As a result of the weekend climbing trip, I’m also in the market for a new camera. I usually keep mine double clipped to my harness, but managed this time, to only reclip the camera bag after having it out on a belay ledge. The camera bag came open, and my camera went flying. Luckily it didn’t hit anyone. I’ve recovered the memory stick, and it looks like I’ll get the camera back too – in one piece, thanks to the metal body, but I don’t think it will want to turn on.

Now it occurs to me that I have two options. 1) to pretend the whole thing never happened and buy the same camera again, or 2) pretend I meant to upgrade all along and get a better camera. The one I had was a Sony DSC-W1, and I like everything about it apart from the lack of shutter/aperture priority, and lack of zoom (which could be remedied with a lens though, as it had a lens thread). Faster shutter speed would be nice too. Suggestions welcome. Must decide quickly, I don’t like not having a camera. Anything could happen, and I wouldn’t be able to take a photo of it.

Supersize mice that are eating chicks alive are threatening the world’s most important seabird colony, on British-owned Gough Island in the South Atlantic….

It’s only later they get to mentioning that they’re talking about albatross chicks that are nearly a metre tall, and weigh 10kg. Link to full article.

You realise what a fragile grip you have on your climbing lead head, when you start up the third pitch of a climb, stick your head out around a corner, and are confronted with a large shiny, sticky pool of congealing blood. It’s bright red still, with flies crawling around it. It’s also exactly where you need to go. You’re 40 metres up the climb already – you knew there was blood somewhere up here, and you knew the guy was fine – he just nicked his ankle apparently, you’d heard him yelling down to his belayer about it. You just weren’t expecting quite so much of the stuff.

He and his partner kept climbing – oh, they certainly did, as there is blood sprayed all over the rest of the pitch. Gingerly following a trail of blood, and trying not to get too queasy as you look down at the rope below you, and the swathes of blood zoom into focus, multiplying. Suddenly everything seems a lot harder. It seems like you’re looking into the future every time you look down, and the pool of blood lying there is yours, waiting for you to fall and create it. Dizziness overtakes you as the queasiness from all the blood goes to your head. You clasp the rock in front of you – it’s still cool from the morning. Your helmet rests against the rock, as you try and calm down, and return to the task at hand.

The climb is supposed to be a 5.5 … well that’s about a 10 in Australia. Even taking into account the Seneca sandbagging, the moves you are looking at doing seem a lot harder… more like 16? Your hands are sweating, and you have no chalk. You look down and across to work out where the traverse is supposed to go, there should be an easier way – oh, there’s the blood again. Getting it together for a minute, letting your belayer know to watch you, you haul yourself through a few more moves, get some more pro in, backed up with one of the ubiquitous dodgy pitons. The traverse here doesn’t look any better. And look, more blood. The sun has moved over, and you lie there, hugging the rock, and wondering what the hell you’re doing there.

A few hours later you’re standing in the river at the bottom of the crag. You got off the climb ok. Everyone is fine. It wasn’t one of the days you climb for, but right now the river is cool, and you can stand here watching the ripples in the water, and nothing else matters.

While in Squamish I developed a … habit… of eating wasabi peas. In Canada they came in huge bins in the Save on Food supermarkets (which have huge bins of pretty much everything, and are a fantastic invention).

I have been unable to find any local wasabi pea sources. I need more wasabi peas! I miss the recoil of having eaten a pea with too much wasabi paste on it… I even miss licking the wasabi crumbs off my fingers, and shuddering after every one – it burns, yet it’s so good. Curse you all! Find me some wasabi peas.

Wikipedia is a fantastic source of useless (and useful) information. After an entertaining read of made up words in the Simpsons, I read the tomacco page….

In 2003, inspired by The Simpsons, Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon successfully grafted a tomato plant onto the roots of a tobacco plant, which was possible because both plants come from the same family, Solanaceae or nightshade, and furthermore both plants are dicotyledons. (It is not possible to graft monocotyledons, because the xylem and the phloem are distributed in bundles throughout the stem, and therefore it is impossible to align the vascular tissues of the two plants.)

Baur suspected that the normal looking tomato that resulted may have contained a lethal amount of nicotine, however testing gave it the all clear (although the leaves of the plant did contain nicotine) – where’s the fun in that?

Fainting goats have developed the most stupid evolutionary trait imaginable. This is the sort of animal that creationists will point to to demonstrate that Darwinism is a load of cobblers.

“Oh, what’s that? A lion? I think I’ll have a lie down.”

The video under the link explains it all, but basically, due to a genetic condition (myotonia congenita) the goats legs stiffen when they’re suprised or over-excited. Often leading to them falling over. Apparently shepherds used to include them in herds with their sheep as wolf fodder. Now they’re being bred for novelty value. Poor goats.

Team procrastination brings you the inauagural climbing purity test. 100 questions – the turmoil, the excitement, can you possibly make your way to the end?

One of the other Australians in the climbing group was farewelled in style, as I discovered that climbing fibreglass poles barefoot can lead to friction burns. Two days later I discovered that climbing offwidth cracks in an indoor gym leads to removal of skin (I suspect this rule applies to outdoor offwidth cracks as well, although I may have to test this theory in person). These incidents have combined to lead to painful stinging shower experiences.

For the non-climbers: an offwidth crack is one too wide to wedge hands inside and too narrow to wedge one’s body inside – the style required to climb such a thing is best described as ‘interesting’.

Meanwhile, newsflash, I have a new way to entertain myself as work – planarity. I just finished level 11. It’s not very exciting. Nothing gets blown up. And I might even concede that it’s just a little bit geeky. Yet strangely addictive.