Seven or eight times over the last few weeks I’ve gone to a nearby park with some friends from work during lunch break. The park has two large climbing boulders, like this one:
Each boulder has four sides, with one easy face so kids can climb. As you can tell from the picture,  the other walls are actually inverted.  The first time we went I looked at the inverted walls and though, “What a joke, I can’t climb these, nobody can climb these.”  I tried anyways, I was right I couldn’t climb any of them, at least nobody else could either

We didn’t quit though, back in the office we did pull-ups and griping exercises, trying to strengthen our climbing muscles, and we kept going back, several times a week. Eventually we all started to notice an improvement. Our goal was to be able to climb up all eight sides in one climbing session, at the beginning that seemed an impossibility, but two days ago Pete did it!  He’s nearly a foot taller than the rest of us, so we joked that it was his height that gave him an advantage, but in reality he’s been hitting the pull-up bar more than the rest of us and has bulked up. I didn’t feel too bad though, I did six of the eight sides the same day, a far cry from only being able to do the two easy sides.

Finally, one hour ago, I was able to climb all 8 sides consecutively! Even better, when I finished, I climbed one of the hard sides again, just because I could.

SUCCESS!!!

We’ve already been certified to belay at the local climbing wall, so our next goal is to climb all 16 corners, and then we’ll start some top-rope climbing at some of the local rock formations.

In Expensive Applesauce I chronicled a tale of sorrow and woe, the tale of my big toe. It’s been a week now since that fateful day, and I thought an update was in order for all my fans. On the evening of day 2 we drained the blister since it was growing too big for me to wear my shoes. I’ve kept sterile gauze and Neosporin on it to keep it clean, but every once in a while I leave it un-bandaged for an hour or so to get some air. My 3 year old stumbled on it today while it was un-protected today and managed to rip half of the protective blister off. So I went ahead and cut the rest of the dead skin off – and then took a picture. It’s really starting to hurt now – especially when I walk anywhere with shoes on, at least it started itching yesterday, so hopefully that means some healing is occurring, right? You’ll have to click through to see it since I don’t want to gross everyone out – consider yourself warned, it’s a gross picture, don’t look if you are weak of stomach.

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We spent yesterday canning applesauce at Grandpa’s house. All of us local siblings and our families were there and a lot of work was done. I think the final count was somewhere around 160 quarts of applesauce, as well as a large amount of dried apple slices.  Awesome work guys!

We made it through the whole day without any incidents until the very last batch. One of the bottles in that batch broken and it lost it’s bottom. As dad pulled it out of the boiling hot-water bath, all the water in it gushed out of it, right onto my foot. The boiling water was not very comfortable, and in the time it took me to get my shoe and sock off, it did some damage. I went into shock for a while and had to lay down – the oddest thing is that my leg was very restless during that time and I had to keep moving it, kicking every 30 seconds or so, which probably made my family think I was crazy. It hurt quite a bit – but I managed not to cry like a baby (while anyone was in the room). Dad and Caleb gave me a blessing, and this morning it doesn’t hurt at all, although there is a nice 2 inch long blister – I paid a dear price for that applesauce