October

Emily finally got in to get her sports physical after school. For how much of a pain in the butt it was to get an appointment, they didn't seem to check a whole lot. They had her answer a bunch of questions. Checked a few things like her height, weight, blood pressure, eye sight, etc. They said it was more complicated but it seemed like any nurse should have been able to take care of this for her. I'm just glad it's over with.

She is over 5'5" now though! Her growth seems to be slowing down but not stopping yet.

Christian had to go get his TB test as well. He also went in to get his CPR certification. His first session of school is over and he did really well. He didn't lose a single point on any of his assignments!

The first quarter of the year ended for the girls also. Caitlyn maintained her 4.0. She was not able to get into ASB. Instead, she went back to yearbook to become one of the editors. She is also an office TA this year. She opted for that instead of one of the lame electives they offer that she is willing to take. Her PE teacher has also made her a TA in her PE class along with a couple of her friends, so she gets in there early to change and then they help with setting up or handing out and cleaning loaner PE clothes. She also had to help hand out locks and teach the new kids on how to open them. You wouldn't believe the trouble kids have with those. In addition to all that, she had one of her friends has become the unofficial TA's for their history class. They go in in the mornings to help out or finish their work early to help in class. Because the same teacher had them last year as well and they have proven themselves to be responsible "A" students, she even has them doing grading for her seventh grade students.

Emily...needs a lot of work. She had assured us that she would keep up on her assignments this year. It was one of the conditions of her joining the soccer team. So far, it's not going too well. I think that she is actually doing worse. I think that if things don't seriously improve, she will not be joining the soccer team next year and we might have to take her out of the IB program as well. It's pretty frustrating.
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This month, we've been having many problems with Christian's pickup truck. First his battery died. The week after, he was doing classroom observations at Emily's school and his truck wouldn't start at the end of the day. After many months of working fine, the fuel pump was failing again. He couldn't get it started. We drove back later that night with a rubber mallet to bang on the tank while starting it. Apparently, that is the trick. You have to do it at the same time and it roared back to life. We don't know when it is going to go out again so we knew that we could not delay replacing the fuel pump any longer. Who knows when it would just not start back up at all?

On top of that, our refrigerator started making weird noises. Christian had to look into that for nearly two weeks before discovering that the relay was bad. We ordered a new one and it seems to be working fine now but it had put a lot of strain on the compressor during those two weeks. We were pretty worried that it would kill the whole refrigerator.

So, yeah...it's been another stressful and expensive month for repairs.
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Our pomegranates are ripe. Most of the time, we only eat a few of them and the rest go to the birds or rots in the yard quite honestly. It's a lot of work to get the seeds out and the kids don't usually help, so I am usually too lazy to harvest them all by myself.

This year, I have finally figured out a way to juice them! The first time I tried, I broke my brand new juicer because of the hard seeds. It was a total failure. You only want to sit and eat so many of them. Like the apples, there is only a short period of time when the fruit is ripe for the picking. They are all ripe nearly at once and then they are gone. Apparently, the simplest way to juice them without some $600 machine, is to just put the seeds in a ziplock bag and mash them. Couldn't be much simpler!

We've been experimenting with fermented natural sodas like ginger ale and stuff. We had the idea of trying to make a pomegranate version. It turned out so good! We are going to be pretty upset when the pomegranates run out. The store bought juice is not as good and fairly expensive. So, when I have time, I juice extra pomegranates and freeze it to stock pile for the winter. I don't think it will last us until next October, but it is better than nothing. We still have problems with the pomegranates splitting open on us, so the birds get a large share of the crop usually. Plus, it turns my hands yellow and dries it out after seeding them for too long. The kids have helped out a little but not enough to really get to it all. We are nearing the end of the crop as it is. We gave some to a few neighbors as it is better than leaving more out for the birds but I am still slowly working through all that we have left.
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We went to our friends' annual Halloween Party. Caitlyn has been planning her costume for a month. She wanted to be Princess Mononoke. Caitlyn was a bit disappointed that someone else had the same costume as hers (except it was a fancy pre-made store-bought one). Emily couldn't think of anything so she just wore one of my old standby outfits. She's supposed to be a gypsy but she didn't put any effort into getting more of the accessories together.

They had the party a couple of weeks early so that it didn't interfere with other trunk-or-treats and parties others were throwing.

On the day of Halloween, Caitlyn wanted to dress up for school but didn't want the other kids pawing at her fur so she just went as a witch. Emily didn't want to dress up for school and still had soccer practice afterwards. The weather finally started cooling down, so Caitlyn ended up staying in her warmer witch costume for the trunk-or-treat. Emily came home from practice with just enough time to throw on her gypsy outfit and head to church for the chili dinner.

Christian actually had a class that evening so he was gone before Emily even got home. Our schedules are so chaotic now.

After the chili dinner, the kids did a round of trunk-or-treating. We hit three houses on our way home of people we knew and called it a day since the kids had plenty of candy anyway!

Yosemite - Day 4

On our last morning, we got up early to pack up our gear and take down our tent. We wanted to move our car closer to the Yosemite Village where we will finish with dinner later that evening. We will then be able to hop in our car and head directly home at the end of our day. If we didn't move our car out there early enough, we would not be able to even get a parking space.

We signed up for another 6 hours of service, each. We then hopped on a shuttle to the Upper Pines area to clean along the Merced there. We fished out another 11 pounds of trash on our last day. More shoes, bottles, tarp and endless micro-trash.

Christian had to take a small break to finish up his homework that he had to submit later that day. We had to head back towards the central area of the valley so that he could use the cell towers to submit his work.

We went back to the Village area so that he had the cell service and ate our lunch there.

We finished up by going down some of the backroads and then cleaning at the Church Bowl picnic and climbing areas before heading back for our day's weigh in.

In the past four days, we each put in 20 hours of work. Together, we hauled in 66 pound of trash. Much of the trash we picked up, barely weighed anything. Things like the corners of granola bar wrappers when people pulled them open, stickers from fruit, cigarette butts,  and straws from juice boxes (along with their wrappers).

I think the total for the entire Facelift event was 6,790 pounds this year. They say that the amount of trash they have cleaned up has decreased every year since they started some 14 years ago, but I think a lot of it has to do with the special cleanup projects they end up doing, so a lot of the previous weight might have been cement and asphalt blocks. They think that a lot of the decreased amount of trash picked up is due to more awareness of the issue. I think that there is a little of that, but in general, there is still just way more carelessly discarded trash out in our natural areas than is acceptable.

We had a bit of time to kill before the raffle, especially since they stopped the weigh ins a little earlier on our last day so that they could clean up. We hiked over to the Lower Falls to see some of the climbing next to the falls. Emily wants to do this nice but long sustained crack up there.

It was towards the end of the day, but as usual, the place was still just crawling with people.

Afterwards, we headed back for the last raffle. We were relieved when Timmy O'Neill showed up to present the last raffle. Emily won a little Patagonia backpack. It's probably too small for her to use for much. She wants to enter as an adult next year since there are no real incentives to enter as a kid any more and much of what they have to offer are geared towards younger children. She noticed another older kid had entered as an adult and won a nice prize. Nobody said anything to them about it. You are supposed to enter as a child until you are seventeen. Before, if you entered as a child, you were pretty much guaranteed some kind of prize. Since that isn't the case any more, she would rather try for some of the climbing gear rather than a tiny backpack, sunglasses or t-shirt that won't fit her.

Caitlyn won a water bottle with VIP family passes for YARTS. Normal YARTS passes would be useless to us, but since the new concessionaire stopped the shuttles up to Tuolumne, it has made it impossible or expensive (same thing at this point) for us to go on our adventure hike through Tenaya Canyon; something we've been wanting to do for the past couple of years. Caitlyn has lots of nice water bottle but she was pretty excited about the passes because she knew what that would mean. Now we just need the time to be able to do it; something we don't have a whole lot of anymore.

We also caught some bags of chalk, so we have a lifetime supply of that! We don't use it often as it is. Neither Christian, nor I, won anything further.

I was happy to see that a couple of people that were not climbers, returned their prizes to be given to others because they would not use them any way.

After the raffle, we went directly to get in line for dinner. The concessionaire puts on a dinner for the volunteers at the end of the event. Usually, after several days of eating camp food, we are drooling for some real food. Since we ate at the meatfest the night before, we enjoyed the food, but we were not quite as desperate for it as before. Overall, the food provided at the camp was a whole lot tastier than the catered stuff...desperation aside. But having to choose between staying for dinner or braving the chaotic traffic out of the valley, we opted to wait in line for the free dinner. Even though we were near the front of the line, we still waited for an hour before getting to eat. It didn't help that lots of people were cutting in line to be with their friends, but mostly because it would mean less of a line for them.

Anyway, that was the end of our Yosemite adventures. There was a lot more frustration, pain and disappointment than last year. We accomplished more, but enjoyed ourselves less. Maybe we just expected too much since we didn't get to go anywhere all summer, I don't know. Did pandering to all the people who pretended to want to help create more awareness and improve their attitudes? I doubt it since at the end of the event, after picking up every bit of trash we could set our eyes on, all we noticed were discarded raffle tickets and other things people clearly got from the event and left discarded on the ground. It was pretty sad and made us pretty angry.

Yosemite - Day 3

We were a bit tired and fed up at not being able to get in to any of the events we wanted to join through Facelift. We decided to take a bit of a break and do a little climbing. We went to the Swan Slab area. The kids wanted to do the second route above Oak Tree Flake (5.6).

Emily led the route up Oak Tree Flake. We have not climbed very much lately, so Emily whined a bit about her gear placements. Then the rope got caught in a crack on the beginning of the flake which resulted in having some significant drag on the rope because she didn't put a sling on one of her pieces. She started to really get frustrated and was thrashing about trying to free the rope from the crack. It was awful. Christian had to stop her and get her to calm down before she hurt herself. She finally got the rope out and finished the climb without any other incident.

Caitlyn could walk fine in her hiking boots with the mole skin on but when she tried to put on her climbing shoes, the result was not so good. She was tired and frustrated and wouldn't communicate with us as to the problem or what she needed. Christian and Emily were up at the top waiting for her and I was waiting to take pictures but she wouldn't move. I was getting hot and frustrated. The place was getting pretty crowded with other climbers on either side of us and a constant stream of tourists streaming past, taking pictures and yelling. Emily started to go up the second route while she was waiting (Bay Tree Crack, 5.6). After getting up a little ways though, she thought she heard a rustling in one of the cracks above her and freaked out. She came back down and I followed up Oak Tree Flake to clean her placements.

When I got to the top, Christian went back down to check on Caitlyn. She had finally decided to take her mole skin off and put a couple of bandaids on instead (which I had suggested to her earlier but she ignored me). He had Emily go back down as well so that she could watch our gear while he went to check on the possible snake in the crack above us. Caitlyn finally made it up but there were some tears as it was still painful on her feet. Christian sent her back down to change her shoes while we worked on the next route.

Christian made his way to where Emily left off and got a big dead tree branch from the Bay Tree to probe the crack. He didn't find anything there and made his way up the rest of the route. Emily came back up to where I was belaying Christian but wouldn't stay to climb the second route. I followed up and cleaned Christian's gear. Christian did find some snakeskin near the top though. We went to find the walk off but ended up down climbing some sketchy rocks. Of course, none of the kids took any pictures for us. When we came back around, we were a bit shocked at how much more crowded it was than before. It was like arriving at Disneyland all of a sudden. We quickly packed up our gear to head back over to check in for Facelift duties. We took longer than we had intended. Or I should say, the kids made us take a lot longer than we had intended for these little climbs.

After checking in for Facelift for the day, we headed out to the Happy Isles area to do some work. We took the shuttle to eliminate any unnecessary hiking. My blister would get a little better each night we rested and would be ready to burst after an entire day of hiking back and forth through some rough terrain. I did hurt it a bit on the down climb from Bay Tree Crack but luckily it still had not popped yet.

We only put in 3 hours of work each on this day but still came back with 7 pounds of trash. One of the coordinators gave us each a nice Deuter Drypack since he knew we would use it and did such good work. We also got invited to a big dinner that evening back at our campground. It was to be a big "Meatfest." The kids were super excited. We only pack the easiest things to eat and go most of the time on these trips. We don't spend a lot of time preparing our food. Our dinner for the evening was just going to be some canned soup, so we were more than happy to put it aside to join the party. Normally, we might have been to awkward or shy to join something like this, but since we got invited personally by some of the coordinators and it was going to be just next to our campground, we sucked it up and decided to join them.

But first, the raffle for the evening. Neither of the kids won anything. In fact, Timmy was not even running the raffle tonight. The kids were pretty disappointed. I actually won a Prana Yoga package. It had a yoga mat, notebook, water bottle, lip balm, chalk bag and trucker hat in a nice canvas bag. I gave Christian the hat.

We went directly back to camp for the Meatfest. It was pretty awesome. We had lamb kabobs and burgers, soup, salad, watermelon and chips. Someone was actually out there deep frying fresh garlic fries. We ate until we were about to burst. Caitlyn filled up on too much salad and didn't get to the burger! We keep making fun of her because it is supposed to be a meat-fest and she had salad. She did have some of the lamb, but still...

It was kind of weird. We were having dinner with some of Yosemite's greatest climbing legends. One of which was bivying above the rock fall (on both days) and came back down alive the next day to tell about it. Some of them got together to have a little jam session.

Photos by yosguns and mouse from merced

Christian took the kids back to get ready for bed after they had their fill and things started to wind down some. He came back and we stayed for quite a bit longer just taking everything in. It was nice there, despite the crowd and more noise than we usually like out here, but it wasn't too bad because it was made up of most of the old timers. The core of the Yosemite climbing community. All the new hipster climbers were out at the Octoberfest in town.

Yosemite - Day 2

Day two in Yosemite was Friday, September 29th. We planned to take it a little easier today. Christian put some mole skin on Caitlyn's feet and she put on different hiking shoes. We had only planned to work half the day, then take off to attend a program being given by Jeremy Collins who is a climber/artist. He was giving an Art Walk which is supposed to start at the El Cap Bridge.

We did not know what it was going to be like heading to the bridge since some of the roads were closed due to the rock fall and traffic in general was a total disaster throughout the park. Supposedly, the shuttle route over there only runs in the summer...at least, that is what the signs showed.

Since we had so much luck finding trash in or near the water, we headed towards the Merced. We got a bit side tracked in one area that might have been a day use area at some point. They had some projects to restore the area, so they were in the process of planting a bunch of new plants there but they didn't seem to bother cleaning up the area before doing so. We dug up so much trash in this one little area, it was unbelievable. We finally did make it out to the river, but just a small part of it as we were nearly out of time.

We only put in 4 hours each on this day but we still pulled out a whopping 18 pounds of tourist debris. After our weigh in for the day, we headed out towards the El Cap Bridge. We didn't have much time to waste as we worked a bit more than we had intended. We also found that the El Cap bridge was a LOT farther away than we figured. We hiked a brisk pace but was not even close when the start time for the walk came and went. To add insult to injury, as we walked along the road towards the El Cap area, we were passed by a shuttle...a shuttle that was supposedly not running anymore. We were pretty put out by it all, to say the least. 

In the end, we had a choice, continue on to the bridge where we most likely missed the start of the walk already, only to have to turn around again and head back where there may or may not be a shuttle to take us back, or cut our losses and just head back so that we can be sure to make it back before the next raffle. In the end, we all opted to head back. We were hot, tired, disappointed and by this time, I had a good blister developing on my foot as well. Plus, we were inundated with gnats everywhere we turned almost the entire time.

We did eventually find out that the shuttles were going to run until October now...little good that did for us.

We finally got back to Yosemite Village to await the the raffle.

We usually have a lot of fun at the raffles. Timmy O'Neill always presents it and he is just hilarious most of the time. But the other kids at the event are super annoying. They are loud, pushy and demanding. You are supposed to be present to win anything in the raffle but the kids will say that the person they called is their friend and will accept a prize for them. Half of them, were not even really friends, they just made it up or met them in daycare...which brings me to our next complaint. While we are slaving away, working hard to do what we volunteered to do, these kids were brought in by their parents and left at daycare most of the time and didn't pick up so much as a single scrap of garbage; yet they were still all signed up as volunteers and given raffle tickets. Some parent even signed up their baby and won something when the kid could not even walk yet. The worst insult had to be the person that signed up their dog. Yes, dog. And yes, the dog won a prize. Plus, there are always dozens of tourists who see the booths and come by to see what is going on and find out they can get free swag by signing up. Many of them don't even make an attempt to help. They sign up just before the end of the day and stick around for the raffle, while drinking with their free water bottles and pocketing their free passes. A few make a half assed attempt to bring some things in.

So we were more than a little disappointed at how things were going. Emily did win a Yosemite Conservancy hat, which she actually really needed. She claims her old ones don't fit anymore. Caitlyn didn't win anything because they threw handfuls of free stuff into the crowd and didn't have enough for all the kids in the end. Most of which didn't help and a few even whined about what they won until they traded them for something else. She did catch a nice chalk bag which would have been pretty cool, had she not already had two of them and had to sit through the other kids screaming in her ear and elbowing her to get more stuff they really should have not been qualified for. Let's not forget the baby and dog.

Christian won a small women's hoodie from Kuhl. Lucky me! I did not win anything...well, officially. Some people won climbing gear (since this is an event put on by the Yosemite Climbing Association), that you know they wouldn't even know what to do with. I guess they will put it on e-bay or it will end up in their garage for a while and eventually end up in the landfill.

We did not even bother trying to go to the evenings program as it is such a crush every night.

Yosemite - Day 1

After returning from the dentist office with the girls, we quickly packed and had dinner, then got a quick shower and a few hours of sleep before rousing everyone to pile into the car to head out to Yosemite. The girls will by ditching school for the next couple of days but they were supposed to have talked to all their teachers to get their assignments done before leaving and making up any additional work as soon as they returned. The service hours will also more than fulfill the service hours that Emily is required to put in for the year in order to graduate.

Christian drove most of the way, as usual. I gave him a small break to catch a nap before the last leg of our journey. We got into the valley early in the morning to check in with our camp host and set up camp. We requested to stay in Yellow Pines this time. We try to request different camp sites every time we come, just to see what it is like at each place. This one is the campground reserved for volunteers.

Once settled, we had a quick breakfast and made the hike into the center of the valley to check in for our Facelift duties. Upon signing up, we received new Yosemite Facelift Kleen Kanteens and free park passes in honor of National Public Lands Day for our service.

For our first day, we were sent towards Mirror Lake and along the trails and creek leading to it.  We put in 7 hours each on our first day and hauled back 30 pounds of trash! That was our record high. We found a lot of shoes people lost in the creek. Of course, there was the usual water bottles and endless micro trash but Christian even hauled in part of a tire. We  ended up catching a shuttle back from near the Ahwahnee Hotel because Caitlyn got blisters from all our walking and the trash was getting unbearably heavy.

Our camp is a ways off, so we had humped our dinner along with our lunch around all day so that we would not have to go back and forth. After weighing in our trash, we decided to get the girls a commemorative Facelift t-shirt as a kind of reward for not having cavities. Unfortunately, the new t-shirts were kind of big with deep v-necks that were totally inappropriate for the kids. Emily decided on last year's t-shirt. Even that did not quite fit Caitlyn, so she was considering some vintage ones. She was considering between 3 of them but was not overly enthusiastic about any one, so the guy sweetened the deal for her by letting her have two for the price of one! She then happily chose two of the three in question and felt much better about not being able to get one of the newer ones she liked better. 

We then finally settled in on some park benches in Yosemite Village to get some much needed rest. While we were resting, there was another big rock fall in the same area as the day before. This time much bigger. The dust from the filled the air above us like a fog rolling in. We did not know what happened exactly until people started talking about it.

Photos by Tom Evans

There were a lot of rumors of what happened, but in the end, there were no fatalities this time. The previous day, a climber and his wife were scouting around the base when the rock broke off from El Capitan. He shielded his wife and died. She was air lifted to a hospital for treatment. There were still a couple of groups on the wall above where the rock fall occurred, but no one below. There was a group of volunteers who had just passed the area moments before.

This time, the rock fall was 3 times bigger but most people were giving the area a wide birth. But because the rock fall was so big, a good sized rock flew out onto the road and fell through a tourists' sunroof as they were driving out of the valley. The driver was hit in the head and taken in for treatment. No one else was seriously hurt that we were aware of.

After all the trash for the day had been weighed and tallied, they cleaned up and brought out all the gear donated by sponsors for the day's raffle. The kids won more t-shirts! Caitlyn got a DMM t-shirt while Emily got a Patagonia one. Neither Christian, nor I, won anything from the raffle this time.

We had some dinner and tried to go to the evening program to hear some of the presentations from climbers whom they had assembled for the day but the line was so long and they place was already filled to the rim. We decided to cut our losses and head back to camp. Christian ended up carrying Caitlyn back on his shoulders because her blisters were causing her a lot of pain.