aberrant1

I went back to the rock gym yesterday, for the first time since I fell and hurt my ankle. The ankle is mostly back to normal -- still weaker than the other, but good enough that I didn't think I'd hurt it as long as I didn't fall from a height again, and I pointedly ignored the bouldering wall so that wouldn't happen. I'd signed up for a Meetup group there, a different one than the one I tried last time. I liked this one better, I think. It's smaller, or at least a smaller group actually showed up. And they're very welcoming and make sure the newbies have someone to belay for them. And they seem more focused on learning and teaching, which is good for me.

But I got halfway up the first route, only a 5.6, and froze. It wasn't that I didn't see what I needed to do. It wasn't that my arms were giving out. Nope, it was just panic. I was seriously considering asking the guy to let me down, but that would have required letting go of the wall. He did notice that I wasn't moving and yelled some advice about where to go next, which I didn't actually need but did convince me to keep climbing. And... actually, it turned out I was past the hard part, and I got up to the top easily after that.

Then the second route kicked my ass repeatedly, and kicked a fellow newbie's ass repeatedly, and then a lady who was shorter, fatter, and older than me, AND had recently injured her shoulder, went up it like a streak of lightning and embarrassed us both. Oh well. The other newbie and I vowed to try again next time. Then we adjourned to the burrito place.

I'm definitely going back.

So far, not much.

Hanging out in Florida with the parents. This is going to be a weird Xmas; at no point will all my siblings be in the same house.

It was about 85° today, and I went for a walk at Morningside Nature Center. I somehow had never been there before, though it was on my way to work for years when I actually lived here. I saw a lot of pine trees. I also saw a humongous banana spider, which was... unexpected, in the middle of December, even for Florida.

Other than that, I have done nothing productive. Seriously, this stupid blog post is the most writing I've done all week.

Gopher tortoise season started this week -- the hard part, on Carter. The walking part. Later, when we move on to Pine Log and Point Washington, we'll use ATVs for a lot of it. But Carter is in the middle of a big longleaf restoration project, and we can't be running over all the little saplings and wiregrass plugs. So, we walk.

There are good points to this: you do see more cool unrelated-to-gopher-tortoise-burrows stuff while walking. Snakes, for example. (Well, technically those are often associated with tortoise burrows, but... you know. They're not actually tortoises.) In the first week, we came across two diamondback rattlesnakes, one pigmy rattlesnake, one coachwhip, and one hognose snake. This is actually more snakes (and more interesting snakes) than I've caught this spring in a concerted effort to trap them. I don't have any photos this time. The two diamondbacks would have been worth photographing, but both times we were too distracted by the "holy shit I could've died" thing to grab a camera before the snake crawled into the nearest burrow.

Seeing things like that almost, but not quite, makes up for the general unpleasantness of the work. Once again, M and I are swearing to have better jobs (or be back in school) by the time this comes around next year.

Speaking of which, I finally replied to the professor from NCSU. I think I did not sound like a complete idiot. I think I came up with a decent idea for a thesis project, by combining two things I think are extremely cool: soil seedbanks and prescribed fire. ( Geeking out over ecological stuff follows. )