In an effort to please my one constant reader I suppose that I really had better ramble on some...
Life has been rather interesting over the last few weeks - it all started when my housemates finally decided that they had got a plan for the next two years and were moving to Leeds. To be honest this was both bad news and good - I am one of those people who don't deal well with shit such as having to move house but after having spent a predominantly great 18 months or so with JPOT the joys of living with a couple, their 4 year old daughter and the Albanian Rat Hound were starting to wear a little thin so the need to find a new abode was not as bad as it first seemed. After a few fruitless viewings of some quite frankly terrible places, I am now residing in a two bedroom flat just round the corner from where I was living before.
Having shared a house with random people for at least the last four years I had forgotten how pleasant having my own space is - the ability to just throw your coat on the floor, watch what you want on TV and being able to walk around the house in various states of undress is really rather brilliant. OK it is costing me far more than it was previously but given the points above (especially the ability to walk about in various states of undress) makes it all worth while. As an added bonus I now have a base to hit the Yorkshire Grit from when the autumn comes as well as someone to drink vast amounts of beer with in yet another city! Now all I need to do is get the incompetent fuckos that are Virgin Media to connect me up to the internet and it will be a win win situation!!
Next up - the first tick on the 2009 list has been attained - I sold my faithful and much loved Golf and I now have a van after what seems like an awful lot of talking about it but not much in the way of action! The only slight problem with buying a van is that once I get the cosmetic things out of the way (removing the remainder of the signwriting and getting the near side sill touched up) I have to fit it out which is just as daunting as when I walked out of the bank with a large bundle of £20notes to pay for it in the first place! While I am not planning a full on camper conversion the list is still proving to be rather daunting. At the moment it runs something like this:
Fit leisure batteries and charging system.
Insulate floor, sides, tailgate and roof.
Fit interior lights and other miscelleneous power sockets.
Build in storage space with a sleeping platform.
Last but not least put in a decent sound system.
Once that little lot has been sorted then potential additions to the wish list include:
Lowering it by around 30mm, getting it on some nice 17" alloys.
Fitting some sort of heating system.
Adding reversing sensors (due to be possessed of great moments of doubt when it comes to parking at the minute)!!
Tweaking the central locking so that it only opens the front doors when it is unlocked on the first press of the key fob thing.
To say the least just getting the main things on the list done is going to involve a very steep learning curve and while there is a wealth of information available on the web a lot of the time it's sorting out just what is relevant to your own personal project and then putting it into practice. On the plus side I get to play with electrics, big fuck off saws, drills and the like so with a bit of PMA this is another win win situation and also loads of content for the blog!
With all this going on in my life it should come as no surprise to learn that I haven't been getting out climbing much but equally surprising what little I have done seems to be going quite well and I feel that I am close (read as I now think it is very possible) to attaining a new baseline in my bouldering and getting Font6b ticked. As my one constant reader knows all too well I have been in the ballpark for getting the tick for a while with Murky Rib at Brimham but a lack of composure at the top results in the send getting stolen from me. Anyway a while back I spent a brilliant session with Duncan Disorderly, Lord Loggington and a few select others at Curbar - started off doing a few things on Trackside and got some much needed beta on Strawberries but it felt miles away so we went to have a look at The Ultimate Gritstone Experience.
Now if ever there was a project to make me all rad and syked this is it - TUGE is one big, gently overhanging fridge hugger of a boulder that requires a degree of shoulder power to get it in the satch. It also has some decent footholds on it so in other words it's perfectly suited to my "talents" and while I am only trying it from a stander at the minute (lowering the grade from 6c to 6b) it is still an awesome bloc. I actually had my hand over the top at one point but a duff sequence resulted in too much cutting loose which led inevitably to thin skin and no tick. To be honest though just being out with a great team with great syke made it a damn good day regardless!
A few days later I spent an equally pleasant day out with Sloper (strange but true) at Curbar, and even now, weeks after the event, I still can't believe that I haven't actually ticked 6b. I made massive progress on Strawberries to the point where I had done the "hard" move and my hand was on the jug. Now it was at this point where I tried to put what I had learnt with my repeated failures on Murky Rib into practice - I had the jug and it felt good so I relaxed... and promptly fell off which caused much angst complete with wailing, gnashing of teeth and redistribution of woodchips! I tried a couple more times but I had beasted myself making the progress that I had so the decision was made to sack it off for the time being and off we went off to visit TUGE again.
As I have already mentioned my sequence for TUGE is less than perfect but I managed to iron out the worst of the cutting loose issues and found a way to make the moves up the right hand arete slightly less strenuous but even so it was pretty obvious that there no chance of the tick that day. Still I now have two Font 6b's in the same area that I know I have more than a fighting chance of doing and in addition I have got the hard moves for Ben's Wall pretty sorted - just the high ball top section to get around now - eeek!!
For now though it is coming to the end of bouldering season (for the grit at least) so it is time to think about a bit of slimestone bouldering, dusting off the trad rack ready to get scared on a bit of string again and hopefully get a bit of fitness in preparation for eight days on bolts in Italy at the end of the month.
Finally for anyone who actually cares the title is a song track off One Speed Bike's excellent album Someone Told Me Life Gets Easier In Your 50’s.
I had already made up my mind to avoid drilling into the floor pan as it was going to be a right royal pain in the arse crawling under the van to seal all the screw holes that would result if I did. Instead I devised a cunning plan to tie the frame into the haulage loops (or whatever the proper name for them is). To be honest this really worked out well - short of a nuclear explosion there is no way that the frame will ever move.
Finally after four days and a lot of cursing and the like finish off boarding out the floor. 
