Busy Busy Busy

Kinda fallen behind on my DW/LJ updatedness of late. There are reasons for this, firstly there's a bit of unpleasantness going on in our lives which I can't really go into details of, but it's involved lawyers and has been rather stressful.

Things are also getting hectic in the run-up to our Utah trips. Lots of last minute logistics to sort out, and we still don't have extreme sports insurance. Have also been spending much of what spare time we have going for long hikes, or spending time at the climbing gym, getting fitter and making sure we have the endurance needed to cope with a week of fairly arduous desert hikes.

At the same time, I find myself wanting to back away from some of the trans activism stuff, at least for a while, because for the first time I'm feeling the warning signs of burnout. This coincides with a difficult time in one of the LJ communities for which I'm part of the moderator team, and it's making me think that perhaps I should back away from that too, although this may just be because issues arising from that particular community have been rather loudly jostling for time that I just don't have of late. While I want to do the right thing, if I've learned anything over the last four years it's that it's important to put my own emotional health and needs first.

The holiday logistics stuff is almost fun, because I know I'm going to really enjoy myself out there. Some of the other stuff will continue to make demands on my time before we go though, and I'm going to have to prioritise. There's some stuff I have to do, and if that means other things have to fall by the wayside, then that's how it'll have to be. I suspect this will disappoint some people, but I'm not going to feel guilty over that.

Anyway, onto happier things, today saw myself, zoeimogen and the_local_echo at the climbing gym, this time with Zoe's children and mother along for the trip. The children were initially nervous about falling, but by the end they were having a great time climbing up a couple of feet and throwing themselves off, accompanied by shouts of "cliff bunny!" while their belayers (i.e. us) slowly lowered them to the ground. I'm not entirely sure that's the purpose of the exercise, but they seemed to be having a lot of fun and it was getting them used to trusting the ropes and harnesses, which I think is a good thing.

We got a few climbs in ourselves as well. I got to the top of the big wall on a grade 5 climb for the first time and when I was about 10 metres up it I did find myself wrestling with my acrophobia. I pressed on, although visions of the ground rushing to meet me, broken rope trailing behind, were an unhelpful distraction. We took my new iPhone along with us (got it on Friday - I spent two hours in a queue outside the Apple Store. I guess that's my Apple fangirl baptism there), and made a few video recordings with it. Here's me demonstrating the start of the grade 5 route I climbed for zoeimogen (no rope because I was only going up a couple of metres, which you're allowed to do without a rope):

And here's zoeimogen facing her current nemesis - a class 4 route with a couple of tricky bits:

I'm quite pleased with the video quality - it's much better than I'm used to from a phone.