Happy New Year!

We spent today hanging out at home. Rugs were vacuumed, Christmas trees were taken down, food was cooked, multiple plants were groomed and moved around. Productive and fun! I do love having a clean(er) house to start the new year off correctly. I'm a neat freak, so it's never really messy in here, but now it's extra clean!

Also, does anyone know how to re-carpet a cat pole? One of ours is looking pretty sad on the lower vertical section. I figure you just get some carpet and staple it into place with a staple gun, but I could be wrong...

We watched Touching The Void last night, about two guys who climbed a mountain in South America. One of them broke his leg with a compound fracture and then, as his friend was lowering him down (which was itself miraculous at high altitude), he went over a cliff and was dragging his friend down. The only thing to do was cut the rope or both guys would probably have died (as far as they knew), and the one who dropped fell into a huge crevasse.

He finally decided that if he couldn't get out by going up, he had to go down. So he lowered himself by his extra rope to the bottom (or what looked like the bottom, actually a snow bridge that started collapsing under his weight) and found a way out. So over the next four or so days he crawled out of the crevasse, down the glacier, and through a huge rockfall back to his camp, all while his leg was broken and he was slowly going insane from thirst.

Amazingly the other guy and a friend of theirs who had stayed behind hadn't left yet, and they heard him calling in the middle of the night. They hadn't gone looking for him because the friend who had cut the rope was sure he was dead. No answer was forthcoming when he yelled into the crevasse. Anyway, everyone made it back alive and surprisingly no frostbite was had or limbs lost.

This was a tense movie, y'all! Even though it is also sort of filmed as a documentary with the actual guys, so you know they obviously made it, it is crazy scary in parts. No crevasses for me!

The well-trodden route up to Camp Muir with a bunch of people on it in midsummer will do well enough, thank you very much.