Due to the recent accidental dropping of my trusty Olympus Stylus 800, I may be in the market for a new, small digital camera to bring climbing (because we don’t always want to bring Luke’s larger DSLR to the crag and definitely not on multi-pitches). I’m looking for something not too expensive with a reasonable [...]
Jun 302008
Jun 302008
I’m just now starting to recover from the exhaustion of our recent weekend at the Needles, which was fun and challenging at times. We started our trip Wednesday night, picking up Gordon at LAX around 9pm and heading straight towards the Needles. We stopped in Bakersfield for gas, somehow avoiding the terrible air quality that [...]
Jun 252008
The big news right now are all the fires up in northern and central California, many of which I believe were ignited by lightning strikes. Best of luck to the firefighters up there right now. On our way back from our trip on Monday, we saw some evidence of fire down further south. This was [...]
With temperatures blazing in the 100s in the SoCal area last weekend, we headed out to Mt. Charleston, just north of Las Vegas, to beat the heat. Mt. Charleston rises above the glitz and garbage of the strip to over 10,000ft elevation – a tree-shaded, snow-covered (for part of the year) alpine oasis amid the [...]
I needed to get out, I just wanted to leave, go somewhere, change the flow of things. But I am not a spontaneous person, I like to make plans and follow them. This balance always strikes me and I don’t know what to do, which furthers my problem. I like doing things, keeping busy and [...]
Jun 182008
There are a lot of difficulties associated with being a Caltech student. The main one is an utter lack of free time during the academic year because there is just so much work to do. However, Caltech student-dom is not without its perks. For example, we get free membership to the gym and can go [...]
Gas is getting really expensive. I had my first >$60 fillup the other day. So it seemed like a good time to save some gas and ride the trains back from San Diego again. The more I try to understand the Metrolink trains, the more confused and frustrated I get. As you may recall from [...]
Summer is here and we have been banished to the shade and the mountains. The sun quickly heats the rock and friction becomes non-existent. We spent Friday night camped out at REI to attend one of their Scratch and Dent sales. Despite arriving at 10pm there were 10 people ahead of us in line. Some [...]
Jun 122008
I just finished the last final of my junior year at Caltech about 5 minutes ago!!! (It was, like all Caltech finals, a take home final, which is how I can be blogging about it already.) Which means that (hopefully) the most stressful year of my undergraduate career is over and it’s all downhill from [...]
Jun 112008
As climbers, we’re pretty good (or bad?) at measuring our progress, success, etc. with numbers – whether you’re working your way up towards 5.15 or battling through the V grades, like it or not, numbers at least claim to give us a feeling of how we are doing. How much stock we put in these [...]
Jun 032008
This past week I had my off Friday and due to some technology problems on Thursday I got to leave work early and get a pseudo 4 day weekend! With finals quickly approaching I surprised Lizzy by coming to LA on Thursday and we packed up and headed out on Friday to Idyllwild. We made [...]
Recent Comments