Long weekend, leg weakness, and lame writing

Last weekend Ashlee got some much appreciated R&R, but that wasn't quite the case for me. My weekend left me feeling more worn out than I've been in a long time, but it was worth it.

On Thursday I caugh a flight after work and eventually made it to Portland, OR. Eric (my brother) picked me up and we stayed at a friend's house that night. Friday we did some errands to prepare for Saturday's mountain adventure, but spent a few hours rock climbing as well. I have my Boy Scout merit badge in climbing, but that was completed on a wooden structure at a camp without touching an cold, hard, rock. This was essentially my first experience doing real rock climbing. So, how did it go? It was a lot of fun and I'm really glad we went. It turned out to be a great way to beat the heat (93F or something) but still do something outside.

That night we drove to a trailhead and slept under the stars (no tent even) so that we could get on the trail ASAP in the morning. That turned out to be 4:20am, which was later than we wanted, but was still a decent hour to begin our ascent of Mount Adams, the third highest of the Cascades. It may not be as well known as Mt. St. Helens or Mt. Hood, but it is taller. Mt. Rainier and Mt. Shasta are taller, but not quite doable when I was only in town for 3 night and 2 and a half days.

Our task was simple: climb about 7,000 feet from the traihead to the summit, eat lunch, enjoy the view, then ski down most of the way, and hike the rest of the way back to the car. For the most part, things went well, and it was a good trip. The ski down was the steepest I've been on in years which I and the others handled just fine. About 3/4 of the way down the real steep section a lose rock (dislodged by sun thaw) threatened all of our lives. It passed by Eric and I safely, but our companion was hit. He got a couple really nasty bruises that we thought might have been broken bones. He wasn't able to ski anymore as a result, and even once we slid him off the steep stuff, his walking was slow and painful. He turned out to be okay (no broken bones or other seriuos injuries) but or return to the car was delayed by about 6 hours.

Sunday was marked by my realization that forgetting sun-glassed AND goggles for the hike led to a bit of snowblindness. My eyes were in quite a bit of pain early on, but got much better as the day went on. I slept through both flights, and packed it in early that night. My long (in more ways than one) weekend was finally over.

Early this week I took it easy as I rested up from the trip, but I finally took the plunge and biked to work today. I had decided that I wanted to start riding as soon as possible because it won't be long before I have to leave the car in Phoenix and rely complety on two narrow road tires to get me everywhere I need to be. Considering the hassle it's been to get this bike commute ready (new wheel, new cassette spacer, new tubes, new lock, and borrowed pump), I'm pleased that the trip went really well both ways. My only complaint is that my legs were just starting to feel better from the weekend, but now they are sore in all new places. Oh well, being sore is satisfying.

Lame writing completes the title nicely and refers to my work. Before I got to Sandia the developer of the code SPPARKS (which I've mentioned before) had implemented an algorithm based on a paper written by a collegue of my boss. As it turned out, the SPPARKS version wasn't behaving anything like the paper reported. This was frustrating to the Sandians, and it became a side project for me. I was tasked with trying to uncover the problem, under the assumption that something in the SPPARKS code wasn't done correctly and that once we fixed it things would work. Well, this week I discovered that what was done in the collegue's actual code and what he wrote in the paper were not the same. Anyone in the research world knows that this is not only an unacceptable practice, but can be frustrating for people attempting to reproduce the author's results. We are convinced the SPPARKS implementation matches the description in the paper perfectly, but it doesn't work because the paper's description is incorrect. Not cool.