Climbing injury

I guess eventually no matter how hard I try to stay healthy, I ended up with an injured finger. Apparently the X-ray showed a broken chunk detached from my middle finger knuckle. The doctor kept asking if I recently injured myself from banging it or anything of that sort. I told him nothing, one day it just hurt whie I was climbing. Also he told me my ring finger also has signs of wear and tear @_@. So I am now wearing a splint on my middle finger of my right hand (yes, I am right-handed). And of course, doctor’s order – NO CLIMBING!!!

I am a little depressed with this news but life got to go on. I am now trying new activities to stay in shape; venturing into P90x and crossfit. Hopefully at the end of 6 weeks, my bone will heal and I can start PT to get my finger back in shape again. Although I may shy away from working on really hard problems. Maybe human body is just not meant to climb hard stuff like that? I was on-sighting hard 11s and working on 12s when this injury happened. What I explained to my friends is that I think I got too strong, so strong that my bone cannot handle it and just crushed!!! Wahhh!!! Maybe I just have weak bone? Eitherway it will be a long recovery process and I may never want to climb that hard again. It’s much better to climb something even though it’s easy than to never can climb again.

 

 

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Changes…

We find ourselves in a constantly changing environment. I don’t know why that is the case but both Matt and I are looking forward to settling down and no more life changing event for a little while.
We just recently bought another apartment in the city after weighing the pros and cons of renting. In the end it makes sense to us to own the apt rather than renting due to the high rent cost in Boston. We are all moved in by now with the few exceptions of more improvement needed to create storage for all our ‘stuff.
Another big change coming up next year is that I am quiting my job in my current company Mimio and starting another new job next Jan. It was a decision made because I think it will align better with my career goal. I am finally where I think I should be in my career and I am very excited about it. I am sure going to miss all the people I worked with in Mimio but my new place is only a few blocks away so I can still go out for lunch with them easily.
Another big change next year is that we decided that we will sell our home in Oregon. Owning 2 homes is too much financial pressure and we decided that it does not make sense to keep a home that is across the other end of the country. So I think we will be stressed again next year with the home selling process but I am hoping that after that things will finally settle down. I am crossing my fingers for now ….

Hello Boston

It’s been so long since we made any post here. So much has changed since then. I’m going to attempt to summarize eveything in one post here.
Matt finally got a new job; one that he actually went to school for. The catch is it is in Boston. Being a supportive wife like I am :), I told him to take it. Who knows when the next opportunity is going to come?
Everything went really fast the moment he accepted the job. He moved to Boston on his own in October; meanwhile I stayed behind to take care of the logistic of moving to Boston. We rented the house out to our friends and entrust them to take care of it for us. Sold and donated a whole bunch of stuff since we can’t possibly move everything to Boston. Oh did I mention our new place here in Boston is a 300 sqft 1 bedroom apartment? It’s not easy downsizing from 2000sqft home to 300 sqft but we managed to do so.
I found a new job in Cambridge and finally quitted and moved there myself in January 2011 bringing Yogi with me on the plane. I was a little worried at first since it’s Yogi’s first time on the plane and he is too big to ride in the front so ended up in the cargo instead but the little guy is tough and made it there safely.
So now here we are in Boston. The winter was pretty interesting consider we got the record high in snow level this year. Yogi of course loves the snow and I love my new sub zero down jacket.
Climbing season has finally started and we have checked out a few of the new crags here and getting used to the style. Can’t wait to start putting more new pictures soon.
Stay tuned!!

New home sweet home

We are now finally moved in and settling down again. My commute is 15mins and I love it. I love waking up at 7am and still get to work by 8am. And I love not having to deal with the highway rush hour traffic. Live if good. We’ll try to post pics of our new home soon but things are still a little messy here.

Nothing much new…

As you might have guessed by the huge gap in posts, nothing new is going on here in Oregon. Yogi’s hair has grown out a little bit so that he no longer looks as…odd…

The weather has continued to be a bit strange this year – colder than usual with very little rain. It’s nice to have a winter without the constant rain we usually get but it would also be nice to have a little more snow up in the mountains! Meanwhile, we’re starting to get excited about Spring – looking forward to the longer days and more reasonable climbing conditions! Here’s a couple (two) pictures from the last month(!).

I think gingerbread houses are more of a Christmas thing but we made ours at the end of January!

This might be proof that we are going crazy inside the house. Joanne took the time to transform one of our old climbing ropes into this welcome mat. She got the idea off of the internet – I thought it looks pretty neat and it’s turned an old rope into a work of art!

D’oh!

So when we went to Malaysia in September, we left a bunch of our climbing gear in Michigan. Somehow, though, this gear never made it back to Oregon and my Mom can’t find it in Michigan. What’s missing in action? 14 cams (including the BIG ones *sob sob*), 30-40 carabiners, 1 pair of down booties, 1 sleeping bag, 1 down jacket. The cams alone would cost $600-700 to replace. It would be nice to have some idea what happened to all this stuff but it would appear some kind of evil gnomes may have made off with it.

Homemaker

Alright, it looks like my official job title is now “House Hubby”. Joanne’s bringing in the money and I hang out at home all day. It sounds easy but I’m discovering that a stay-at-home spouse has their work cut out for them. Besides doing the cooking, cleaning, laundry, job hunting, and dog-walking I don’t have a car so I ride my bike to buy groceries. It’s not particularly hard work for me but everything takes up time: from the time Joanne leaves in the morning till she comes home I seem to have my hands full. Who knew? So give your stay-at-home spouse some extra love tonight!

Good news….or bad news??

Well, today is my first day at work. It’s good to finally make some money but I still have mix feeling about this job. The drive is just too far (I have to commute 45mins one way) and I’m so worried driving. Today on the way home, the car right in front of me hit the car in front of it. What a close call but the junction between I-5 and 217 is just too scary. Matt told me that there soon will be a train that goes right into Tualatin so I might be able to take the train instead of driving. I’m looking forward for it.

Packing for Malaysia

Tomorrow morning we leave Detroit for a two month stay in Malaysia! We’re both pretty excited and are going over all the last minute packing and adjustments. We weighed our bags on a scale here: we have somewhere around 150 pounds of luggage! So we’ve spent a lot of time repacking to beat the weight limits on check-in luggage. Most of the tricks we use involve bringing as much as a carry-on as possible. Some of the things we’ve thought about:

1) Wear your heaviest clothes and boots on your person. Don’t forget to bring your jacket on the plane.
2) Heavy stuff goes in your carry-on: for us, this means our carry-on is loaded with rock climbing gear which, surprisingly, usually gets little more than a glance from the security folks. The only time we’ve had trouble was trying to take a rope on the plane. They let us bring 20 pounds of aluminum but somehow rope is a security hazard?

Anyway, our first stop in Malaysia will be Borneo and Mount Kinabalu, the high point in the country. We’re planning on staying there for 3 weeks or so before heading over to Peninsular Malaysia to visit with Joanne’s family for a month. It’s likely that our access to the Internet and the rest of the world will be non-existent during our stay at Mount Kinabalu and with no laptop we probably won’t be updating this page until November(!!!). Send us an e-mail, though, we’ll probably get an opportunity to check that!

Back in Michigan

We are now back in Michigan; arrived today at 9pm, 2 weeks earlier than we originally planned. We changed a few of our plan due to recent events. Let see, I think we came home early mostly because of me. I have a lot going on in my head recently, antsy to see my dog, a little stressed and needed a long break from climbing.

Recent fellow climber death has reminded me of how fragile our lives are and that we are not invincible. We have been doing a lot of real crazy, adventurous climb in the Rockies and Teton and got out in one piece with no major epics. I’m very thankful that we got so lucky and I don’t think I need to push our luck too much. We were going to try the Grand Traverse and got stalked by cougar (detailed story TBD). I took it as an omen and decided to bail the attempt. Maybe someday long in the future we can try again.

It’s really nice to be back, take a break, sleep in soft bed and hot shower every day for a while until we leave again for our 2 months trip to Malaysia. Stay tuned for more stories from Teton.