ScottP

The answer to this question should be in the FAQ. Not true. I've donated dollars and have been posting for 6 years and I'm still labeled wiggly diggly or some such nonsense. I really don't give a rat's ass though 'cause this site's primary mentality is just that.

The crux on the second pitch of Dirt Circus has some added spice due to the rusty 1/4" spinner protecting it. If the timing works out right, I'll help you with the rebolting. I agree with you on the Broad Daylight pitch. That hole you reach right for is a unique feature for Darrington. Do you know of any other pockets like that? Re: Visionquest...I only want the first pitch. I promise.

Warmed up (literally, it was cold) on Under the Boardwalk. Magic Bus, Dirt Circus (that top anchor is pretty creepy)and the first pitch of 'Til Broad Daylight. Didn't have a camera with me, but I wish I had brought one. The lack of leaves made for more open views. That Visionquest has "classic" written all over it. Is it near Leavenworth?

South Butt, 3 O'Clock Rock.

Woohoo! Darrington on Sunday. Low 50's, hazy sunshine.

This is mine (the dihedral, not the thin cracks)... Paid $32.00 for a day of instruction. Eddie Joe was the instructor. He called me "Spider Man" because of my tendency to downclimb stuff facing out. Kernville Slabs, Southern Sierra, 1978

The Ski Hill in Leavenworth is rope tow serviced. My kids have been learning there the last few years. In the beginning, they rode up between my legs, at least until my right forearm was so pumped I couldn't get a grip (wish I'd had those grippers then). Now they're independant skiers and run mad amounts of laps.

Middle school science teacher.

:anger: Try veggie pasta, buddy. Much healthier. No silly, I don't sautee and dice the chicken. That's what I do to the mushrooms. For the chicken I slice it into about half inch strips, grill it on high heat, for about 6 minutes, and then shred the strips by pulling them apart with two forks. That way it absorbs the pesto better.

Fresh linguine with homemade pesto, grilled chicken that's been pulled apart with forks, lightly sauteed, then diced, oyster mushrooms and thinly diced green onion. Toss and serve with red wine.

From the Brooks and Whitelaw "Washington Rock" guide (1982)" "East of Leavenworth 2.2 miles on US Highway 2 is Sandy Slab, a piece of rock immediately adjacent to the road. On the left side, 50 feet above the road and next to a group of pines, is Get Your Wings, a 5.8 route. The pitch is fixed, as area all the routes on this slab, and ends at a small pine. It is possible to traverse off left or rappel with two ropes. Never On A Sunday, 5.7, starts just right of Wings in a flaky depression and ends at the same tree." The description goes on about routes called A-1, I Shot My Baby, Fascist Rule, and Suncups. (I believe I did the A-1 route back in the late 80's. Pretty unforgettable climbing as I remember.) The guide also mentions something called "S. Slab" near Peshastin that has a fence at its base. There are iron rods that are tied off for belays at the top of routes called Lilies of the Field and Catching the Sun.

Nope. It's Lon Chaney. Nice try though...

Speaking of creepy clowns, anybody know the name of the guy who played this creepy clown? Hint:

Speaking of creepy clowns, anybody know the name of the guy who played this creepy clown? (What the hell? It showed up in the Preview.)

Most of my memories stem from difficult, stressful or amazing (to me) experiences. My first memory (as a short video clip in my head) is of being amazed by heavy rain clouds moving rapidly across the sky as I lay on the front seat of my parents station wagon after waking up during a camping trip. I watched the clouds as my mom put on my shoes and socks. I related this memory to her some years back. She told me I was almost two at the time. Below is a story I wrote from memory, based on my expriences as a child. Much of what I wrote I can still see clearly in my mind as pictures or 'video clips'. Each of the events is something that has stuck in my mind, I believe, due to the intense nature of the experience. Read it or don't. The memories I recount are epic, or harrowing aspects of my life... Even as a small child I remember bumping my head a lot. My earliest remembrance of this collection of cranial mishaps comes even before kindergarten. I had borrowed all of the elastic headband things that my sister's used to hold their hair back. Pretending to be an Indian, with all of these headband things strapped to my forehead, I ran whooping throughout the house, just like the Indians on TV would do. Since there were so many of these headband things on my forehead, some of them slipped down over my eyes. Running hither and yon, I tripped on some unseen object (probably my feet), and crashed into the edge of the coffee table. The resulting, copious head-wound-type bleeding ruined every one of those headband things, much to my sister's chagrin. There is in my memory a brief hiatus in the string of injuries I had started with the infamous Head Band Incident (This is not to say they didn't occur so much as I just can't remember them.). This lull ended quite abruptly one fine June day in 1964 when I suffered a karmic fall from a sycamore tree while trying to steal baby sparrows from the nest. The ensuing broken left femur and lacerated chin provided me with the experience of six weeks on my back in traction (with weights attached to pull the upper and lower halves of my femur back into something resembling normal postiton), and another four weeks in a cast that extended from my armpits down the length of my left leg to just short of my toes. Not letting a little thing like this keep me down (literally), I was eventually up and lumbering around in this plaster leisure suit. In retrospect, I imagine I looked something like a cross between the Mummy and Frankenstein. The resulting pressure on my abdomen from standing in the cast was diagnosed as the cause of a mysterious bout of vomiting, so I was required to stay off my feet. This two and a half months of forced immobility resulted in a pair of severely atrophied lower limbs. After removing the cast, the doctor thought it would be a good idea for me to start riding a bike in order that I might avoid wearing braces on my incredibly skimpy legs. So I did, and quickly collided with the back of my Aunt Betty’s maroon, '64 Dodge Dart that was parked in front of our house. The patching I got from my friend, Doctor "Damned Two-Wheel Vehicles!" Johnson, came complete with a nifty pressure bandage wound turban-like around my head. (It was said that all I needed was an American flag, a fife, and a drum to complete the ensemble.) I started first grade walking on crutches with this serious looking pressure bandage wrapped around my head. It made for a lot of 'fun' kickball games and childish ridicule. I began riding the bike I had borrowed from Lonny Bitzer. It was too small for me, but it had two 'damned' wheels, so I eventually got pretty cocky on the thing. Too cocky, in fact: Taft, CA. is pretty well known for very few reasons. One of them is the size of the tumbleweeds that occasionally roll through town. One of the larger of the species found its way onto our street one fall day. It looked pretty spindly, so I decided that I would ride my borrowed bike Evel Kneivel-style right through it and send it shattering into a million pieces. Tumbleweeds are pretty resilient. This one launched me like a rocket straight up into the air. I remember being pretty high up, the street seeming to get narrower below me. Surprisingly, I recovered from the ensuing landing fairly quickly and got back on my bike, muttering six-year-old oaths at the demon weed as I wobbled away. I have, after much contemplation, come to the conclusion that the reason I was able to shake off this pair of post-femur-break launch and splash down episodes was due to the high pain threshold I had gained from The Nurse at The Hospital. She spent much time, and seemed to gain fiendish delight in torturing me in the name of medicine while I lay helpless with a fractured femur and festering chin stitches. She was a wicked, rough old bitch who had me do pull-ups on a bar suspended over my bed while she changed the sheets underneath me. She wouldn't answer my buzzer at night, causing me to pee on myself. Upon discovering this aberrant behavior, she would sternly reprimand me for being so "messy". I’ve heard children wondering where the legs go when Dorothy and Toto land Auntie Em's house on the Wicked Witch of the East. Glenda and those munchkins have us believing that she’s dead. Well, she isn't. She’s very much alive and still working at Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California because witches are immortal, you know. As a child I was always experimenting with cause and effect relationships; like what happens when you put a board on a fulcrum with a rock on one end and then you jump on the other end. "It hits you in the head." was the observation I made during this experiment. Several stitches over my right eye was the resulting prognosis made by my friend, Doctor Johnson. Many years later, while studying physics, I happened upon a description of Newton's Third Law of Motion: "Whenever one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body exerts a force on the first body; these forces are equal in magnitude and oppositely directed." I pondered this concept only briefly before coming to conclusion that if Newton had been beaned by a six pound chunk of quartz instead of just an apple, he might have deleted the "...these forces are equal in magnitude..." part. I was never really big on playing team sports, but that never stopped me from being enthused about the game of hitting rocks with a pick axe handle to see how far they would go. Neighborhood friends also found great satisfaction in this seemingly harmless pastime. Stevie Kranyak was particularly adept at batting rocks, and was in fact, the first switch hitter I ever met. I found out about switch-hitting by standing on the wrong side of him as he pasted a line drive into the fields across the street. His follow through pasted me to the ground, adding to the bump that my Aunt Betty's '65 Dodge Dart had permanently affixed to my forehead and drawing yet another draft of blood. My father, apparently afraid of the pointed questions now coming from the staff of my friend, Doctor Johnson, figured that this latest opening in my flesh could be mended with a butterfly bandage. He was right and the resulting scar caused by Stevie's scathing swing and my inattention to his left- handedness is probably less obvious for this first aid than the stitches my friend, Doctor Johnson, would have cussingly installed. As time went by, the usual cuts, abrasions, and contusions a healthy boy will incur during normal play were interspersed with the unusual events that only someone cursed with a bump-prone head can appreciate. I faintly remember walking to school one day, totally engrossed in a book, when a telephone pole stepped in my way and cold cocked me in the forehead. My cousin Liane found this to be particularly amusing. She was walking right next to me and could have warned me, if her pentient for witnessing such amusing sights hadn’t interfered with her family-held duty of warning me of such imminent danger. The next catastrophe that befell the region above my torso was after we had moved to the other side of town (which really wasn't much of a move given the diminutive size of Taft). I had acquired my own Stingray bike and was steadily increasing proficiency in its operation. I’d learned how to ride long wheelies, and it was this very activity that was the reason for my next demise. That, and the fact that I failed to put lock washers on the nuts of the front wheel axle. Dropping off the curb in a full wheelie right in front of my house, the front tire popped off and rolled across the street. The now-bare forks bit into the pavement, and milliseconds later so did my chin. It was, in fact, the first part of me to touch down. I remember hearing my friend Glenn, who was riding next to me, say, "Ooooo!", as though he knew the excruciating pain I had just experienced. I got up off the ground in a bell-rung stupor, blood dripping onto my shirt, and headed for my house. Seeing my sister's boyfriend coming out of the front door, I managed a feeble, "Help?", before pitching face first into the lawn, out like a light. When I awoke, I was on my bed. My sister's boyfriend was holding a towel to my chin. My sisters were running around frantically giving my mom reports on my condition while she calmly put on her make-up in another part of the house. I suppose that for her these events had become pretty mundane. I heard my friend, Doctor Johnson, even before he entered the emergency room. He came in cussing, cussed while he stitched me up, and I could still hear him cussing long after he had left. That night, with a jaw that would only open a matter of millimeters, I sat down to a steak dinner prepared by my mom. Fortunately, the baked potatoes mashed up pretty well and I was able to take some sustenance that evening. "Why steak?", I still ask myself. Even as an adult I'm not immune to connecting my head to immoveable objects with a certain degree of force: I have never been very good at finding things in big stores. One day I was walking through a big hardware store diligently trying to find some object by looking down each aisle as I walked by. I never did find what I was looking for, but I did find one of the concrete-filled metal support poles that holds up the roof. It nailed me right on the Dodge-Dart-chunk-of-granite-pick-axe-handle bump, completely blinding me and sending me to the floor. All I remember as I went down was some unseen guy saying ,"Ooooo!", as though he knew the excruciating pain I felt at that moment. (There is no way he could have known the pain I felt at that moment.) I blindly picked myself up off the floor. This still unseen person asked me if I was okay. I lied that I was fine and started taking a few wobbly steps as my vision began to return. Stumbling around the big hardware store, bell-rung and vision-blurred, I tried my darndest to remember why I was there. To this day I do not know what it was I was looking for. I have probably since purchased it for I'm certain there was a need for it, but even if this is the case, I'm sure I never related it to the TKO I suffered at the hardness of that concrete-filled metal pole. Wood can be a pretty springy thing. Sometimes it's not. Cutting kindling to keep a coldsnap at bay two years ago, I gained a new rule: Cutting across vertical grain with a hatchet has different outcomes than cutting with the grain. A piece of 1x2 vertical grain fir sprung up from an impatient blow. The point of a 45 degree cut on the end hit me right above the right eye cutting a vertical smile and knocking me senseless. Slowly recovering from the stun, I looked for the piece of wood. It took me a some time as it was five feet away from the point of impact (strike the Newton comment made above) and I was bell-ring and bleeding profusely. I didn't have to look to know there were stitches in my future, even though the gaper closed nicely with a little pressure and one of my daughter's Barbie band-aids. After enjoying one of my wife's yummy Indian dinners, I made my way to the emergency room. A surprisingly short time after arriving, a doctor was manhandling the tender part of my forehead. "It was healing nicely. I probably could have glued it together if I hadn't started messing with it. (HeeHee)" I hate medical humor. The saving grace was a nurse who deduced my seasoned status and, as I was leaving, clandestinely handed me the tools needed to remove the stitches myself, commenting that I look like a "handy sort of a guy".

That looks like the Nightmare Needles.

fugedaboutit.

I can make a hole in a rock. How does one "hollow out" a rock?

I'm still waiting for the "hollow out the rock" beta...

Radio penetrates stone? It's DruWorld, that kind of stuff happens all the time.

Like I said, I am FORCED to use a windoze machine at work. I use OS X at home. OpenOffice will open and edit my MS Word 03-created .doc files?

Thanks marylou... ...yet I have to do this first... "Instructions To install this download: Ensure your system is up to date by installing all High-Priority/Required updates on Microsoft Update (required for Microsoft Office XP and 2003 users)." I have to put on band-aids before I can put on band-aids. Where's that new Microsoft keyboard?

Is it just my computer, or has anybody else noticed that right after that add loads, the guys image briefly flashes as a skeleton on a white background? Creeepy!

So, I am forced to use a Gateway laptop at work. Recently I was given a copy of the newest MS Office as a gift. I loaded it onto the work laptop and now I can't open any of the .doc files I created using the older version of Word. I'm curious... WTF is up with that?!?