Cold Morning

It's been a busy week, stuffed with a ton of dance, a lot of teaching, and a fever that took a few days to go away.  It was nice to have this morning off to get some grading done, and even better when I run across little drawings from my students:

I have to run out eventually, but when you wake up to a temp of -17 and a windchill between -30 and -40, it's nice to not leave the house for awhile.  :)

Instead, I've got coffee, some climbing magazines, lesson planning for Composition, and trying to plan some meals for the next few days.  I've been running around so much lately that I haven't had time to cook, relying instead on Mac & Cheese, eating out, or (like last night) toast and dipping soft shell tortillas in guacamole.  This morning I opened the fridge and realized that my breakfast was either going to be slices of cheese (no bread), sunflower seed butter (on... more tortillas?), or a red pepper (what am I supposed to do with that??).  Time to make a list.

Tomorrow is the Climbing Competition at Vertical Endeavors, which means I'll be there at 8 am to help set up, clean up, and get climbers checked in.  Tonight, however, is when the real work gets done.  I'm heading down around 4 to climb every one of the 47 new routes to help rate them for the competition.  This is called "fore-running"- I can tell the setters if a route is harder or easier than it's supposed to be, and help find the order that the routes should be numbered in for difficulty.  And at 5'4'', I'm a good person for testing to make sure big moves on hard routes aren't too big for shorter climbers.  If I can climb it, there can't be any complaining that the moves are too far apart.  :)
I'm excited to go climb tonight, but right now I'm enjoying not running around in this chilly, chilly air.
Time to go get Albert to stop licking the windows... stupid cat...