Categories
general

pirates and phd

hoorah! i’m to go to a piratical house-warming. it’s been far too long since i’ve indulged in pirate-type behaviour, and longer still since i’ve dressed as one. although the last international talk like a pirate day (which is september 19th by the way) was fun. meanwhile, not of particular interest to anyone else, but the ‘o’ key on my keyboard has decided to misbehave. i tried to fix it, now it’s worse. essentially every ‘o’ in this has either not come out the first time, or come out as a double. much use of the backspace key, it’s driving me insane. especially as i’m supposed to be writing up at the moment (satellites and sounding systems chapter of thesis – trying to work on terra and aqua satellites). grrr. much grrrr.

Categories
climbing general

kachoong

… and just for the record, here is a photo of kachoong. (not my photo, will put up one from our trip as soon as i can get hold of copies)

Categories
climbing general trip reports

easter trip report

climbs completed: six

climb of the trip: probably seconding kachoong (21). according to the guide book, it’s “the most dreamed of, photographed and fallen off route at arapiles”. alas, the photographers ledge was getting too warm, so our photographer had escaped into the shade when i was climbing. the roof was absolutely awesome – huge jugs, that were also good as foot jams (well, leg jams for val, she could have got a hands free rest there). feeling very pumped afterwards, lots of napping in the hammock for the rest of the day. a very lazy trip overall.

possums sighted: nil – they must have been scared off by
the hoards of people in the campsite. that, or the pickings were so good they didn’t need to come down for more than a few minutes each day.

half-price easter eggs consumed: one white chocolate lindt bunny (courtesy of val), one m & m egg with m & m’s inside, and a box of crunchie eggs – but no crunchie bunnies this year!

favourite film of the easter holidays: both simon mentz’s ‘rams to the slaughter’ and a new bouldering movie ‘a colarado daydream’ were shown at natimuk town hall on sunday night. ‘rams to the slaughter’ wins hands down. it was excellent. ‘a colarado daydream’ was boring. there was minimal bouldering footage, an excess of gimmicky shots, overuse of graphics/filler footage, and far too much time spent setting up the ‘daydream’ concept. nice idea but it just didn’t work for me (and the others i saw it with). (plus i couldn’t stand the music)

Categories
climbing general

easter plans

easter – the traditional time of the year for every climber in melbourne to descend upon mt. arapiles. except this year an awful lot of people seem to be going to moonarie… or somewhere that isn’t mt. arapiles. hopefully that translates to less than 1000 people at the campground, and maybe space to walk between the tents at the pines. hopefully, because i’ve actually been persuaded to join the pilgrimmage to arapiles at easter for the first time. well…. for a few days anyway, as i really want to get over to the grampians as well, and relish being an evil sport climber.

Categories
general

well, apparently clubbing baby seals is back in again, and bigger than ever. meanwhile, if you’ve ever actually wondered how to define your political views the political compass offers a really neat way of doing so, with a bit of extra political information thrown in for good measure (for the record, i’m a libertarian leftist).