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June 07, 2005 - 2:59 p.m.

Somewhere about 1300 on Sunday I just sat there, feeling so tired. All I wanted to do was to shove my self of the edge of a building. Even that seemed too much work to accomplish at that point. My hands hurt, my back hurt, a was becoming rapidly dehydrated, and I was developing a hell of a good sunburn. It is sad I suppose to be so tired that just standing up and falling backwards seems like too much work.

But really, after jumping off the building more than a dozen times that morning, one more was just � work.

Okay okay, so I am not at the point of ending it all. I took a HTR (Hazardous Tactical Rescue) Ropes Class this past weekend. This was the initial �awareness� level training and it is 16 hours of some classroom training, some knot tying, some harness building, and a heck of a lot of just doing it. We got to dangle and rappel off the side of the Loudoun County Government Center (and associated garage). It certainly provides a different prospective of the court house let me tell you. Once you get past that initial time of standing up on a ledge 5 stories up and having someone tell you to just lean back into it, it is a great time.

So that pretty much consumed the vast majority of my weekend. The hours that were not directly consumed by being in class, they were spend eating and sleeping. Apparently rapelling makes you terribly hungry. Go figure. This will also be consuming the vast majority of my weekend hours for the rest of the month too. I am taking the Ropes II class, and that is another 40+ hours.

They tell me that rescue quality rope work will ruin me for sport climbing, and I believe it. Everything we are doing has multi-redundant double anchor systems and ropes with safety factors of 15:1. I stopped by REI and looked at their stuff � flimsy, flimsy, flimsy!!! Of course I mention all these good safety factors, but I do have to admit that Thursday night (yes before the class) found me responding to an EMS call on a rural road. The patient was in a car about 35 feet below the road. Um, yeah � they tied a rope to the front of the squad and there I was skittering down the sheer incline torn between praying for my life, and praying that I just got away without being covered by the masses of poison ivy that was prevalent. No gear, no harness, no GLOVES. Sonotmyfault.

Other than that, things here continue. My boss is out of town until Mid-July. That adds to the crunch time here at the office. Boy is it crunch time. On the bright side, I have a brand new shiny laptop (as of Friday) and presently an office to myself. Well I share my office with a number of happily blooming African violets. That is definitely a bright spot in things.

Mom remains in a nursing home, next round of testing comes up in a few weeks here. This will determine if she is capable of returning to the assisted living center that she prefers. Certainly there is much more to do in assisted living. And there she has her own furniture, and her cat with her. Such a vast difference in quality of living. Keep your fingers crossed for us. Her cat is living with me now (yes that brings the family cat count to 4, from 3 generations of my family. Good thing I have a small family). Fluffy is a girlie-white cat that lives up to all of the stereotypes of her name. It is only in the past few days that she has ventured out of the basement. Dubis is starting to become reconciled to her presense, Fidget is less convinced. Cougar is living outside and with my next door neighbor (don�t ask) and could care less.

Well all, it seems that my meeting is about to switch gears again and that means I need to return to being more interactive with the topic. More updates later.

Rock rock.

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