Finally

I'm back, and I'm hoping it's for good this time. I finally got Internet access in my apartment, but it's much slower than I'd like since my roommate took charge of setting it up. But oh well. I'll take what I can get.

Work is good, though today one of the cats (we like to call him Chubbs or Fatty because he looks like a hippo) was playing a little too forcefully and hooked his claw deep into my finger. Since I'm allergic to cats, my finger didn't take this so well and is swollen to almost twice the size. It's been nearly five hours now and it still is difficult to bend, so I might not be typing much tonight.

On the dating front, I have two blind dates set up this week: one Friday, the other Saturday morning. I'm excited about one but not the other. The Friday night date I'm not looking forward to considering the poor guy bores me to tears just talking to him on the phone. The second guy sounds really nice on the phone and has many of the same interests I do. I've been waiting a while to go out with him because he took off to China for a few weeks on vacation, and then I was gone the past two weekends hiking and camping.

Which brings me to what I've been up to lately. A week ago I went with my family to Bryce Canyon overnight so we could go hiking. It was a lot of fun, but four hours of hiking up and down mountains wore me out. However, it was a great warm up to this weekend when I went camping for three days in Zion National Park. (I have lots of great photos, but I'll post those later because I'm too tired to download them to my computer right now.)

My friend and I went on three good-length hikes. The first, Angel's Landing, was incredible but it really made me nervous at points. Those afraid of heights, and especially those afraid of walking along the edge of a cliff on both sides with only a chain to hold onto, are not encouraged to go on this hike. People fall off and die more frequently than I'd care to think about. In fact, the friend I went with informed me today that the most recent time someone fell off and died was in June.

We also hiked through the Narrows quite a ways, getting wet up to waist deep, which wasn't terribly pleasant when night started coming on. The weather was wonderful considering it is the middle of October, but it did get pretty chilly at night. The last hike was also up a mountain, some of it going along cliff edges with only chains to hold onto, but it was gorgeous. It's called Hidden Canyon, and it's exactly that: a canyon hidden high up, with beautiful trees in the shade of tall walls of sandstone. One of the nicest things about the time of year was that some of the trees were just starting to turn since autumn hits southern Utah later. The green, yellow, orange, and red leaves contrasted beautifully with the red and white sandstone.

That's about it for now. I'm still really tired, exhausted really, considering we hiked a long way and I'm still really out of shape. But it was really nice to get away for a while and not even think about work. Sigh. Now it's back to the grindstone, but at least I'm more relaxed and ready for life.