what up

i've sadly gotten out of the joyful habit of daily blogging. by my beard and bones, it's not the output that matters, it's the input!

the joy of writing is in having your work read to you by those that love you. short of that, it's fun to actually put things down in words. i've done neither, of late, on account of i've been busy.

please, sir, mister saint toad, you ask, busy with what?

brewing
climbing
planning
wedding
lifting
working
light traveling
entertaining
listening to good music
laughing

i will go over these, narration style, with no adhesion to logical progressions of time, and no love for actually going over what i said i'd go over. you know the drill.

so i went and got hitched. that went well. hasn't been a month yet, for whatever that's worth. we're settling in to a new life, which is not, perhaps, what either of us really wanted. still, domestication has its benefits compared to wandering, as civilization has its benefits to the tribal alternative.

actually, the benefits are precisely the same: beer production. the production and consumption of beer has occupied a lot of our time lately. i've moved on to allgrain brewing, and i think that by my next batch (#12. incidentally, that means i've brewed 11 batches of 5 gallons of beer. that's 55 gallons of beer in less than 2 years. that sounds like a lot, don't it?) i'll have gotten it down to a routine. a manageable, relatively straightforward routine that makes sense and isn't all chaotic.

that's the supply side, but on the demand side, we have a wedded pair of light drinkers, one with an expanding waistline (tolerated only because of the expanding deadlift). so we're now getting into "entertaining", which consists of inviting people over to drink our beer in exchange for feeding them and giving them stuff to do while they do it. but i just ordered 2 more empty kegs, so i can really get a good backlog going before i need to dump it on friends.

climbing is meeting with slow progress. the wife and rictor/veg are progressing faster than me, now, in some regards. it's interesting to see how we diverge and specialize. we can all climb pretty well at the 5.9/10a level, but when we hit a 10b/c or a hard a, some of us can manage and some of us can't. i seem to be good at overhangs, the wife is good at smearing and routefinding, and rictor/veg is good at using naturals. combined, the three of us make a very well rounded climber.

in my case, though, i'm fighting an ever-increasing resistance due to gravity, an ever-increasing lack of climbing motivation due to heavy weight training, and an ever-increasing frustration at slowed progress due to the above. meh, it's temporary.

lots of busywork keeping busy, and lots to look forward to. it's a challenge to balance all interests and activities, to find time for everything, to keep the anchors in place that fasten my life to the Real but still allow me movement in the world of dreams. but i'm managing.

still: busy.