Friday afternoon I drive to Ouray, Colorado, to meet a friend from high school. She has been ice climbing for years! I plan to watch, because ice climbing sounds terrifying. But I do take my harness, just in case. My friend talks me into trying it. The picture is NOT me. That is a competitor and she is amazing!
My climb was at the beginner ice wall. There are volunteers with loaner gear from gear companies. Boots, crampons, two ice axes and a helmet. My friend and a friend of hers give me instructions and I watch my friend climb first. She will be climbing all week!
I am wearing 1980s snow pants. Puffy and unstylish, but very very warm! I got all the way up and acquitted myself decently! Kicking each foot into the ice and then trusting that it will hold me, that is the interesting bit. Heel down, so that the crampon, boot and foot become a lever. And all the time in the climbing gym helped me to trust the harness, trust the ice axes, trust my feet.
My daughter gave me new foul weather pants for sailing for my birthday. She borrowed mine when she started college. She was on the racing team at Western Washington and my pants took a beating. During this visit she put about 1/3 of a roll of duct tape on them for an alumni race in the Lopez Island harbor. I offered to loan her my new pants but she explained that hers are now a tradition, duct tape and all. Her team won the regatta.
Here we are showing off the pants. I got lots of hugs for my birthday too, hoorah. I think my son took the photograph!
It’s just a scarf. One to wear when you are feeling alienation. Those are just stripes. Don’t look at the other end of the scarf. No, you are imagining things. It’s just a scarf.
I dressed up in November for the Chamber of Commerce masquerade. This is a 1920s dress and I had to repair the lace around both arm openings. The underdress is rust colored silk and is beaded. The overdress is lace with the beaded and fringed flower with a tassel on the side. The lace is definitely see through and I wore a slip. The silk underdress has beaded squared off tags that hang outside the lace, which is a detail I haven’t seen before. I do not remember where I got this, second hand.
When the silk is nearly 100 years old, it wants to fall apart. I took a second dress just in case there was dancing. If I danced in this dress, it would probably disintegrate.
In other news, here is an article about the Post Covid exercise intolerance. It is a small sample size, but they biopsied skin and muscle in people who were still exercise intolerant one year out from Covid 19. These people all had Covid-19 in 2020, so unimmunized.
“Compared to two independent historical control cohorts, patients with post-COVID exertion intolerance had fewer capillaries, thicker capillary basement membranes and increased numbers of CD169+ macrophages. SARS-CoV-2 RNA could not be detected in the muscle tissues. In addition, complement system related proteins were more abundant in the serum of patients with PCS, matching observations on the transcriptomic level in the muscle tissue. We hypothesize that the initial viral infection may have caused immune-mediated structural changes of the microvasculature, potentially explaining the exercise-dependent fatigue and muscle pain.”
This is a big deal. More needs to be done to confirm this, but a talk earlier this year said that the muscles don’t get adequate blood flow and get hypoxic and that the fatigue is recovery afterwards, taking 1-3 days. That is the best hypothesis for why people have the activity “crashes” after exercise or doing a little bit more than usual. My chronic fatigue shuts my fast twitch muscles down when I have pneumonia. This time it was two years before I got them back and I still have to be careful. It’s weird when they won’t work. It’s like the muscles go on strike. They didn’t really hurt (ok, they burned like strep throat all over the two times I had systemic strep A) but it’s more like the muscles are screaming NO NO NO NO! at the brain. It is hard to describe. If I tried to push, it felt like dying. Perhaps the muscle cells really DO start dying if we push them too hard. Mine is annoying but it doesn’t confine me to bed. My slow twitch muscles were fine though this time I needed oxygen. I hope not to experience it again.
This is the mask I wore. Nice to be in a different sort of mask, but I masked at a concert last night and will mask for travel with an N95.
Under the hazelnut tree. A squirrel alerted me to ripe hazelnuts this year and I picked all I could. Yum! Thank you, squirrel!
I have to watch Sol Duc when I am not holding the leash. She will sit for a long time and then suddenly trot off somewhere else. She has favorite spots where she can plot to catch birds.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: underwear! I thought about using this photograph, but I am job hunting. It might not be the best choice for now.
I did not sort out Italian fashions in the two weeks I traveled with my daughter.
For one thing, we were mostly in tourist areas. It was hot, though not as hot as August. Very thin straps on tops and short shorts or skirts were to be covered to go in to the big churches and the Vatican Museum. Having to cover up is just a little ironic since so many of the sculptures are nude or partly nude, both male and female.
I took a black skirt and a pair of pants that are loose and flowered and cool. These proved to be very good guesses for my age group. I had washable travel button down shirts, which worked well. I never used my fleece jacket or rain jacket, on this trip. My feet complained and I might choose different shoes next time.
One recurring theme that I noticed is leopard prints. Dresses, skirts, shirts, blouses. I saw them in each of the five cities. There also is a recurrence of rompers. My daughter comments, “There are very few people that look good in rompers but mostly people don’t.” I didn’t like them in the 1970s and I don’t like them now. We did see a very few either tall or thin or both women who carried them off.
Tourist wear is all over the place but mostly is driven by the heat. Hats were for sale to tourists and large scarves to double as a skirt to cover short shorts or skirts.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.