Thursday, June 29, 2006
Somehow, it always comes back to me.
I haven’t mentioned this before, but one of the major things occurring in this house right now is that my husband is going to climb Mt. McKinley (or Denali, as it is rightly called in Alaska) next year. You know, the highest mountain in ALL OF NORTH AMERICA. He’s been climbing mountains for years, and has even done a couple glaciated mountains, but Denali is in a class of its own. Or if not of its own, its still pretty high up there (according to Wikipedia, it actually has a larger bulk and rise than Everest). It takes approximately three weeks to climb. You not only carry a 70-pound backpack, you pull a sled with 100 pounds of stuff behind you as well. There are thousand-foot deep crevasses that you cross over with ladders while wearing shoes with spikes on them so you can spike into the ice and not slide off the freakin’ mountain.
Okay. That’s the part where I can no longer talk about this climb without heart palpitations. But I can say that I’m really proud of my husband for his commitment and dedication to this. Rick has worked toward this goal for many years, and now that it’s getting closer and closer, he’s working harder and harder. He runs, he bicycles, he works out at the gym two hours a day several days a week. By the time he’s ready, he’ll be doing the Stairmaster for an hour with a seventy-pound pack on his back. He’s already in the best shape of his life.
But enough about Rick and his cool self. Let’s talk about how this upcoming endeavor affected me this week. (Also, let’s change the subject before I start lamenting about what kind of shape I’m in). You see, we decided that since Rick’s going on this once-in-a-lifetime adventure, he needed something better than our pre-millennium digital camera to document it.
He needed, maybe, something LIKE THIS:
Yep, we copycatted Nanda and bought a Nikon D50. After all, when you’re already carrying two hundred pounds, what’s an extra five or so?
How does this affect me, you ask? It's in the way I am totally going to co-opt this thing when he’s not looking so I can take knitting pictures. If I can figure out how to operate it, that is. Here are the operator guides (note plural usage) the camera came with:
Yikes. My technophobe heart just let out a long, plaintive sigh.
Okay. That’s the part where I can no longer talk about this climb without heart palpitations. But I can say that I’m really proud of my husband for his commitment and dedication to this. Rick has worked toward this goal for many years, and now that it’s getting closer and closer, he’s working harder and harder. He runs, he bicycles, he works out at the gym two hours a day several days a week. By the time he’s ready, he’ll be doing the Stairmaster for an hour with a seventy-pound pack on his back. He’s already in the best shape of his life.
But enough about Rick and his cool self. Let’s talk about how this upcoming endeavor affected me this week. (Also, let’s change the subject before I start lamenting about what kind of shape I’m in). You see, we decided that since Rick’s going on this once-in-a-lifetime adventure, he needed something better than our pre-millennium digital camera to document it.
He needed, maybe, something LIKE THIS:
Yep, we copycatted Nanda and bought a Nikon D50. After all, when you’re already carrying two hundred pounds, what’s an extra five or so?
How does this affect me, you ask? It's in the way I am totally going to co-opt this thing when he’s not looking so I can take knitting pictures. If I can figure out how to operate it, that is. Here are the operator guides (note plural usage) the camera came with:
Yikes. My technophobe heart just let out a long, plaintive sigh.
# posted by katie @ 10:03 PM 
