Alas

The rain last night brought snow to within forty feet of my house. Which means my local crags are covered. It's so cold down here in sunny South America that Argentina turned off their gas pipeline to Chile. Nice bit of international relations there. Already there's a sizable chunk taken out of the eight tons of wood I bought for heating.

Worst of all, my body is going into winter-survival mode - storing fat whenever and wherever possible. Calorie bombs are attacking me from every direction - just walking down the wrong aisle in the grocery store can result in a net gain. In kilos, no less, not your trifling pounds. My eyebrows look chubby. It's nearly as bad as flying into the Minneapolis airport which houses an elite strike-force of calorie bombs that relentlessly attack your waistline until you have no recourse but to flee to a thinner, less geographically challenged part of the world. I've stopped measuring my time in the Midwest in days: Oh, I've been here for about 10 pounds now....

But I digress.

Local cragging is over. Done. Gone. For a while. And it's sad. There's the surreal climbing wall fishbowl in the middle of the mall, there's the unheated wall further downtown. Exciting options.

And it DOES NOT HELP that all you northerners are posting such rad photos as your days get long and warm and school lets out so at least those sensible enough to be students or teachers or unemployed or sponsored can climb full time. No, that does not help one bit.

Time to, sigh, wax the skis, practice with the avalanche beacons, sharpen ice axes - I think I'm too old for this winter nonsense. Even bluebird days of ego powder are at least a month off. I am in limbo and rapidly developing my own gravity.

Revenge will be mine....sometime in January or February...