Climbing the walls...

No exercise is a dangerous thing. It can lead to issues like psedentary psychosis (symptoms include: distorted body image, sagging sense of self-worth, premature aging, unhealthful food cravings, impulsively needing to do out-of-character activities...). No endorphins, no cleansing sweat, no vigorously pounding heart... it all amounts to no good.

My health issues of late have made running more than just the normal amount challenging. And the bike isn't as much fun at night as running is. I've been crawling out of my skin over here...climbing the walls. Yesterday, I decided I was tired of feeling old, fat, slow and in pain (fine, argue with me...but I'm not listening...psedentary psychosis). I decided that I needed to do something that scared the crap outta myself...but it had to be something that wasn't going to leave my children motherless and my husband wifeless. So running blindfolded across the freeway wasn't an option. Nor was playing chicken with a speeding BART train.

Every day on the way to and from my kids' school, I drive by a gym. It isn't just a gym...it's a climbing gym. I don't know what made yesterday different from any other day before it, but yesterday I suddenly got a bug up my butt to go try this...

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I did one of these climbing wall deals once a long time ago at a kid's birthday party...and it totally freaked me out. I was fine on the going up part, but when I got to the top and turned around to see the dude holding the rope for me down on the ground, I freaked the F out. I had to close my eyes while they lowered me down. I wanted a drink...and I don't even drink.

But yesterday the Try This NOW bug found me...and bit me hard.

I called my husband. "Honey, I'm going to an Intro Climbing class tonight at 7:30. You'll need to put everyone to bed tonight. Okay?" He said that would be fine (of course he had to ... he still owes me for that 12-day solo trip to France he took last summer).

When 7:30 rolled around, I was sitting there in Berkeley Ironworks, a little nervous.

I had to put on this harness thing...

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...and weird shoes...

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...and learn how to tie knots...

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"First you make a loop...that's the ex-boyfriend's head. 

Then you wrap the rope around his neck and poke him in the eye with the end of the rope. 

Then you pull the rope tight. " 

After that, you 'trace' the knot so that it's doubled and it ends up looking like this...

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Then you take the end of the rope and tie a fisherman's knot...

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Those are some of the things the person going UP the wall needs to do to get ready.

This is the person standing on the ground holding onto the rope that can save the climber's life...

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...and they have their own set of instructions that they must know to perform their function properly...to keep the climber safe. The rope goes into the belay device a certain way, the slack always needs to be taken up, the carabiner must be locked...lots of important stuff.

In the Intro Climbing class last night, I learned both ends of the deal. The instructor was very thorough and nice...even when I kept screwing up my knots. Safety is of tantamount importance. She patiently helped me get them right. And then she let us climb the walls.

What I learned:

• as long as I don't look down, I don't get scared. 
• being the belayer is really stressful! 
• my upper body is pathetically weak.
• having trust that your belayer has you makes it so much easier!
• keeping your arms straight and just hanging is helpful.
• you use legs more than I thought.
• climbing uses a whole lot of muscles I didn't remember I had...my whole body is sore.
• I really like it...even though it freaks me out.

The place has more than just the walls for climbing. It is a gym. There are treadmills, weights, classes...

I need a change. I need something to be excited about. I need a new adventure to take on.

I joined the gym.

Happy Leap Day :)

The Big Boy Hike

For years I have wanted to go hiking with my kids. I wandered the Berkeley hills in Tilden Regional Park when I was young, and I loved it. I wanted to share this place with my own children.

Spending eight years hobbling around in my slippers, using shopping carts like walkers pretty much meant hiking was not an option. Now that I am healthy enough to take on the great outdoors, I have a few pretty resistant customers, most likely because it is completely foreign to them. Hiking can be hard work...and you might get dirty. My big boy is especially known for shying away from activities that involve those two things...working hard and getting dirty. 

Imagine my surprise when he excitedly agreed to join me in climbing a mountain this past weekend. I'm pretty sure it was a combo of getting time away from his humungous history project on which he has been majorly procrastinating and spending a little one-on-one time with me :)

I packed some lunch and some water, put on some real hiking boots, and off we set. I'd done this hike several times decades ago; I knew it was something he could handle. I have no idea how many miles it is, and I'm too lazy to do the math using the park's trail map. Start to finish, it took us 2 hours...and we were really leisurely. 

Me and my big boy getting ready to head out.

We opted for the road less traveled...

the one to the right, in case you couldn't tell.

Some images lend themselves to hugeness...

...and here's a close-up of the branch obstructing the trail...

...because the blistery, black fungus we had to climb over reminded me

vividly of that poor prairie dog we saw on our trip to the SF Zoo.

We were careful to not touch it in the event it is interphylum contagious.

This one also needs to be seen really, really big...

Yes, my son is a tree-hugger. 

But he does have discriminating taste...

this is quite possibly the biggest California Bay Laurel

in the world!

Well...it's the biggest one I've ever seen, anyway.

We skipped through dried-up meadows...

...climbed down steep ravines...

...crossed cute little creeks with fluffy ferns growing next to them...

...spotted hot babes...

...texted dad to let him know we'd had no Sasquatch sightings and were safe...

Dude...

This was hard work.

We were climbing a freaking mountain!

See? 

That's the trail sign...

That hump thing is the mountain...and we went to the top.

This is about 3/4 of the way up.

Ever upward...up, up, UP!

The final stretch toward the summit...

at a whopping 1250 feet above sea level.

I started to get worried because we had neglected to pack our oxygen tanks.

The glorious day from atop Wildcat Peak.

Once we finished our lunch, we started down...

Through trees...

...short and droopy...

...tall and straight...

And we skipped through more meadows...

...not sure why this meadow is so much greener than that first meadow...

...and we followed the road more traveled back to the car.

As we followed this road around the corner past where you can see, 

we saw something very special. Right before we reached the car, 

a hawk swooped and snatched up some prey about 10 feet from us.

Both of us were awe-struck as we watched its strong, powerful flight between the trees, 

rodent dangling from its talons...

triumphant.

Not once had he complained. Not once had he whined. Big G spent the remainder of the afternoon and on into the evening thanking me for taking him on this hike. He'd walk up to me and stand there, and when I'd turn to him, he'd throw himself into my arms and bury his head into my shoulder and say how cool it was and how much fun he had and how he wanted to do it again sometime...and thank you. It really did move me to tears.

No remorse...

I follow a blogger who lives literally around the corner from my childhood home. Isn't that so weird? She is hilarious and real, snarky and shameless....or so I thought.

Turns out the woman harbors shame...and not only has she shared her own shameful situation with world, but she has invited us all to link up our own shameful situations. I'm not sure to what end...but not everything has to have an 'end'.

I love coming clean regarding my foibles.  And based on her photo and some of the other linkers, I am most shameful. However... interestingly, I feel neither shame nor remorse regarding my totally crap housekeeping skillset. Nonetheless, I am always in for making people feel better about themselves...or at least giving them a good laugh at my expense.

I could do the living-out-of-my-nastyass-car shots, like Jill posted...

...but even though I've got the retro keyboard, a mouse, a pair of ice skates and 

God-knows-what-else, her carpet is way gross...

and the pirate booty she has scattered about adds a certain je ne sais quoi...

interestingly, I think we have the same car.

Then prompted by Neo's Post of Shame, my thoughts wandered to how messy I allow my kids to keep their rooms...

G's room

X's room

Q's room

...but unlike her kid's room, mine are just toy-messy 

while her photo showed dirty dishes and food wrappers.

Of course there is Miss C's disaster area, which happens to be prominently located in the family room...

But how it expands into and joins with the mess in the living room is what bugs my husband more than probably almost anything in our house...

Yes, the lovely, velvet chaise is covered with laundry... always.

Not just on Saturdays like Robot Mommy's.

...and I'm hoping Dot over at Our Adventures with Riley recognizes her table's long-lost twin :)

I could show you guys my garage...

Seriously, how did those burglar-guys find anything of value in this mess?

But....

It was a comment left by AutismWonderland regarding the contents of her freezer that piqued my curiosity about my own freezer...

I wasn't particularly shamed by the old hamburger meat that I haven't tossed in the garbage because I keep forgetting to do that on trash day...and the thought of it rotting out there waiting for trash day totally makes me feel ill...

It does, indeed, say "08/11/11" as the freeze by date.

I put it in the freezer in September...which is why it never got used.

Nor by the Pedialyte pops that moved with us back in December 2009...

...after they had already expired in April of that year!

I think the only thing that really strikes me as super weird...and perhaps somewhat shameful... is this...

In 2007, my eldest had lice.

His little brother had lovely, long, downy, curly hair and a very hyper disposition.

We shaved his head to avoid needing to do any nit-combing or other painstaking treatment.

I put the hair in ziploc baggies and then into the freezer to kill any possible lice.

I still have these four-and-a-half-year old bags of possibly formerly lice-y hair in my freezer...

and we moved in 2009.

I guess I am shamefully sentimental about this hair.

And maybe somewhat of a hoarder?

Do come share your shame...

click on Jillsmo's cute lil' pic to be transported to the magic shame portal...

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The Wild Thang at Costco...

Today I took the kids to the zoo.

"Good God, woman...not another f*ckin' zoo post? You've posted about the f*ckin' zoo like THREE times in the past 8 months. It. Is. Boring. ... unless you have more pictures of 5-legged or two-trunked (i.e. exposed male) elephants to share..." :)

First of all...it was a different zoo, okay? And second of all...this zoo has no elephants. Really. So, sorry...but there are none of those kinds of pictures this time.

We had a bit of trouble leaving the house early enough to make the morning carpool lane and get across the bridges on the cheap(er). There was a lot of yelling...some hunting around for unfound reciprocating zoo membership cards...an escaped toddler who ran gleefully up and down the block being chased by her siblings while mommy hunted for those *%#@ingmissing cards...a phone call and some sweet-talking to obtain an official email stating that I hold a family membership at a reciprocating institution and then the printing of that document...

We ended up leaving an hour later than I had hoped. But this is not unusual.

The drive into SF was pleasant though pricey... $10 in bridge tolls. Traffic was light; the Golden Gate Bridge looked spectacular against the bright blue sky. Parking was easy...but also pricey at $8, the admission line moved quickly, and there were no problems with my official email thing being accepted for a hefty discount...yay!

And we went in.

It was a glorious Bay Area day, and the San Francisco Zoo was not too crowded. Unfortunately, it would appear that beautiful days usually mean lazy animals. Does anyone else notice this? 

We hit the Children's Zoo section first.

Intended to be a cute photo of all 4 kids...

and I patiently waited until the hordes of others had finally moved on...

but, as luck would have it, Q accidentally shoved Miss C's head in between two of the metal goosenecks. She is crying and X is reading him the riot act.

The rarely-found-in-captivity Guinea Pig.

I was forced to take this picture and forced to promise to put it on here.

Sorry.

The Prairie Dogs were having issues.

Apparently, until April the moms are protecting their babies who are hiding out in the underground nests. The non-moms are all out in the open getting barked at by the moms.

And then there was this guy...

poor thing has some sort of skin condition...it really made me sad.

Older than me at 50 years of age, this Great Horned Owl is named King Richard. 

She had been living at the zoo for 17 years before laying an egg to let them know that the name wasn't working for her. 

Yeah...a millipede.

The guy said the feet tickle and prickle sort of like a toothbrush.

And he let us pet it...it is very hard and crunchy-feeling.

We left the excitement of the Children's Zoo to go fight the seagulls for our lunch...aggressive bastards. Throughout lunch, Q wouldn't stop playing with his loose tooth (yes, another one).

He told me he wanted me to pull it out when we got home.

It didn't make it all the way home.

Part of lunch consisted of chocolate chip cookies. Whenever we go to the San Francisco Zoo, we have to bring these because the first time Q remembers visiting this particular zoo, he had a stand-off with a peacock over his chocolate chip cookie. He has orchestrated such a stand-off every time we visit now. This visit would be no different. Except that we didn't see any roaming peacocks before he had already devoured his allotted two cookies...

Peacock:  Dude...where's the cookie?

Then there were the capybaras...world's largest rodent.

G says, "Mom...it's like a donkey crossed with a hamster."

Must say I agree...and I laughed really hard at this observation.

Then G took a picture of a pacing tiger. In case you didn't know, the San Francisco Zoo is the zoo where a visitor got killed by a tiger on Christmas in 2007. Apparently, an investigation unearthed the facts that these dickheads guys were taunting the tiger and...well...she got pissed.

This is not that tiger.

And the zoo totally upped the 'security' of all animal enclosures...

this shot was taken through super-duper thick glass.

I finally got a decent shot of all four kids...sort of looking in the same general direction at least...and one is actually smiling :)

Too bad the bear didn't get the memo...

And if you've made it this far in this yet-another-zoo post and are wondering what in the heck Costco has to do with any of this...

Yes...leopard pants. Different leopard vest. Snake shirt. 

A snow leopard/leopard throw blanket tucked under her arm.

What you can't see is that inside the awesome pink Crocs, 

...wait...

...no...

yes!

TIGER SOCKS!!!!

The wildest thing we saw all day was next to us in line at Costco.