Wow, where have the past four months gone?

I've been really bad about posting so I'm going to try and do better and catch folks up on some of the fun things we've been doing.

The spring semester was really hard for me. I taught a brand-new course and had a group of very difficult students but I survived and I have learned a few things that will (hopefully) minimize such problems in the future. However the process of getting to this point involved quite a bit of hair pulling and beating my head against the wall.

There were some really great points in the past four months though. We went to Costa Rica for ten days in March and have some really great photos that I will share in my next post (which will be in the next day or so instead of in another four months!). I also went to Cambridge, Vienna and Prague with a group of humanities professors from my school (I was one of two token scientists) which was an amazing experience and I'll try to post photos from that trip before the end of the week. In between and ever since, we've been hiking and canyoneering like crazy people. Unfortunately my last camera died in a canyon right around the time of my last post. This may be part of the reason I haven't posted as much. I got a replacement in time for the trip to Europe but haven't taken it in a canyon yet. I have already begun to rectify this with a short trip to the north rim of the Grand Canyon but it will probably be next month before I get any additional photos to share.

Why next month? Because last week we did Fat Man's Misery (the wrong way) on Wednesday and then Orderville on Friday. These are both beautiful canyons. Orderville is a very easy canyon that then feeds into the Narrows of Zion. However, Fat Man's Misery, while normally not easy but doable, turned into quite a challenge for us because we parked the cars in the wrong place and ended up hiking the normal ~4miles to and through the canyon and then (what I estimate) nine miles upstream in a river and another mile overland to get to the car instead of the 2.5 miles we were supposed to do after the canyon. Not only did we have to hike that extra distance but we had to hustle out of the canyon because we started to hear thunder and you DO NOT want to be in a canyon if there is a storm because of the risk of flash floods. In fact, we probably should not have been in there at all that day but the weather predictions were a bit off and the sky looked clear when we started out. Fortunately we only experienced cold rain but it still made for a miserable day of slogging through the river and at the end of it all I developed runner's knee.

Yes, I developed a condition called runner's knee from canyoneering. I am nothing if not creative in how I get my injuries.

So this means that I am out of commission for a few weeks while this thing heals. This is a bummer since the summer is the time when we get to go canyoneering without freezing our butts off. It's also the only time we really have to travel. In reality, I've been pretty lucky. We had some really awful conditions for going into a slot canyon and the worst thing that happened is that my knee is a bit inflamed. Am I allowed to feel old in my 30's?