Yes, Aaron is still alive

It seems like the posts lately have been me me me. Aaron even said the other night that he should post something so that people know that he is still around. Lately my adventures have been Aaron-less, because he has been traveling so much for work. In fact the night I got back from my climbing trip, he had just gotten back from more than two weeks on the road. It was nice though, because Grandma and Grandpa Collick still had the boys, so we actually got to go on an honest-to-goodness, sushi-and-a-movie date!
Right now I am Aaron-less again, at least for the weekend, but I am not the one you should feel sorry for. He is currently somewhere in New York State, halfway through a 16+ hour drive with the boys and Meagan for a short trip to Maine, pulling a trailer with a motorcycle in it for Grandpa Bob's friend. Let's hope the precious cargo (the kids, not the motorcycle!) and Aaron's sanity make it there in one piece!

Climbing in the Red

Redclimbing2008_048, originally uploaded by gonewest98.

So this is my friend Anne, climbing her second route outside on real rock. I like this one because she looks like a total pro, even though she was really nervous. We went to this area of Red River Gorge called Muir Valley, and the place where this climb is is called Practice Wall. There are a bunch of climbs that are all about the beginner level and they are all really close together. Muir Valley has been putting up a lot of new routes in the past few years, which is really nice, because in the past it would have been hard to find a lot of stuff for beginners. I drove down to the Red with Anne, Erica and Amber. Anne and Erica both work at the Gazette, and Amber is a former intern who has moved on to bigger and better things at the Seattle Times, but still managed to fly all the way back so she could cram herself into a tiny Suzuki filled to the brim with stuff and ride for 7 hours to sleep in the woods!
We stayed at Miguel's Pizza, which might not sound much like a campground, but it is essential to any trip to Red River Gorge. The place is a shack owned by Miguel Ventura, where he sells the most awesome pizzas known to man (just ask my friends) and opens up his backyard to climbers, where you can camp for $2 per person per night. The place is amazing and impossible to describe. You just have to go. On any given night there will be people sitting around a campfire, playing cards, walking the slackline, playing basketball (REALLY badly, I might add) hoola hooping, or (and this is a first for me to witness) spinning flaming poi. We originally had six people going with us, but two dropped out, so we were left with 4 people in the most humongous tent I have ever seen. It was a nine person tent, complete with its own closet. At 10 feet by 18 feet, it was probably big enough to fit three queen size air mattresses inside, although we only had two. With enough room for the air matresses, cooler and all of our gear, it was quickly dubbed the Tent Majal. I was a little embarassed setting up such a huge tent, but it came in really handy that night when it started raining. We all sat inside, playing Uno and painting with light, which is really the first time I have ever just hung out in a tent. Generally they are too small to be good for anything but sleeping. After that night I got over my embarrassment and decided that anyone who wanted to say anything about the Tent Mahal was just jealous.
Saturday we went out to experience our first climbs. I was a little nervous being in charge of everyone (read: responsible for anything bad which might happen), but it turns out I was the only one to have any sort of brush with danger. I was lead climbing our second climb of the day which was about 30 feet high. I climb up to the third bolt hanger, clipped on a quickdraw, tried to clip the rope—and dropped it. By this time I was a little shaky, but I was sure I could get it. I grabbed the rope again, pulled it up and put it in my teeth (read: lots of slack in the rope—not good) so I could get a better grip, then proceeded to fall, probably about 20 feet. It happened so quickly, I didn't even have time to be scared I was falling. But Erica, my belayer, did her job and caught me about 5 feet above the ground. I think it actually scared her more than it did me. Taking lead falls is a part of climbing outside, but that was still the farthest I have fallen, and I am not even exactly sure how it happened. After being a little shaken up, but not hurt, we stopped for lunch, and then I climbed back up to finish that stupid climb. We climbed a bunch more stuff after that, but I managed not to give my belayer any more heart attacks. Once we got back to work at the paper, though, it seemed like all everybody was talking about was my "brush with death." It was a great trip, everybody got along, and nobody got hurt. Not that I was expecting anybody to, but my mommy instincts make me worry a little bit about stuff like that. And the best part is that I got to share a place that I love with friends, and I think now they love it as much as I do.

I am such a nerd

In my previous post I said I was experimenting with flickr, and putting photos directly on the blog from there. It worked great, except when I looked at the post, the photo was cropped on one side, because for some reason, flickr likes to make large blog photos 500 pixels wide, and Blogger thinks they should only be 400 pixels wide, at least in the blog template I have. Since I am a fan of large photos, the bigger the better, I tried to see if I could change the layout of my blog template. You actually can't, unless you go into the HTML code. So I went into the HTML code and CHANGED THE WIDTH OF MY TEMPLATE. Considering HTML is kind of like a foreign language to me, this was pretty impressive, at least to me! So the blog is a little bigger now, to accommodate all those fabulous photos!

Foray into flickr

Redclimbing2008_026, originally uploaded by gonewest98.

This past weekend three of my friends and I went down to Red River Gorge for a traditional rite of spring: the girls climbing trip. The makeup of the group is always different, but the goal is the same: camp, climb, and have fun in the woods. There will be more to this post, but right now I am testing out flickr. Supposedly you can blog directly from flickr to your site, which is what I am doing right now.

Race for the Cure

Today the boys and I ran in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure to honor Grandma Darrell, who is a breast cancer survivor, and raise a little money and awareness for breast cancer research. I didn't know exactly how well this was going to go, since I was planning on running with the boys in the stroller. I signed them up too, so they would get a race number (this was their first race, after all) and presumably a T-shirt, but when we got there they were all out of youth size t-shirts. That didn't really matter, because I had made them their own t-shirts. We got settled, went to the bathroom (Note: An adult and several children will fit in a handicapped Port-a-potty!) and then lined up for the race. I knew we wouldn't be setting any records, so I set us up toward the back of the line. The gun went off and we sort of shuffled towards the start, the way it is in the back of a race, where the gun goes off and there are so many people you don't hit the line for a few more minutes. The boys excitedly ran out ahead of the stroller for a while, and they were so cute, most of the people around us were middle-aged women and their families, and the boys looked so tiny! Everything was great for a while, (like a quarter mile) then Connor tripped on his "Warriors in Pink" scarf that he had been running with, and Riley got his foot run over trying to climb back in the stroller. It had all the makings of a disaster, but we calmed down and took it in stride. We walked for a while, with the boys climbing in and out of the stoller as the mood struck, and they probably ran at least a mile of the 5K (3.1 mi) Connor might have actually run a mile and a half. He would run up ahead, laughing and calling us slowpokes! I do have to admit that it was kind of eating at me not to be able to go faster. I have the running bug now, and being in the pack with all the walkers made it hard for me to jog, even when both boys were resting in the stroller. I kept running around people on the outside of the cones, and I only managed to hit one poor lady with the stoller. (Actually this was at the beginning of the race—our jogging stroller is huge and it took a little bit to get used to maneuvering in the crowd.) Eventually though, I told myself to slow down a little and enjoy doing something cool with the boys and all these other people who came out to walk for a good cause. Eventually we made it, crossing the line in 53:28, which I think is a pretty darn good time for a three-year-old doing a 5k!

From Race For the ...

I guess I didn't realize how tired the boys would be after all that running, because we soon after had a "What in the world was mommy thinking?" moment. After the last race that I ran, we went to brunch with Daddy at a restaurant called Food Dance. The boys asked if we could go again, and since it was close by, I said we could go, even though I rarely take them to restaurants by myself. We walked over there, parked the stroller, and everything was fine until the food came (Jack's Baby pancakes). First, Connor dumped almost a whole container of syrup on his pancakes in the three seconds that I was looking at Riley instead, then FREAKED OUT when he tried to pick them up with the fork and they were all soggy. And when I say FREAKED OUT, I mean FREAKED OUT. I am talking theatrical screaming and hysterical crying over the pancakes. To the point that I scooped him up and swept him off to cry it out in the bathroom, leaving Riley sitting there at the table, eating his pancakes. I got Connor calmed back down, then as we were walking out the bathroom door, I see Riley coming up to us, saying he has to poop. Argh. I get Riley set up on the potty, then take Connor back to the table, where I swap one of Riley's dry pancakes for one of Connor's soggy one. Thus appeased, Connor goes to work on his breakfast, and I return to the bathroom to assist with wiping and hand washing. We then return to the table, where our waitress was kind enough to re-heat my food for me. I had taken about three bites when Connor said he had to go potty. I am thinking, "Are you kidding me?!?!?!?" Luckily it was just a pee, and pretty soon we were all back at the table, eating our food. That had to be the closest I have ever come to just throwing some money one the table and leaving without eating. WHAT WAS I THINKING? After we were done, I left the poor waitress a 12 dollar tip on a 28 dollar bill, and wrote her a note that said, "Thanks for putting up with us!"
I was so proud of them for all the running they did in the race, but they had just reached their limit. Unfortunately for me and all the other poor customers at the Food Dance restaurant, I didn't realize this until we had already ordered our food. After we finished with that disaster, we came home and the boys (and I!) took a 3 1/2 hour nap. Considering they don't even really nap anymore, that's a long one. They must have been exhausted.
So next year we will be back at it, hopefully walking with Grandma Darrell this time, but I think we will skip the trip to the restaurant.

New Orleans pics

So before any more time passes, I am putting up our New Orleans pics in a slideshow. We had a great trip. We stayed in an apartment on the quiet end of Bourbon Street (if you can believe Bourbon HAS a quiet end!) with a balcony overlooking the street. It was a great place to sit and drink coffee in the morning or sit and drink wine at night. Having a place of our own, with a kitchen to cook breakfast and lunch in, was great. It really made it feel like we lived there. Plus we had the bonus of my good friend Jaclyn's Vespa to tool around on and her knowledge of the local scene to really make us feel like locals. Alas, though, all good things must come to an end, and we returned to Kalamazoo and our crazy-busy lives. Right now Aaron is in the midst of a two-week whirlwind tour of the country, (business, of course) and before he gets back, I am leaving for a girls climbing trip in Kentucky for Memorial Day Weekend. Things just never seem to calm down! So I am glad we at least got to spend all that time together before the craziness resumed.

The boys are GREAT with money

Riley and Connor both have a tendency to hoard shiny things, kind of like a ferret or a raccoon. If you leave change sitting around, it is bound to end up in their hands, before it then ends up on the floor, in the couch cushions, or in the washing machine. Then they get really upset when they can't find their pennies or nickels that they didn't keep track of (because three-year-olds apparently have a lot of stuff to buy). So the other day we were at Target and we walked past a display that had piggy banks, and the boys got all excited, and said, in their best whiny voices, can we pleeeeaaase have a piggy bank? Mommy, I reeeeaaaallly want a piggy bank! Mommy? Mommy! Since they say this about just about everything we pass in the store, I don't usually give in, but I thought it would be a good lesson, learning to save their money and whatnot, but they were more impressed with the idea of breaking them to get the money out than having a safe place for their pennies. So we get the piggy banks, and we get back to the car and I figure I'll start them off with a little bit of money. We put some coins in each one, then I attempted to give Connor a paper dollar. You would have thought I gave him a stinky piece of cowpie or something. "No I don't want that paper. Don't put that in my piggy bank! I'm just going to take that paper and throw it in the garbage!" No matter how I tried to explain that that paper was worth 4 quarters or 10 dimes or 100 pennies, he didn't care. All he wanted was the shiny stuff that makes lots of noise when you shake it. How sweet would it be if I could give them their allowance in pennies when they're older?

It's Hot!

"Shannon Kenney, of Ann Arbor, a performer with Arsons Blazing Carnival, spins flaming poi on Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny in New Orleans Thursday night."

Sometimes when what you do for a living is more than just a job, you find yourself working on vacation. Aaron and I were in New Orleans this past weekend for our yearly trip to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and I intentionally left my professional cameras at home because occasionally I get so wrapped up in documenting things that I forget to enjoy the moment. So armed with only a digital point-and-shoot camera, we wandered through the French Quarter and into the Faubourg Marigny nearby. As we walked down Frenchmen Street, listening to the sounds of jazz and blues spilling out into the streets filled with people, we saw a street performer spinning flaming poi. She did her routine, spinning a chain in each hand with a flaming pot on the end, then had someone blindfold her, then had someone handcuff her as well. The flames were mesmerizing, and so I decided I needed to shoot some pictures. I knew a slow shutter speed would be necessary to showcase the moving flames, but the camera had limited functions. I simply turned off the flash and tried to hold the camera as steady as possible, and this picture is the result. (Canon PowerShot SD750, Lens 6mm, ISO 800, 1/5th of a second at f2.8.)

As it turns out, I flew all the way to New Orleans and ended up shooting a picture of someone from Michigan. Shannon Kenney, the woman spinning the flaming poi, is with Arsons Blazing Carnival, a performance group out of Ann Arbor. I guess it's just a small small world.

This trip has been great. we love New Orleans. It is like our second home. And because one of my really good friends from college (Jaclyn!) lives here and owns a shop called The Voluptuous Vixen , we get a local's insight into all the happenings in town, not to mention a Vespa to tool around on in the French Quarter. I will be posting more photos later, so stay posted.