september...when it comes...

Dave and I had quite an exciting Labor Day weekend. we took Thursday and Friday off work with the intention of getting away, however Serafina had to be taken back to the birdie doctor in the afternoon (she's doing much better by the way, but still has 5 more weeks of shots with the doctor ahead of her...) and we thought that the morning and evening medicine still would need to be administered (turned out that we get to stop that one), but anyway, it wasn't looking good for actually getting away, so we decided that we would try to get away a bit every day.

Day One –Thursday: to celebrate the final day of August, we checked out the Beaver Street rock wall in the city - such a crazy thing that a 45 foot rock wall exists right above the Castro with easy access! did not climb it. looked scary. Found a cam that had been wedged into a rock so deeply that it would not come out (hence, some poor person had to leave their nifty little $75 gadget stuck in the rock face). We tried to get it out. We failed. After that, we headed to Glen Canyon - as recommended by a 'rock climbing in the Bay Area' book that dave picked up at our second home, REI. Oh wow. How is it that there is this big CANYON in the middle of the city that we have completely MISSED for 10 years?!?!?!? so strange how these things happen. It was an absolutely BE–YOU-TEE–FUL day and we hiked around a bit, found the boulders listed in the book after a bit of confusion and did some fun outside bouldering. We then pulled out the rock climbing gear and set up our first anchor all by our little selves. It was on a wall face that was only about 20 feet and not too scary. We set up the anchor together trying to use all the learnings gleaned from our outside rock clinics. It was our first time doing it unsupervised and with no one there to double check us, so it was a bit freaky. We used our new gear, including our one fancy neato cam and i'll be damned if this shit really looked pretty darn safe. We climbed on it a couple times each and i know dave was super happy - like a little toddler getting to play his favorite game. It was nice to finally get some wear on our new equipment and it was good that our anchor held and we did not die. We ended up being out there for hours and had to zoom back to get serafina in order to get her to the doctor in time. She was inspected and they took more blood (she did not like this), weighed her in the pot (did not like this), checked her little body (didn't like this either) and gave her the shot (soooo did not like this). At one point her bleeding was not stopping and they took her away to work on her and told us to sit down outside. Dave and I were having horrible visions of serafina bleeding to death due to some goddamn routine blood draw in order to do tests to make her better. I have no idea how anyone deals with having children. She was returned to us intact and we got her home as fast as possible. Ate some egg and cheese scrambles with deeeeeelicious farmers market veggies and decided to got to REI and check out their labor day sale… and see if we could find dave some more hot spandex bike shorts. On sale. We did. And some other fine back to school finds. And then as the clock was hitting 9pm and the store was ready to close, we passed this amazing rack of shoes. Mostly slightly used shoes. What the hell was this? Marked down to $19.93? For $100 shoes? What is this? Turns out that prior to their out of control amazing used gear sale, REI will put out their shoes starting a night or two before…. Dave and I worked as fast as our little tarty feet could try on shoes and ended up walking out of there with almost $300 worth of shoes for $50. nice. It was invigorating. We vowed to return the next day to see if we missed anything. Went home and watch 6 Feet Under - Season 5 Episode 4.

Wow. That was an exhaustive blurb. Perhaps I will try to be more concise with the rest of the weekend. But for now, we’ll call this installment ONE.