A solid afternoon climb

A good solid climbing session, with a couple of new successes. I repeated & R flashed a 6a slab, although she cried off a horrible 6b — all balance work and nasty holds — after the first move. We then both flashed a 6b dihedral route with lots of smearing & hand-foot matches, with honesty requiring the admission that her knee-drop heavy footwork was a good deal less scrabbly than my own.

I made another attempt at one of my 6b project only to screw it up what should have been a nice clean send with a piece of stupidly clumsy footwork, but at least I'm now confident that I've got all the moves sequenced and that I can probably complete it next time. I also talked R into working on some things outside her normal comfort zone — something with a lot of side-pulls and a route full of fiddly balance work & tiny crimps — both of which she gamely tackled, even if she did complain afterwards that I was responsible for ruining her fingers...

An unexpectedly awesome birthday

An exception to my general rule of allowing birthdays — my own, at least! — to pass quietly unobserved thanks to some cunning planning on part of someone who shall remain nameless but awesome. Thus I got a tasteful t-shirt complete with a hand-sitched personalised and deeply appropriate slogan — in case you can't read it, it says "bitch" — an MP3 of Lionel Richie serenading me with Happy Birthday, and a bunch of backing dancers boogieing along to it! All of which was a genuinely delightful surprise, although with hindsight I probably should have realised that something was up!

As if all that wasn't enough I came back from my run this morning to discover an unexpected copy of The Goldfinch had come from my parents, an email from my father in Hong Kong, and something from my uncle. Even my grandmother remembered to phone although she wasn't entirely certain how old I was supposed to be...