Wednesday I thought the homework situation was going to be all right. Next week I have two tests, a paper, and a homework due but it was not that bad. Then my humanities teacher gave us the reading assignment: one chapter in the boring book - that's all right, that's 14 pages, and then 77 pages from The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon. The Bacon book is one of those incredibly dense, florid kind of Latin texts (translated, mostly) that takes forever to read. And I read a lot. Any other book I'd be all, 77 pages, no problem. So now on top of all that other work was this reading.

But then this morning I got my Kinetics homework back and I'd gotten only one problem wrong, so that meant I wasn't going to have to spend my entire free answer copying down the answers (from where they're posted in an entirely different building), so I was actually able to finish the reading. It was honestly astonishing.

The main reason for my time crunch is that last night Catherine and I were at a rock climbing class and this Saturday we're going on a rock climbing trip. The rock climbing meeting was pretty interesting. It was taught by an instructor we call Lumpy, who's an interesting guy. He's totally into the outdoor sports and otherwise isn't questionable, but his overall physique and style of movement are very feminine. He's very slim and rolls up his pants so they look like a girl's capris.

He was pretty funny in going over the rock-climbing basics. He said that rocks are scaled on the "Yosemite Decimal Scale" where 5.0 to 5.4 are like stone ladders (Catherine and I are hoping that's what the one tomorrow'll be like), 5.5 to 5.6 are harder, "a mere mortal" can do up to around 5.11, and then 5.14 is just insane, "and they just came up with 5.15a, whereas before you could only do 5.14d, so now 5.15a is a pure wall of glass with bullet holes every five feet". Catherine and my favorite was when he said "And this is a caribiner. That's French for....one of these things."

Another bit that amused us was when we were trying on harnesses (good ones, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all-glorified-single-piece-of-belting kind we normally use at the wall) and Catherine kept having to go, no, this one doesn't fit. "I supposed I should be flattered he started me out on medium," she said at the end.

The people going on the trip seem pretty cool. One is another girl who seems nice, named Luann. Then there's a kind of British or New Zealand guy, a man and a woman who are kind of older, and then two frat guys, one of whom is very cute. Catherine said it should have been outlawed to wear jeans as well-fitting as he did.

In any case, the trip should be really fun. Except for the no bathrooms thing.