My life as a bat

Small Melina on her first Lead Climb Evah

I ate eleven tacos tonight. That's Eleven Tacos, son! I only wanted ten but I pushed on to eleven in honor of the 5.11d I climbed today: my first 5.11d ever. Boys and girls, I think I'm actually getting better at this. It sure has taken a decidedly long time: I mean, I started getting on rocks when I was just a wee one (in fact, I was eleven.) Hell yeah, eleven.

And since we're discussing new records: post-climbing Taco Tuesday saw higher numbers than ever before,  with all of us squeezed into the booth, and folding chairs brought out for the rest. We raised our beer glasses every few minutes for a new toast:

Here's to Ian! He's getting up at 2:30am tomorrow to go skiing and he still came out with us!
Here's to Melina! She knows what AT stands for!
Here's to Jeremy! He...did something cool involving ice and tools!
Here's to Lisa! She climbed her first 5.10 today!
Here's to Katie, she looks really good in that halter top and she was on campus 15 hours today!
Here's to Brian! He's a guide on the gauley woah dangerous and he's had shingles before! AAAAHH!!

That's how it started, pretty soon we were raising foaming glasses to anything that was said that we found funny, which was woah, everything, we're hilarious all of a sudden! I didn't even hear what you just said and I'm still laughing! Yeah, we were that table, constantly clinking and hollering, and tacos kept magically appearing and disappearing, and the beer was amber and pretty and instantly refilled. Don't worry, I brought my camera. But for those of you tired of seeing photos of the inside of the climbing gym and the inside of different eating and drinking establishments in Seattle, wince not, because I forgot the camera battery.

Ah, but that's life in this rainy city, isn't it, in this season: inside and warm with plenty of friends, plastic molded rocks and drinks named after famous ships. Beats the hell out of what it's been like in the past.

It's all very exciting, this climbing thing, and it keeps me very happy and energized....although apparently not all the time? Check out this photo that Koko took of me, I appear to be upside down on my very favorite train for-the-roof problem, fast asleep: