Gunks, days, and weeks
Another day, another trip rock climbing.
A view of the ridge. I think this is the one we climb on. There are routes that have been climbed, named, rated, and evaluated approximately every 5 feet down the whole thing, and plenty of boulders for people who are into that. There are more ridges, too.
This time we top-roped the first pitches of some climbs. I did my first 5.7+ outside with, er, one major fall, some major freaking out and being lugged up on the rope, and quite a lot of general awkwardness. For comparison, US ratings start at 5.0 (the easiest climbs in a gym are rated about a 5.5, but outdoors things rated 5.3 or 5.4 are plenty challenging) and the current limit of human ability is about a 5.15.
The views out, to the side, and down, from "Bunny", 5.4. No, those aren't my legs.
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I'm moving again, out of these antiseptic dorms into a quirky rooming house in Chatham, middle-of-nowhere northern New Jersey, but only a few miles from the labs. In addition to my suitcase-and-a-half from Budapest, I somehow managed to accumulate four bags of kitchen stuff. After books, which I can never bear to part with, collecting a full kitchen of staples to give away at the end of the 3 or 6 months seems to be my next biggest moving vice.
This morning I wandered over to my mentor's house to drop off a few last-minute things, and within minutes he and his wife were plying me with cold melon, cereal, caustic black tea, and guava juice, and I found myself sitting at the table, split between the New Yorker, which contained a long meditation about bird watching and love and environmentalism, and a short piece about violence towards Martians by Jack Handey, and a paper by J.P. Serre involving modular forms, arithmetic functions, and Galois extensions. In French.
It's just like having fairy math-parents.
I need to sit down with the collection of serious books and serious papers that have been accumulating about me, and work seriously. Komolyan, serieusement. I can't learn any other way. I've been failing to do this all summer, for much of last semester, outside of a few C&P-inspired fits and starts, and indeed for the semester before that as well.
And with that, it's off to the airport for me.