The past few days have been busy unfortunately. I have over 100 hours of work this week which isn’t all that terrible when you figure that about a third of that I will hopefully be sleeping, but because of my 2 weeks off last week after my bike crash (and subsequent injuries) I’m working 40 hours of that 100 for free. But the last 2 weeks I was paid as if I worked, but the way we traded shifts around this is how it worked out. It’s for the better because I still get to keep my 2 weeks paid time off that I can save for a “real” vacation. Work has been insanely stressful the last couple shifts for lots of reasons, but I won’t get into it all, I don’t want this to be all winey and full of self pity. I will say that I was so pissed off and worked up last night that I couldn’t go to sleep until like 3am (got up at 6) because I would sit up in bed and be like “that fucker!” Good thing we have private rooms in that station… haha.
So this whole month I’ve pretty much taken off from any kind of “training” using it as an opportunity to do a lot of the things I’ve been neglecting the last year really… Things like hiking and climbing, camping and the like. I tried my hand at mountain biking and found that I should stick to the road… I’ve never been to the ER as a patient until this year, and that total is now 2 after a couple weeks ago… oops. Turns out that’s quite an expensive habit. Percocet is the dankens though. It also turns out that I didn’t do much of what I wanted to do. There were a couple good hikes

Only 1 more week until Lindsay comes back from Boise and to say I’m psyched would be an understatement obviously. I went up to visit a couple weeks ago and had a blast even though I had limited functioning because of my messed up old man back. Can’t wait. 1 week to the day.
Turns out my life is exceedingly boring without bike racing or training going on. Nathan and I went on a hike on Longs the other day only to be snowed/iced off at tree line… We were going to try this super classic alpine route on the North face with mostly hand and foot scrambling with a couple hundred feet of easy but technical rock in the middle, until it snowed. We had summer gear with us outfitted in relatively light clothing and essentially tennis shoes which was fine until we hit tree line, about half the way up, where we were greeted by winter in the form of snow and ice. The route is completely doable and within our skill level, but we lacked the equipment we needed that day (winter boots, crampons and ice tools) to make it a doable/safe feat. We knew this would be the case once we saw a conditions report at the trailhead but we were there, it was 3am, and not wanting to waste the day and whatever mental prep we had done, we continued up into Chasm View, which is perhaps the most scenic mountain environments in the state. We waited there for a couple hours huddled around the warm but small glow of Nathan’s stove for the sun to come up and treat us to a breath taking view.

Although we didn't make it close to what we had set out for that day, all was not lost... At all.
