XS

Good news -- on Sunday, Nick and I were in the Peak District with great weather, for once. Not too hot, but for the most part not too cold, either. We went to Burbages South and North, which weren't too overrun with people. And the highlight was that I led my first English E-grade -- Long Tall Sally. I probably should have done this a while ago, but neither Nick nor I are big headpointers (Adair by the Sea and The Spring (at the Gunks) notwithstanding). So it was a good flash and went reasonably well -- no major drama. It was actually a lot easier than a lot of the HVS fist-width (and wider) cracks that Nick has been dragging me up lately.

Sage in England

So, since finishing exams (grades come out tomorrow or Friday -- there will be tears), things have actually gotten a lot busier. Sage was here visiting for four days last week, so we had some good adventures. The first two nights we stayed in Orpington because it was, theoretically, easier to access both Oxford and London from Orpington. But only theoretically, because there was a tube strike going on. That made things more interesting, because it cut down how much time we had in Oxford and meant that when we were in London we had to walk everywhere (I counted it up on Google Maps afterwards and we walked at least ten miles in total on the London day). But I still dragged her around very quickly to all the main sites. She also had a day and a half in Cambridge, which was more relaxed.

Between the two of us we have more than a thousand photos of the week, but I assume that she'll eventually put some of the highlights up on FB. In the meantime, my favorite thing was the installation exhibit at the Tate Modern that was new since the last time I was there in February. Called Bodyspacemotionthings, it was a re-creation of a 1971 exhibit that was shut down after four days because of lawsuit potential. The new version is less fun, because a few parts of it you can't play on in the same way, and because there are guards who make sure that you don't do anything too dangerous, but it still had some fun stuff to play on, including a low tight-rope, a balance beam, and wooden slabs. So Sage and I spent some time there.

























Unfortunately, the exhibit seems to have ended on Sunday (which is when I believe it was scheduled to end), so I guess no one else will see it -- but it was good.

Done. D.U.N. Done.

I had my last exam, Civil Liberties, this morning. Now I'm done, woo-hoo! Except all the other stuff I need to do. It's hard to get a sense of how the exams went, but rumor is that we get grades (or a single aggregate grade, I guess -- we don't get the breakdown until later) on June 18. Publicly displayed. I predict tears. Especially from me.

Last night I was talking to one of the other girls in my house and she said something about "I'm just worried that the exam won't reflect the amount of work I've put in!" I answered something along the lines of, "Yes, I too am concerned about the extent to which the exams will reflect the amount of work we did."

Weekend Wrap-Up

I had a good and interesting weekend. After lighting the grill tray on fire on Friday night, I had a relatively calm Saturday while Nick went mountain biking with Adrian in the morning. I did my weekend studying then, and then, when they got back around 3 in the afternoon, we all went on a punting adventure. Adrian went to Cambridge for two years back when he was an undergrad, but apparently never punted. So we let him do it for a bit after we navigated through some of the crowds (lots of people were cranky about the river being so crowded). He did fine, happily zig-zagging back and forth.









At one point I told Nick to take a photo of me and his response was "I can't from here, you wouldn't fit. I'd need to switch to a wide-angle lens to fit you in." Ouch.



We had dinner at the Thai food restaurant across the street from my house, and went to bed early because we had to get up early to go to the Peak District the next day.

When we woke up, my bathroom door said this:



I opened the door trepidatiously.



Luckily, whatever infestation there had been the night before (I had heard some squawking from the hallway outside the bathroom the night before) seemed to have died out. There were a bunch of carcasses on the windowsill and the sink, and in the shower, but there didn't seem to be anything alive. Phew.

So we got ready to go up to the Peak District, and met up with the three other CUMCers who were going to ride in our car with us. The ride up was uneventful (all four of us besides Nick slept the whole way), and then we did some good climbing when we got up there.

Nick did some good leading, and I followed more-or-less competently (although at one point I had to hang to attack a nut). I also led a VS and an HS without too much drama -- and then failed to lead an HS. Barely got off the ground on that one -- true jamming required.

Fiona-from-OUMC showed up to climb with us in the afternoon, since she lives near the Peak District now, and I put her on photo duty. I also made a panorama and took pictures of the many sheep and lambs around.











We had dinner at a nearby pub, and drove back late to Cambridge. The backs of my legs were wicked sunburned (they still hurt) -- but don't tell Krissy.

Oh, and speaking of burned, it turns out the grass we used as a fire extinguisher on Friday night didn't survive quite as well as we initially thought. The shape of the grill tray seems to be traced into our lawn, now.



Next exam: International Intellectual Property, tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned!

Burning Down the House

So Nick and I had a little mishap cooking dinner tonight. The first thing to know in the description of our incident is what our kitchen setup is like. A common stove set-up in England consists of a small oven below a small "grill" -- which seems to be a little chamber with heat coils across the top of it. This is what we've got in our kitchen. Now, our stove is a bit quirky, because the oven takes a hugely long time to pre-heat. It takes it about 30-45 minutes to get up to about 250F, and never really gets any hotter than that. The grill seems to get up to normal temperature, though.



Prior to this term, the way we cooked things in the grill (which is how we had to cook things if we didn't want them to take at least an hour, since we also don't have a microwave) involved a baking tray. Now, the grill has two little ridges on each side that could theoretically hold a baking tray up close to the heating coils at the top so that you could cook them. But we didn't have an appropriately sized baking tray. Our tray was too wide to fit if you held it one way, and too narrow to sit on the ridges if you held it the other. So you had to slide it in kitty-corner with two opposite corners supporting all the weight. Occasionally it would come crashing down. I can draw diagrams if necessary for this point.

But over the Easter vacation, we got a real grill tray. The features of the grill tray are as follows. There's a physical tray, similar to the baking tray but maybe slightly deeper. Then there is a wire frill frame that sits on top of it that you actually put food on. There is a handle attached to the tray (although the handle gets hot when you're actually using it and you still need potholders). There is a layer of tinfoil between the tray and the wire platform that sits on top of it that people typically keep reusing until it gets really gross (your food touches the wire platform, not the tinfoil). And best of all, the physical tray is the right size, so you can just plop it down on the ridges inside the grill rather than fight to balance it.

So, tonight, Nick and I made fajitas for dinner, and needed to heat up the tortilla wraps. Because the food was almost ready and the oven was off, we decided to put them in the bottom of the grill (not on the tray, just on a plate sitting on the bottom of the grill) to warm them up. We plunk them in and wait. A few minutes later, Nick checks on them. The top ones are warm; the bottom ones are cold. (I think this is a function of having the heating coils at the top of the grill.) So Nick takes the stack, flips it over, sticks it back in the bottom of the grill, waits a few more minutes, and opens it back up.

And the grill is full of fire! The grill tray is in the grill -- and it's clearly on fire. (I don't exactly have any photos of this.) The kitchen has a door to the outside, so Nick put on a potholder, grabbed the grill tray by the handle, yanked it out of the grill, went out the door and down the half-flight of steps to the yard, and flipped it over on the grass to smother the flames. It worked! Apparently we didn't even kill the grass (although by the time Nick went back outside to retrieve the tray it was dark, so I'm not convinced he could really see how lively the grass was).

It seems that what had happened was Nick hadn't realized the grill tray was sitting on the ridges in the grill when he warmed up the fajitas (I didn't realize it mattered). Now, there are two ridges on the side, both of which are up pretty close to the heating coils, and when we cook things on the grill, we all slot the tray between the two ridges (so that it's sitting on the bottom one). If you put the tray on top of the top ridge to cook, I think your food would probably be actually touching the coils unless it was really flat. But if you're just sticking the tray back in the oven after cooking on it, you probably just plop it in any old way. And we typically leave the grill tray in the grill even when we're not using it because there's no place else in the kitchen for it -- and plus, normally you use it when you use the grill.

So it appears that some fat or something from somebody's meal had dripped down onto the tinfoil, which was an inch closer to the electric coils than normal -- which made it catch fire. Exciting!

After dinner, Nick and I took the tray back in and replaced the tinfoil. Good as new! The fajitas were good, and the wraps ended up being warmed just right.

Siuirana Climbing

At the moment I'm cranky because no one is driving to Mile End tomorrow, so I probably won't be able to go, but this post is about...

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Today when we got up it was finally clear, and the rain had stopped, although there were intermittent clouds. Nick and I ate breakfast relatively quickly and headed back to Grau dels Masets. We were disappointed to see that a climb we had identified two days ago as looking good, but hadn't yet done, was absolutely dripping. It was a 6b that shared anchors with a 7 (easy 5.12 range) that we wanted to toprope -- but both were sopping, so that was a no go.

We warmed up on some other stuff at the eastern part of Grau dels Masets, and did a pretty tricky 6b (one of the ones that Nick didn't quite onsight despite being pretty close, and then I flashed by using his beta and prehung draws -- strop strop). Then we heaed over to the western part of the crag to do some of the longer, more exposed stuff. The hand-drawn topo in the guidebook was confusing at first when we thought we found the world's softest 6b (turned out to be 5+), but then we figured it out and did a whole bunch of 6s there, almost all lead, pretty much all in the 5.10 range.

We ate lunch at one point while we waited for a route to free up. Both us and another party wanted to both do two routes that shared the same set of anchors. We wanted to lead one and TR the other; the other party wanted to lead both. So we were stepping on each other's heads and crossing ropes and all that stuff. So at one point they were doing something while we ate lunch and watched it get progressively cloudier.

However, it hadn't totally started raining or anything, so once we got the chance we attempted to TR the 6c+ that came down from the anchors we had already clipped. We knew that the start was going to be hard based on the other party, but Nick and I simply never figured it out, and the other party was gone by this point. Eventually we both pulled past it and both cleanly TRd the rest of the climb, which was in the 6c/6c+ range. The bouldery start to me felt way harder, since neither Nick nor I could find any way of doing it that was even close. I would have lead the rest if I had figured out a way to do the start, since the rest was totally my style. I kind of suspected that something had broken at the start at some point, though.

There were a few drops of rain after that, but it eventually passed and became sunny again, and Nick and I did a few more easy 6s before heading back to the campground. That night, we ate dinner at the campsite restaurant again (we were pretty much out of food, and there were also a few more sporadic rain showers at this point) and headed to bed early again. This was our most productive sport climbing day of the trip, and was generally really pretty good -- it was too bad we didn't have more days like this! We didn't take any pictures this day, though.

2 Down, 2 to Go

I finished my second exam this afternoon. Yesterday I had Family Law, which went okay, although I don't think it was particularly a strong suit for me. Today I had Intellectual Property, which I thought I did well on -- but everyone thinks they did well on that. And although they claim not to grade on a curve, that's silly -- just because there's not an entirely strict, inflexible curve doesn't mean that there isn't a curve; there's no other way to grade a qualitative subject. So we'll just have to see.

Next week I have International Intellectual Property on Tuesday and Civil Liberties on Friday. Stay tuned...