least two meals per day. An ATM stole 512 of my dollars (error message with no money three times; turns out it withdrew the money each time but never gave it to me; I have complained to the bank). We drank a lot of drinks full of delicious juice and not much alcohol while sitting beachside. The two little Hyundais we rented struggled with potholes bigger than their tires (we lost one wheel to a pothole; oops). We ate lunch out on a dock over the water. I complained that the most beautiful beach has been taken over by beachside bars and lounge chairs and way too many people.

One day, J. went diving in the morning. In the afternoon, I met with a diving instructor to learn the basics for a discovery dive.

When we first put our heads under water in the shallows, I was worried. It seemed hard to breathe through the regulator, like I had to pull on it too hard to get air. But then we tipped forward horizontal. Everything fell into place. 

The parents piled onto the boat to snorkel, and J. and I and the instructor to dive. Out in the water, I watched the parents start to float off in different directions, and then I held my regulator and mask as the instructor told me to, and I dropped backward off the boat.

The instructor had me hold onto the mooring as we descended. We followed the rope down, blowing out to equalize our ears and masks. At the bottom, among the coral and fish, we swam. I was surprised to find that I wasn't at all bothered by knowing that my only air came from a tank through a tube. Just like rappelling, it was only scary until I did it. 

J. pointed out a huge eel snaking through the coral. A grouper sat under a shelf, underbite silently open. A lion fish waved its feather-like fins out of a crack in the coral. 

Far too soon, we had to ascend. I popped out of the water exhilarated and ready to do it again, despite being exhausted by the novelty. 

Also, I was pretty proud of myself for only using 10% more air than J. did, despite it being my very first dive.

days

J. and I hosted Thanksgiving at his house. Truthfully, J. did most of the work. And bought most of the food. I ordered the turkey, but J. picked it up and made the sage butter rub and basted the turkey every hour.  

But I made two pies and a sweet potato dish (you're going to want to make this asap: Crispy Sweet Potato Roast. The chili lemon vinaigrette is perfect), and I helped with the general prep. 

And the cleanup. The cleanup has taken days. I guess it didn't help that we decided to make stock out of the turkey carcass. And then we had to figure out how to transfer all the broth to another pan even though we'd left too much of the turkey meat on the bones. We still have to get all the broth into containers. And I'm fairly sure the butter is still sitting on the counter. 

Yesterday we went downtown to watch the tree lighting. A year ago yesterday (or today, or tomorrow, depending on how you count; we decided to count by the day after Thanksgiving), J. and I went on our first date to the tree lighting. We stood in the crowd again. Then we went to wait in line for the same restaurant we waited in line for last year. 

Only this year, we went rock climbing first, and J. isn't a stranger. 

The woman standing behind us in line said uncomplimentary things about the peanut curry, which is what I was planning to order. I ordered it anyway, and it was delicious. "I knew you were going to order it as soon as the guy mentioned green beans," J. said. (The green beans were perfect.)

Today we went for a hike in old growth forest in the rain, deterred at one point because there were many signs forbidding entrance onto private property. I neglected to keep my hood up. Rain dripped down my back, and we turned around when we started hearing closer gunshots; we'd forgotten to wear orange during hunting season. 

On the drive out, when we hit pavement, we heard a strange noise. "I'll check," I said, and jumped out to look. "Drive forward a little."

There was a bolt stuck in the tire, so we pulled off in an opportune place (namely, the middle of a dying timber town) to change it. J. jacked up the car. I wrestled the muddy tire into the trunk. 

We limped back to the suburbs on the donut, with the tire pressure light on all the way. I read the manual. Blah blah blah, driving on the donut may make the tire pressure light come on. It's fine, right?

We left the car at the shop, and I shivered as we walked to a nearby restaurant (the same one where we attended a wedding a few weeks ago). J. kept one of my hands warm, at least. He can't believe how fast I lose body heat. I can't understand how he manages to retain his. It took changing into the dry clothes that I had in my bag in order to warm me up.

When we got back, J.'s car was up on the lift, and two tires were off. 

Turns out the car had picked up two bolts. 

But we made it back in time for J. to catch most of the game. Some sort of sportsing, I don't know. There may be a ball involved. 

right

I'm going on record here: I am horrified that this country elected Donald Trump. To me, racism and sexism and xenophobia are deal breakers. It's like saying, "My boyfriend is really great, except he hits me." Not hitting you is the bare minimum. Not being overtly racist and sexist and xenophobic is the bare minimum in a president. I am horrified that overt racism and sexism and xenophobia are not deal breakers for 47.5% of this country.

We are all racist and sexist and xenophobic to some degree. We were all raised in a society that told us that black people are a little scary and don't have good intentions, that told us that women are bitchy if they stand up for themselves, that told us that people from somewhere else have weird, unpleasant ways that would bother us if we had to experience them.

But we have to fight that. We have to fight it. If we don't fight it, we are part of the problem. When we vote for someone like Trump, we are saying, "Racism isn't important to me. I don't feel the effects of it in my life, and I don't care that other people do." 

So don't tell me that people who voted for Trump aren't racist. Don't tell me that they aren't sexist. Don't tell me that they aren't xenophobic. They accept these things in other people. They don't speak up against them. They don't, above all, reject them in their leaders. 

I hope, I really do, that our institutions and law are strong enough to prevent Trump from becoming Hitler. I hope that social pressure is enough to keep Trump from becoming Hitler. But there is a very real chance that this is Germany in 1934, and we just elected Hitler. 

I grew up in the Midwest. I understand why people vote Republican. I will never understand why anyone voted for Trump, especially not anyone who claims to be a Christian.

Because I will tell you this: Jesus would have utterly rejected a man who stereotypes black people and calls them "the blacks" to other them. Jesus would have utterly rejected a man who treats women like objects and grabs them without their consent. Jesus would have utterly rejected a man who threatens to make Muslims carry ID cards (sound familiar? see Germany in the 1930s, Rwanda in the 1990s, just prior to the start of genocide in both countries). 

If you voted for Trump and are reading this saying, "But, the Supreme Court! He didn't mean those things!" let me tell you this: the man would say anything to get elected. He would tell you anything about the Supreme Court and Obamacare and immigration and how he's going to bring jobs back. But you have literally no idea what he will actually do. He changed his story every time he blinked. He denied statements that he made days earlier, that were on tape. He will do what is best for himself, not for you. He cares about no one but himself. 

And more: he pandered to the racism and sexism and xenophobia in some (hopefully small) segments of our country. He gambled on the fact that most people wouldn't stand up against that. And he won. Most people didn't stand up against that. They accepted it. If this is 1934 Germany, 47.5% of the country voted for Hitler. If this is 1964 Alabama, 47.5% of the country voted for the white supremacist governor. Trump lost the popular vote, but he won enough people in my home state and others like it that he won the electoral college. 

I don't know what my Oma would do if she were here, but I know this: she stood up against Hitler when the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis. I can't imagine what she would have thought when her party elected a man who read Hitler's speeches for inspiration. She couldn't even stand the sound of German being spoken. I am so glad that she never knew that some of her children and grandchildren voted for a man who used Hitler's strategies to get elected, who talks about minorities  as if they are the source of white people's problems just like Hitler did, and who, I fear, may turn out to treat minorities the same way Hitler did. 

I worry now, speaking out about these things. I worry that I will have to stand in the gap and risk death to stand up to Trump. But I'm doing it, because it is the right thing to do, and because my Oma did no less. 

indoor

I've taken up indoor rock climbing. J. and I took it up together, actually, but then he flew off to Spain, leaving me to find other climbing partners, and I have done so. I am shameless about hitting people up to go climbing. I will climb with anyone who won't let the rope go too slack.

I might have overdone it a little two weeks ago, climbing five out of seven days. Last week I kept it to three, thanks to busy evenings and my elbow hating me when I climb too much, but this week I'll probably be back up to four or five. I love it. I love it like I love martial arts (or would, if I could find a good dojo in this city). 

(If you don't know the numbering, anything in the 5 range means that you probably need a rope. (More details in the "Free Climbing" section here.) The gym routes start at 5.6 and go through 5.13. I started with 5.6s and 5.7s, which are like ladders, and 5.8s were my hard climbs. After six weeks, I climb mostly 5.9s and some 5.10As. My project climbs are 5.10Bs and 5.10Cs.)

My evening emails to J. for the last two weeks or so, as I've been moving up, have read like this: "So then I climbed that purple 5.10A - you know, the one in the room straight ahead right as you enter, over from the orange route that has the overhang? - and it was hard and I had to rest on the rope a couple of times when my hands got tired, but I did it!!" I'm sure he is enthralled. He's threatening to find me a support group.

Yesterday I climbed tried to climb a couple of routes that were way above my abilities, and somehow the whole afternoon passed while I fought the wall. I only figured out how much time had passed because I was so hungry that I got dizzy. It's hard to climb when you are dizzy.

Today I struggled on a route that I did successfully last week (they put in a big handhold for another route in exactly the wrong place to stop me from balancing where there are no handholds), and then when that didn't work, I climbed a 5.11A. Okay, with a little help from the rope, and I used the crack in the wall (I'm never sure whether you are allowed to use the crack or not). And it was my favorite kind of climb, with big bulby handholds far apart (tall people unite). I hate little handholds. They make my fingers cramp up.

"How far do you fall when you fall?" my mom asked. Since I am a 'fraidy cat about falling, I hardly fall any distance at all. Yesterday I was climbing with someone new, who didn't pull the rope tight when I said, "take," and so I just let go of the wall to rest my hands and fell about two feet. Which is fine, except that I was struggling with that route, and losing those two feet of climbing when you are dizzy and hungry and just want to go home is rough. The good news is that I've gotten way more comfortable with falling over the last week or two. Before that, I just clung to the wall like a burr rather than risk falling when I probably could have made the next move.

Climbing is so much fun.

sharp

At one point last week, I had five bandaids on my body. 

Two of them were from the dermatologist's office. She scraped off a mole - benign - and cut out a dermatofibroma - also benign. One of those (the dermatofibroma) did (does) have five stitches, though. It was 6 mm, she said, which alarmed me just a tad when I went home and consulted Dr. Google, because Dr. Google said that the average melanoma is diagnosed when it is 6 mm. 

I read that, and then I forgot about the whole thing, other than the itching - oh, the itching - until a week had gone by and I didn't get a call about the results. Apparently benign results that don't require followup aren't at the top of their list of priorities. 

For the other three bandaids, though, I have no excuse. 

My coworker brought in a block of cheese that she wasn't eating. Because she wasn't eating it, it had gotten hard on one side, and I needed to cut off the hard part to get to the good stuff.

As I put the very sharp, serrated knife against the cheese, I thought to myself, "Cutting upward like this is not a good idea," and then I continued to think (or not think, as the case may be), "Nah, it will be fine."

It was not fine. I had six long, bleeding scratches from the serrations, one bleeding round spot without skin, and I cut a chunk out of my knuckle. I thought the knuckle might need stitches, but there wasn't enough skin to stitch it together (it was a triangular hole), so I pressed on it for a while and then sealed it off with a bandaid. And then put two more on the rest of the open wounds. 

Someday, I will learn to handle sharp objects with the respect they need. 

spider

Over Labor Day, J. and I drove down to that One Big State that takes up most of the west coast. We met some friends of his, who drove up from the south to meet us at a great location for climbing.

So, about climbing. I like climbing. If you give me a rock wall with reasonably large variations in it, I will scramble right up it.

Real rock climbing, though, involves walls that do not appear to have anything to hold onto.

I failed. Twice. I kinda choked, because the wall was harder than anything I've ever tried.

It was frustrating for someone who is mostly fearless about heights except for a tiny itty bitty little (small) fear of falling. Also a twinge of perfectionism. 

So I signed myself up for women's climbing clinic out on a big rock formation in the middle of State of Happiness on one of the weekends that J. was in Spain. 

I drove myself out there in my new car, the back full of tent and bedding (the comfy version of camping: foam pad and real sheets). I found a campsite in campground with a creepy name in a national wild land with another creepy name. Turns out the camp manager was also one of those older guys who calls every woman sweetie or honey or darling. So, maybe creepy? It's hard to tell with old men. I reserved judgment.

I went into Central Ski Town for dinner, which was more like 4 pm because I hadn't managed to eat lunch and was dizzy with hunger, and then bought a bunch of (somewhat necessary) stuff at Re!, and then settled into my tent by about 9 pm. 

I laid there in the dark, realizing that I'd never gone camping alone before, not real camping, not with only a tent between nature (cougars! rattlesnakes!) and me. Always before there have been other people around. People I knew, not just the strangers in campsites 50 feet away. I wasn't sure if I would sleep, but I did.

In the morning, we gathered at the climbing supply store, a group of women between 23 and 50. We'd all climbed before, some only inside, and we all wanted to learn.

We did. We learned to build an anchor up at the top of a pitch and to clean the anchor to rappel back down after everyone is done climbing. We climbed.

And then we hit a pitch that I couldn't climb. My confidence was up, because I'd been climbing, but this one didn't seem to have handholds. At all. 

The usual thing that people do when this happens, when they are standing below you, is to yell things like, "Try to the right of your left knee. Can you get a foothold there?" 

These women, though, they knew. They knew that it wasn't just about telling me where to reach. It was about giving me the knowledge that I didn't have to find a perfect handhold to try another step. "You won't find handholds here," one of them said. "Your hands are just for balance. Your feet move you up."

And so I put my hands flat against the wall and did exactly as the climbers say: I trusted my feet. I stood up on the tiniest little bit of incline, on my rubber shoes, and it worked. I climbed the wall like a spider, and at the top I got to undo the entire anchor and re-loop the rope through and do my favorite thing about climbing: I rappelled down the side of the rock, reminding myself to look around at this beautiful place and enjoy every moment.

keys

I bought a new car a couple of weeks ago. An actual new car. It had 31 miles on the odometer when I drove it off the lot. 

I didn't actually set out to buy a new car. I believe in buying used cars, and I've been driving an almost 20 year old car. But I priced a bunch of used cars and started to realize that I would be saving about $2k and losing quite a few miles if I bought a several year old car, and an actually old car is not something I dare to buy without the presence of my dad or someone else who knows a lot about cars. Also I drive about 25K miles a year right now, so an actually old car wouldn't last all that long. 

And truly, I'd started to feel unsafe in such a small car on such a fast highway. My airbags didn't even work on that old car. 

I sent my dad some options (new Camry, used Altima), and he didn't get excited about anything until I mentioned the small crossover SUV. He doesn't like the low cars for safety, and the gas mileage is about the same on the small SUV as the bigger sedans.

After quite a few bad experiences (it turns out that car dealerships are a nightmare to work with), I found the only manual transmission version of the car I wanted. It was a 4.5 hour drive away. And they wanted it off the lot by the end of August.

We managed it, somehow. J. was the hero of the hour, considering that he was still jet lagged coming back from Spain and we both had to work the morning we made the drive.

We got back to Gone West at midnight.

Other than the car payment (I hates them), I am delighted with my new car. It's bigger, it has a manual transmission (my primary criterion for a car), and it averages almost 32 miles per gallon. 

A few things take getting used to, though: it has blind spots, it doesn't accelerate quite as fast as the tiny car (also I'm trying to be nicer to the clutch and transmission), and it doesn't have a key.

I was in the habit, with my old car, of using the key to lock the doors when I got out. That way, you never risk locking the keys in the car like you would if you did the lock-and-hold-the-handle-up trick on older cars. 

Now I can't remember to lock my car. There is no key! (Okay, there is a key. It's buried inside the clicker, and it's really only intended to be used if the battery goes out on the clicker.) I'm often at the door of my office before I remember that I didn't lock the car. Fortunately, the clicker works from afar.

Today I went to a new tea place because there was a gluten-free donut popup shop there, and I've been meaning to try these donut holes (which are only offered at popup locations). I got a particularly excellent chai and more donut holes than I could eat (the others are in the freezer; let me just say a word about the chocolate ones: YUM). I sat around people watching and internet surfing and writing in my journal.

When I got up to go, I couldn't find my keys. Not in my pocket, not in my purse...

I realized that I had left them sitting openly in the console in the car. The unlocked car. Which was parallel parked on a public street, still so new that it doesn't have permanent plates on it.*

Good news!! No one stole my car.

Bad news: I'm an idiot who deserves to have my car stolen. All those times I made fun of people who left their cars unlocked with the keys in the console (admittedly overnight) because what do you expect? Of course your car is going to be stolen if you ASK for it to be stolen. Well, I regret my choices now. 

* I have the permanent plates. They arrived in the mail on Thursday. I just haven't found a wrench, daylight, and time to put them on the car. I have no defense if I get pulled over; they are sitting on the floor of the passenger side. My defense will be, "But it was raining."

hypothetically

Text conversation with J. this morning: 

Me: Hypothetical question: you are driving in the middle of three lanes on the highway just south of the city, on that curve before the rest area. The left and middle lanes are full of cars. The right lane is empty. There is a cop behind you, and he lights you up. Do you: a. Come to a halt in the middle lane, b. Cut across the crowded left lane to pull over on the curve without much of a shoulder, so you are still partly in the lane of travel, c. Pull across the empty right lane to the wide shoulder, or d. Both a. and b.?

J: definitely d

because that just shows how cops pulling people over is dangerous

Me: Ding ding ding!!!

That's exactly what the guy did this morning.

J: sigh. awesome. 

...

I was in the left lane. All of the following happened: we all slammed to a halt. We all had to get over to get around the police car, which was still in the lane of travel (because there was a concrete barrier on the other side). And then everyone behind me had to slam to a halt again because the cop waved to the guy that he needed to get over to the right side of the road, which he did by cutting across moving traffic.

I do not understand the instinct that would cause a driver to pull to the left, into traffic/a concrete barrier, instead of to the right, into an empty lane/the wide shoulder, when being pulled over by a police officer.

impossible

It turns out to be ridiculously, impossibly hard to buy a car. I know what car I want. I know how much I'm wiling to pay for it. And you know what I get, after extensive research, when I tell a car dealership that? 

Last night, one of them told me that I am wrong. 

Let that sink in for a moment: this guy claims to want my business. He tells me that he can get the car I want. He called me, so he apparently does want my business. And when I told him, based on my research, that one aspect of his pricing (a delivery charge) was more than I wanted to spend, he didn't say, "Let me see what I can do," he said, "No, you are wrong." 

Then he proceeded to mansplain to me 1. why buying a used car is a bad idea (he also sells used cars), 2. why Mazdas are just as good as Hondas and Toyotas (which is nonsense and unnecessary, since I told him I wanted to buy a Mazda for the manual transmission EVEN THOUGH they aren't as reliable as Hondas and Toyotas), 3. why he doesn't pressure people into anything because he wants people to send other people to buy from him (while continually telling me that I had no choice but to pay his delivery fee or end up with a lemon). 

I really don't understand how car dealerships do any business. So far, I have had the following experiences:

1. A car dealership that won't come down to reasonable prices. Should a used car really cost the same as a new one?
2. A car dealership that added all sorts of hidden costs and turned out not to have the title anyway. They also wanted me to sign a paper with my offer on it. I get the psychology that they think it makes me more committed, but it just made me irritated that they thought I was that easily manipulated.
3. A car dealership that claims to be able to get the car I want, but insists on telling me that I am wrong about everything. This bullying does not make for a happy customer. 
4. A car dealership that does not, despite confirming in writing, actually have the car I asked to see. They tried to sell me on some other cars until I flatly told them not to contact me again unless they had a manual transmission in stock. 

How is it that every other business at least attempts to offer what people want at a price people will pay except this one? 

If I were a man, I would have my car by now. 

good

I walked down to the waterfront tonight. I haven't done that in a while. Last year, when I was unemployed, I walked down there often, because I had to get out of the house somehow, and I didn't have money to spend. I watched a lot of sunsets over downtown.

As I walked along the esplanade tonight, there was a cloud of smoke in front of me. It didn't smell like anything by the time I got up there, though, so I didn't think much of it. I assumed someone had done something involving smoke and then walked away.

Soon thereafter, I stopped at a railing at a good turnaround point. There was a firefighter peering over the railing (just in a t-shirt, not in gear), and I realized that he was looking for the source of the smoke. 

I started walking back, partly following the guy out of curiosity. The smoke was more clearly a column now. Looking over the edge when I got there, I saw something smoldering in the brush. The firefighter was climbing down around the end of the railing. 

Another firefighter passed me as I turned to go. "Garbage," he said. "Smells bad, doesn't it?"

I smiled at him, but what I was really thinking is how familiar it smelled. We burned our garbage in Liberia and in Rwanda. I know that smell, and it feels like home.

(Side story that I may have told before: I was at a music festival during my college years. It was very hot, and things sometimes got thrown on the ground and trampled. At one point I sniffed the air and said, "Ah. Smells like rotting garbage in the hot sun. I remember that smell from Liberia. It smells like home." One of the people I was with said, "Don't you think it's a little messed up if a smell like that makes you feel at home?" But I do not, in fact, think that is messed up. I never have.)

Walking back along the water, I thought of a conversation I had with my mom last summer, while I was unemployed, about how things could change at any time but it's really hard to enjoy all the free time of unemployment when you don't know when it will change. 

But change it did, and it's all so different now. I have a job that I love, I just agreed to buy a car that won't make me feel like a bug about to get squashed on the highway, and a cute boy brings me turron from Spain. If I could tell the me of a year ago how it turned out, she never would have believed it could be this good. 

motorized things

The other morning, I could not get the AC to turn on in my car. It was quite annoying, because I need the AC to work in order for my windshield to stay free of fog when it rains.

I had my oil changed over the weekend, and when they finished up, one of my headlights wasn't working. They had joggled it loose somehow (they fixed it). So I suspected them of also doing something to the AC. What, I didn't know, but something.

I tried many times, turning it off and on, and then I gave up. Ugh. A car problem. 

On the drive home, I noticed that the fan wasn't on. Turns out that the AC only works when you have the fan on.

So there's that.

...

The motorcycle repair garage across the street was extra loud one night this week.

I was getting up at 5:30 am last week, working 10 hour days, so I needed my sleep. I was not particularly pleased when they started revving one of the loudest of the engines over and over and over for a good half an hour, starting around 10:30 pm. 

The thing about a noise like that is the unpredictability. I can sleep through a constant noise. I can sleep through a noise that occurs at regular intervals. I can't sleep through a noise that stops and starts unexpectedly.

I was too tired to do anything about it, but the next day I went over into the garage full of metal and rubber and said, "So, I live across the street, with the window facing this way, and..."

I didn't even get to complete my sentence before one of the guys was apologizing. He knew exactly what the problem was, and how late it had been. They were getting ready for a big trip this weekend, it seems, and that bike was having trouble. 

...

My headlight has gone out again.

bits, pieces

Apparently my commitment to avoiding ants in my chai just disappeared when I got up after 6 hours of sleep on Friday morning and found an ant in the day's chai. I don't even drink the chai until I get to work, 2 hours after I wake up, but it's a ritual, and I wanted it, especially after staying out late for J.'s birthday. So I fished out the ant and went on my way.

I have now resorted to making chai on the coffee table in the living room, since I found an ant on the bar stool. How is this possible? They are everywhere. 

...

I've become the sort of person who reads about climbs for fun. Hmmm, Class 4 but very exposed. Crumbly 5.0-5.3 approach. That sounds like something that requires a real climb leader, not just a bunch of us who have taken the initial class.

I also have plans for the intermediate class, starting a year from now. I have to get in three more summits, including two that involve rock climbing. I just have to find people to lead them, since I'm a little bit of a skerdy-cat when it comes to the anchors, etc. I like safety as much as I like getting to the top of a mountain.

...

I like fireworks a lot, but my tolerance for them on a Monday night is low, and they are going on in all directions around my house. The kind, you understand, that are illegal in some many states. 

There were some kids setting off a firework in the middle of the road, in the fancy neighborhood up the hill. I watched as one lit it and another tried to set a plastic take-out container upside-down over it. The container tipped, and the kid who lit it had to go back in and set it right. 

Fortunately it was just a smoke bomb, and all it did was color the take-out container green before the it tipped over again.

The only other adult visible, standing on the sidewalk I was on with a smaller kid, looked at me with the look that says, "We are supposed to be the grownups around here. What do we do?"

I just smiled at her. That is not a battle I'm going to attempt. I'm sure there were some parents somewhere, off on a porch. This is not the kind of city where kids roam free. 

It's a good thing I can sleep through a lot, because a lot is going on right now.

ant revenge

The ants have taken over again.

J. was in my kitchen the other night and lost patience with them. He wiped them all off the counter into their deaths in the sponge. I found baby powder, which he sprinkled around the edge of their favorite counter to keep them away.

Tonight I lost patience with them and added a whole bunch more baby powder to other parts of the kitchen.

I have no idea why the baby powder stops them, but it seems to.

I had to make my chai on a stool today, because lately I've been finding ants in my chai. And I'm not that picky about finding ants in my drink, but I draw the line in two places:

1. That time that I came back from Spain and Croatia and I had a chai in the fridge waiting for me and it turned out that an ant had been marinating in the tea for about 12 days. It was bloated.
2. The ants that are in the cup when I pour in boiling water so that they are cooked in the cup. The last one I found was breaking apart into little ant bits. So much in the way of nope.

weekends

The last few weekends have looked like this: 

1. 

J. got back from Spain on Saturday, jet-lagged. We spent Sunday shopping the sale at re!, buying very important things like a sleeping bag (me) and a cargo box for roof of a car (him). Rain came down in sheets, so we took refuge in a Thai restaurant, where we sat in a booth made out of a tuktuk and found out that J.'s final softball game was canceled. We ordered more Thai iced tea to wait out the storm. 

2. 

I took Friday off so that we could head off to the desert. We spent Friday morning packing J.'s Subi with way too much camping gear (a canopy is really vital, obviously) and about two weeks worth of food and water and a dog. For a weekend. I miiiiiiiight not have conveyed quite how far away the desert is, because when we got to Sunny Ski Town, J. thought we were almost there. We were, in fact, almost halfway there. 

We ate West African peanut soup and chilaquiles outside in the sunshine in Sunny Ski Town with the (borrowed) dog constantly begging next to us. 

By the time we got to the desert, it was dark, and the camp was not in the same place it had been last year. We ended up driving through the fog over the flat, cracked dirt. It was eery not being able to see very far in front of us. With the fog, we could have been in a forest, even though there was nothing to run into for miles. 

The camp was full of lights and music. People played music at all hours - one night there was a stage set up in the middle of the desert - and lounged in open sided tents during the day. "This is the Pleasure Pavilion," a woman I know from hiking said as we walked by one afternoon, from pillows in a screen tent. There was a geodesic dome with hammocks strung from the frame. 

J. and I mostly went for hikes and explored, though. We drove south to another mountain range one day, and across the desert to the bluff the next day. J. took the Subaru up past 100 mph on the open desert, and then he took his hands off the wheel. There was nothing to make the car deviate from its course. 

The dog turned out, at age 10, to have a bit of a mind of her own. When she got tired, she just plopped down and laid there. That was fine on the first hike, where we mostly followed a little stream. She could go frolic in the water until she had her energy back. One time she laid down and sat, panting, looking at us, while a lizard snuck up and jumped on her back. We laughed at how she turned her head and scared it off, but didn't startle enough to jump up. As soon as she looked away, the lizard came back and jumped on her back again. This time she grudgingly got up. The lizard scampered off for good.

There was no water on our walk the second day, back between the bluffs out of the desert, and so when she refused to move we just turned around and started back. We saw a snake that startled us, but it didn't have a rattle, so we weren't too worried. (It was probably a Pacific gopher snake.)

The drive back to Gone West was just as long, except interrupted by lunch at a Lebanese place in Sunny Ski Town.

3. 

J. was in San Diego for work, so I drove his car out over the mountains after work to the cabin of one of my climbing friends. A bunch of them were gathered there. I made guacamole and we all laid out our climbing gear in the living room, asking people's opinions. 

"Do I need a puffy?" S. asked. 

"I don't think so," I said. "It's going to be almost 100 degrees this weekend, and even if it is 40 degrees on the mountain, I was okay in the desert with only a fleece and this other light jacket."

After dark, I drove out to the nearest airport to pick J. up. He had changed his flight to join us for the climb, so that we didn't have to drive three hours from Gone West in the dark.  

The next morning, we all packed our packs and met our climb leader at the trailhead. We hiked through a large burn, our leader telling us stories about the time he got caught in that fire and had to hike out the other side, without a trail. We hiked through snow, until we were right at the bottom of the glacier, and there we made camp. 

Around 3:50 am, 30 minutes into trudging up the snow, the only thing I wanted was to turn around and go back to my warm sleeping bag. The only thing in the world. 

But then the sun came up, over the east ridge of the mountain to the north, and the world was all aglow, and my muscles loosened up, and then it was just one step and another, all the way up the snow to the top of the mountain. 

4. 

J. and some friends ran a half marathon up on the mountain. There were ten adults and one 2 year old in two condos. (Our condo got the two year old.) 

The morning of the race, J. and R. went off with one of the other runners in her car. I followed an hour or so later, driving mostly blindly since I didn't have network on my phone. It was like the old days: I had to watch for the sign.

Driving semi-aimlessly, I finally found a spot where the runners were passing. I didn't know how many had passed, so I watched for a while and then worried that I might have missed J. Also I had parked J.'s car in a place with many signs demanding that one pay for the park entry and put the proof of payment in the car window, and I had not, mostly because I had no cash. 

I should have waited, though, because I beat the fastest runners to the finish line, and it was confusing who had run the marathon and who the half, and it took almost an hour before J. and one of the other runners made it to the finish line.

Fortunately, there was a hot tub and ridiculous amounts of nachos and some crazy 80s kids game that involved fitting shapes into the correct spot while a timer ticked, and if you didn't get them all in time to stop it, the whole thing got upset.

5. 

J. went to Spain, so I had a weekend to rest and do nothing. 

Of course I volunteered to spend Saturday assisting with the summer climbing class. Which meant getting up at 4:35 am. 

I have no explanation for myself. 

I didn't do much climbing, but the wind picked up and the guy in charge of the chimney decided to shut it down, so I climbed last, with my pack. There's a little lip at the top that I struggled to get over last time even without a pack and without the wind. I might have panicked a little. The poor guy had to pull hard on the rope to keep it without any slack, and even then I panicked about falling. 

I didn't fall (not that I would have gone anywhere if I did).