August update

Ok, so I didn't quite get this one up in August, but it's only a day late so I'm calling it cose enough. I don't actually have much to say concerning this month, pretty standard fair really without much in the way of new things to post about. I've been a bit more excited about climbing lately. A nice feeling to get some psych back, especially since Leanne and I are heading to the Grampians in about a week and a half to take a short but much needed vacation and do some rock climbing. From our previous trip last year I thought it was the best bouldering area I'd ever been too, and I hear the route climbing is just as good so hopefully we'll get a chance to do some of that as well. The next post should be a good one.


As for the past/present. I've been spending a good deal of time as usual at the University in my lab coat putting my brain the rack. The past few weeks I've been attempting to isolate and purify double-stranded viral RNA and capsids from fish blood, which may or may not sound very difficult but let me assure you that it damn well is. The stuff I'm to do with the RNA once I've purified it has plenty of pitfalls as well, but in the end I don't really have anything to whinge on about since I find the problem solving quite interesting.

I (we actually, since there's 4 of us) have continued with the beer making. Since Feb we've done well over 100 gallons, which may seem like a lot but when you have a number of people drinking it it goes pretty quick.

The last few weekends have been rather rainy, which didn't make for very good climbing although we tried anyway. This past Sunday I went out again to the Leven Canyon area to try and find some more climbable rock. I checked out a new place called Preston falls, which had the angle I was looking for (i.e. overhanging) and the rock quality seemed decent, but spray from the falls and the precipitate that had formed on the rock didn't inspire me enough to get out the drill....yet. I might have to take another look in summer when the falls dry up and see if the rock will clean up better then. It's a pretty area at any rate.

I also went back to the only climbable limestone cliff I've seen in Tassie, which is unfortunately on private land and quite near to the owners house/bed and breakfast. After a good hard look I decided that I didn't think it'd be worth the effort of developing for the few choice lines available and mostly dead-verticle terrain, although laying my hands on a tufa and a couple of crimps definitely made me miss climbing on that type of stone. I'd say limestone's my favorite by far.

So that's about all I have for now. I'll leave you with a short video of a couple boulder problems I did in Oatlands at the end of last summer and have only recently got around to uploading the footage. Three nice problems, all around 7A+ in what's called the Rumble cave. I'll be excited to get back there when the lake goes down again to get on some of the harder stuff. I'd Like to thank Andrew Geeves for shooting the footage, he did a really good job especially concidering I handed him a camera he'd never seen before and said "here, shoot some vid".

Till next time-