Mountain Conquering On A Lazy Sunday Afternoon.

Tali and Ella and myself climbed to the top of this (note, entire photo appears in google reader. Website displays partial image.) today. Ok, we went around the back up the gully, but it was pretty cool. We saw a rotted wallaby carcass and some wicked looking gold and red spiders. Tali really liked climbing up and Tali-sized boulders he found, and both he and Ella could be heard to shout "On to the next challenge!!" as they clambered upwards through the boulder-strewn and overgrown bush.



We checked out this 22m grade 13 (it is visible as the left leading crack on the towards the right on the top image) and it looks really quite doable. Apparently there are rappel chains at the top which is good because I had a go at clambering up what I thought might have been the descent from these climbs but ended up being a scarily suddenly exposed handholdless ledge out in the middle of nowhere and I was staring down at my kids thinking "Uh oh, I'd really better not die out here because they'd never make it back and no-one knows we're up here time to go down now."

I think this may be top-ropable, or at least, we could climb this to start with then set up some top ropes then rap off att he end of the day.





Climbing anyone?

more iceland

Luce finally got his manager's manager's manager to okay his spending the rest of the year in Iceland, so that's a huge relief. Apparently his manager had to go and argue his case for him a bit - yay for managers who are on the side of good!!

And, while neither of our embryos took, and we've got the whole process to look forward to when we get back next year, on the bright side we don't need to worry about obstetrics and the like in Icleand, or whether I can fly while preggers. Aaaand we don't need to worry about whether being pregnant will affect my snowboarding in January on the way home... So, more living life now, which I am very focussed on enjoying.

Oh, and I learnt heaps in the 6 day stats course I just did, where the learning was finding out the maths and reasoning behind the stats tests I already know how to do, which means I feel very confident now in my statistical analyses, and am unlikely to forget it very soon. Yay again!