Just SEND it, CRUSHER MCGHEE!!!

Pitch 3 of the Rostrum
The Rostrum from the approach. 1300 feet of perfect crack climbing

Another goal for this summer is to climb the Nose again

This is my current "proj. O' tha week"- Just Send It 5.13b

I just turned 31 (ouch!). Lateley, it's dawned on me that I'm not getting any younger and that some of my goals in life (at least athletic goals) are only going to get harder to accomplish the longer I wait to achieve them. Because of this reasoning I've been fairly focused and dedicated to really pushing myself at climbing this fall. This spring I really pushed myself on the bike working up to a 100 mile mountain bike race. I saw first hand how my hard work paid off when I easily finished the race and beat out many other, more experienced, "lifers" in the race. With that mentality, I've been really trying to bump up my climbing ability into the 5.13 range. That means projecting climbs that at first seem nearly impossible to even reach the top, let alone reach the top without falling for a clean ascent. Then as you work the moves, find suitable rests, develop certain strategies and little tricks to make the movements of the climb easier, you eventually get to the point that you can climb from bottom to top without falling on fairly desperate(for me at least) terrain. With that said, my new "proj o' tha week" is a climb at Fern Buttress called Just Send It, a 5.13b sport climb that climbs super technical and is about as powerful a climb as I've ever been on. It's real close to my trad line, Portley Gent's Route, that I completed this Fall. I one-hung Just Send it twice yesterday so now its just a matter of time before I tame the beast and on to the next line but there is something magical about the process of learning movements on hard lines that I'm getting more and more addicted to. Hopefully all of this hard work will pay off this summer when I head to Yosemite for a 3 week climbing trip. One of my goals (for a long time) has been to free climb the Rostrum, a 11c 12 pitch route in Yosemite.

TICKING PROJECTS, HOME IMPROVEMENT, SOLOING, AND TRYING TO KEEP MY COOL !!

The past few weeks have been BUSY to say the least. We moved into our new house and had the endless amount of errands associated with moving into a new home. Everything from setting up internet and TV; to pricing home insurance; to getting the odds and ends to make living more comfortable. On top of that, we were slammed by the Fayette County school system to jump through all the hoops of getting all of our paper work in, take our drug tests, get our transcripts sent, etc. At the same time I've been trying to do some of the more simpler tasks around our house that I can do before it gets cold. One day I put up storm windows on the many windows all over our house. A few days were spent cleaning out our crawl space under the house to lay down a vapor barrier. Tracy's dad and I fixed the sump pump and insulated some of our water pipes.

As if that wasn't enough, I've been taking full advantage of the fall season trying to climb as much as possible. I've been slowly ticking away at some of my projects here at the New River Gorge but the MORE I CLIMB, THE MORE PROJECTS I ACCUMULATE. So far this fall (ok, here comes the chest pounding, egocentric-driven bragging) I've climbed Portley Gentlemen's Route (12c trad), Skull Fuck (12c), Shang (12d), Made in the Shade (12c/d), Dining at the Altar (12a), Pettifogger (12c), Thunderstruck (12b), Finders Keepers (12b/c), Go Cat Go (12b), Reallignment (10d trad), Preffered Dynamics (11d mixed), Butterbeans (10a trad), and a good two-dozen other routes that I can't seem to recall right now. Oh and I SOLOED THE DADDY, a 400 foot route in Linville Gorge that looks amazing from the rim of the ampitheatre and doesn't disappoint when climbing it. It has crack climbing, slab, face climbing, and even a small overhang on it. It was awesome. Bachar would have been proud.

We went to Bridge day and froze our ass watching people jump off the bridge while eating our Pork BBQ sandwiches. I drank alot of beer.

I'll try to get photos from Tracy to post.
Until then.

UPDATE THIS BLOGDIGGITY SON!

This is the house we are currently "camping" in until we officially close on the house below which we are buying. We sleep on a camping mat with sleeping bags as our blankets. Our clothes are in duffel bags, or better yet, scattered around the floor.
Our new house. It was built in 1896 and has loads of charm.

Camping with Tracy's parents while house hunting at the New.

That's me climbing out of Summersville Lake on the overhanging cliffs that surround it. This lake is only 20 minutes from our new house.

Kayaking Saranac Lake. We are about 5 miles into our journey and just saw a row of baby ducks following their mommy. Little did we know that our serene trip was about to turn epic when the sky unleashed the fury of 50 mile an hour winds and waves that drenched us completely. I was loving every minute of it.

This is Tracy following the 2nd pitch of a route in the Adirondacks that we did together. It was a bit scary because this pitch traversed a good bit and didn't have the best of gear so if she would have fallen she would have taken a 30 foot whipper about 100 feet off the deck. Kinda spooky for her and a little nerve racking for me as well. She got through it ok and we finished the pitch (which was awesome) and topped out.

Hiking up to Rooster's Comb in Keene Valley, NY

Gina (my little sister) graduated this summer from JMU.

I climbed with old man Steve this spring for a long weekend where we climbed both the Glass Menagerie at Looking Glass (probably the best big wall route on the East Coast) and the Original Route at Whitesides.

Bodhi and Roxy became best friends while we were living with Tracy's parents immediately returning from Kosovo. Roxy became a good girl learning from Bodhi and Bodhi got some of his spunk back because both Daddy, Mommy, and the young Roxy were now back in his life.

I'm alive and doing well cyber geeks and geekettes, or anyone else who reads this ramble of mine. Anyways, it has been months since I've updated so let me fill you in on a few things and bring you up to speed.

We left Kosova and spent nearly a month in Northern VA with Tracy's parents looking for jobs and trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do. Remember we didn't have a car, job, a place to live, not even a bed to our name. But we had all the outdoor gear you would ever want, :) the important stuff. After a month of staying with Tracy's folks and eating all of their food I finally found a job in the Queen City- Charlotte, NC. I reasoned that Charlotte would be a good move for us because the city is new, housing is affordable (way more than NOVAs), great climbing areas, in fact some of the best on the East Coast, are within a couple of hours of Charlotte, and the job seemed to ideal. I would be teaching 6th grade world history at an IB magnet school. OHHH, that's sounds fancy and prestigous. Just to make sure that the school was ideal and lived up to my expectations, Tracy and I took the 6 hour drive down to Charlotte to meet up with the principal and tour the school. Well, Mrs. Dee Gardner gave us the grand tour showing us the ballet dance room, the old fashioned auditorium, even the high tech media lab, aka library for you old school folks out there. We were convinced that this was the place for us. It actually sounded too good to be true. WELL IT WAS!!!!

Within an hour of my first day at school I realized that this was gonna be another tough 6 months. My students (i found this out later on the first day) were all what they labeled "open" students. Meaning that they didn't belong at the school because of their test scores, reading levels, and general behavior record was not adequate but instead were allowed by Charlotte Mecklenburg (CMS-or politcal corrupto ignorantamus as I like to call them) to join the school with the hope that they would be heavily influenced by the strong academics and moral conduct of the other half of students who actually belonged in a magnet IB school. By the way, for those who don't know, IB stands for International Bachleaureate (didn't spell that right and too lazy to look it up right now) which basically means that these students are working towards an Internation based diploma with hopes to go to an international university. The cream of the crop so to speak. HA! My kids were the cream of the crop all right, the crop which is armed robbery at 17, dealing drugs and repeat offender by 18, petty car theif by night, and southern low ballin slingin gangster by day just trying to play the game. Most of my kids (and I mean most, like maybe 10 out of 120) were just plain horrible. Obviously we could go on forever about who's fault this was. The obvious answers of absentee dad, cracked out mama, older brother who is a bad influence, no place to live, no money, the white man, etc. but the point is that they were not fit for a public school environment and I had to deal with them on a daily basis. Spitting, stealing, fighting, cursing, and everything else you can think of was par for the course. Everyone of the teachers outside in the trailers with me was overly stressed out. We were a band of red eyed, red faced, constantly sick, frizzled hair, heart, and mind trying to, uh, make a difference. RIGHT! We had lost motivation and nothing was going to bring it back .

The coping mechanisms of my fellow teachers were hilarious at times, as I'm sure mine were to them. We had Mr. King who treated his job as a Math teacher as a prison warden would. He issued garbage detail duty to kids during lunch, held a cardio boot camp during recess for his most horrible students, and tried at all cost to keep his kids behaved and put on the facade that he in fact had these kids in control. The last week of school he was forced to leave early because of an incident in which he got into a student's face screaming at her. Nuff said. Then we have Mrs. Peterson who did her best, like me, but for all her effort was barely hanging on. Teachers we weren't. Behavior monitors, or better yet, guards we were. Then we had Mr. Carter who cared deeply about these kids but literally let his kids run all over him and his classroom. At the end of the day Mr. Carter's room looked like a bomb went off in it. It was truly unbelievable.

So... nuff said about my shitty Charlotte teaching job. At the end of the school year I told my principal I wouldn't return. She didn't care this was the norm for this school to turn over teachers every year, plus because of budget cuts I wasn't going to get a renewed contract anyway. Win, win I guess. Win for me for sure. Oh, I forgot to tell you that during this time Tracy was hired to teach at another middle school in Charlotte, but not a "prestigous" school like mine. Well, to make a long story short, Tracy hated her job. She came home in tears at least once a week and from what I saw in her it seemed as if her spirit had been broken. I tried to convince her to quit the job and that we could find a way to make it work but she wouldn't. She stuck it out like me. By the end of the summer we were fried and we were in desperate need of a good vacation.

But before I tell you about my vacation, I need to mention the good things about Charlotte. I met some new friends who rejuvenated my love of mountain biking. Thanks Ryan, Thomas, and Lance for getting me back into biking. Ryan and i sure had some fun, yet scary as hell for me, rides in Pisgah. Ryan can ride downhill at a speed that scares teh living shit out of me so just trying to follow him his a task in itself. He and the other guys influenced me to sign up for my very first mountain bike race, the Shenandoah 100, a 100 miles of backcounty trail riding with 14,000 feet of elevation gain and nearly as much descent.

So about our vacation. We left for the Adirondacks in upstate New York for some mountainization. We climbed at Spiders Web, the Beer Walls, Pitch off Chimney, and Chapel Pond. We hiked up to peaks like Roosters Comb and the Gothics, we paddled Saranac Lake, we ate the world's heaviest pizza in Lake Placid, and we met Pat and Mike at camp and laughed at their crazy noob stories where, "Man, we should have DIED today" started their conversation. They were great and I hope we get the chance to see them again.

While we were at the Daks (that's what cool people call them) we applied for teaching jobs in Fayette county, WV -home of the New River Gorge and best climbing area on the East Coast. When we returned to Charlotte we continued to look for jobs, interview, and figure out things as far as career goes. After many internet searches, interview in Brevard, cover letter and resumes sent, and numerous trips to Fayetteville to hound the Board of Education for jobs we luckily were both hired in Fayetteville. We currently are about to move into our first house (which is awesome) and we live in a climber's dream town. So things are generally good. Now only if get my students to care about learning and things would be awesome.

SHEHEMI PRISHTINA!!!

Andrea and Kevin's wedding
The happy groom, my new brother

Kevin, Andrea, Gina, and Tracy at the rehearsal dinner

Vienna, Austria at Christmas

Vienna on route to Washington DC

Qendressa has graced us with her presence in Sophomore 2

There are hippies, goths, and homeboys in Kosova

These 3 on the right are responsible for at least 4 new gray hairs on my head. Denis "You talkin to me!"

The Russian Kosovars . Notice the fashionable hats.

That's it time to choke Eti the White Gangsta

Eti aka "G Unit"

Besart aka "Afro-boy"

Peter-our token Bulgarian in Junior 3

Junior 3

Man, who's that ugly dude in the middle?

Girls in Junior 3.

More girls in Junior 3.

Watch out students. The next one who starts talking has to answer to the bazooka.

Krenare and Doruntina serving cake

Eating lunch will Sophomore 4 at Qebabtore, sorry Gezim, Ben Af will have to wait for another day.

Gezim and Ron ready to make an escape

Gent is taking no prisoners

Sami on guard

Sophomore 4: Knights holding court at the round table

Sophomore 2

Granit and Alban goofing off.

Sophomore 4

So a lot has happened since my last post. I left my job teaching history in Kosovo, came back to the states during the worst economy since the Great Depression (with no job, house, or car bear in mind), helped my mom move out of my childhood home and into a new house, attended my sister Andrea's wedding up in NY, landed a job teaching 6th Grade Social Studies in Charlotte, NC and I am now planning the move to my new home in the South Park District of Charlotte (I'm going be living in Southpark, that's kinda funny, it just damned on me) Whew, what a whirlwind of a past month.

So I'll start from the beginning. My job in Kosova was horrible. I could tell by the first month that I didn't like teaching there but I tried to make it work. After coming from such a great school to ASK I was shocked and horrified to realize how things were done. It was a constant area of frustration, stress, and discontent for me that I ultimately was never able to see past. Alot of my friends and family asked was it the students, or the people there that you didn't like. And my answer is always the same, "No my students were generally great, better than your average American student. Much more initiative, a lot more curiosity, and a good bit more courteous. I loved my students." I would add, "Kosovars are wonderful people. I had nothing but good experiences with the locals. They were loving, generous, open, and genuine people. I would go back in a heart beat, to visit, that is." This is when I would get to the root of my crux while living in Kosovo. I would explain, "I learned many things in my short four and half month stay over in Kosovo, but the most important things were what I learned about myself. I learned that I love America, and being American, more than I ever had before living in Kosova. I learned that I'm not a city guy. I love the sights, sounds, arts, culture, and general chaos for a visit but not on a regular basis. One of my favorite bands growing up, Fugazi, had this line in one of their songs that never rang more true until I lived in a city. "Concrete and chaos rise up as one." Fugazi were right. Peace, beauty, and true vitality, although alive in the city, always seemed cloaked by the dingy cityscape and choked by the seemingly urgence of such non importance that is bred in urban moderne.

Ok enough with all the hippy dippity shit. Students, co-workers, and traveling was great. The daily 9 to 5 was intolerable. I will definitely miss it and my students made sure that I would miss them by all of the cakes, presents, and festivities that we had our last week of classes together. If you are reading this students I can honestly say that I will never forget any of you and I truly hope that you will keep in touch and let me know if you are visiting the states. I am going to open up a facebook account just for you guys once I get the chance to. My wife has said for years that I need to get on facebook but I have always resisted arguing that I don't want to spend that much time on the computer. I guess the time has come for me to jump into the 21st century. I'm gonna try to visit Kosova again in summer of 2011 to see my sophomores graduate. Alright I will let the photos and videos tell you the rest of the story of this crazy month. They sure are funny.

A FEW VIDEOS

Me trying to unlock the sequence on the perfect tree in Meteora Greece. I'm obsessed, what can I say.

Traffic Jam on the Monastery road in Meteora.

MY BIG FAT GREEK VACATION

Leaving on the train in Thessoliniki (by the way these pictures are in reverse order- I dunno, I'm an idiot).
This the outside market in Thessoliniki. Notice all the meat hanging. There were all kinds of meats, fishes, vegetables, and other "old world" products.

One of the monasteries in Meteora

Tracy topping out a cool boulder in Meteora.

Some of our passes from the monasteries.

My lady of the woods.

All of these human skulls were in one of the monasteries. I swear it was something out Indiana Jones.

A little cairn we made to mark one of the "trails" we took while exploring.

Look closely and you can see this mank ring on one of the climbs.

Pulling party tricks in a valley in Meteora.

Meteora terrain

More Meteora terrain shooting out of window in a monastery.

More human skulls. We found about 20 human skulls and leg bones just sitting outside at one of the monasteries. I'd never seen any shit like that before.

I should have taken one of these now that I think about it.

The view from our apartment in Meteora. I loved this place. I just needed a drill, about 200 bolts, and a healthy finger and I would have gone to town.

Tracy climbing

Outdoor model of the year :)

More Meteora terra firma. These pics don't do it any justice. It was such a beautiful contrast of gray and orange stone with bright vibrant hues of green in the grass, moss, and foliage.

Mist shrouding the rock pinacles in Meteora

A perfectly positioned 40 meter pinacle

This particular morning we took the road less traveled and I was able to convince Tracy to follow me up through a gully with some 4 class terrain and down another to reach a huge valley where we hiked out of and up to our first monastery of the trip.

In the town of Kastraki. What a cool little town. We stayed here and it felt as if you woke up along with the monoliths.

A local church in Kastraki. By the end of our trip we were thinking of ways how we could live here for a few years.

Downtown Thessoliniki

Old fortress tower used to look out for the Turks.

Pizza Hut in Greek.

Starbucks in Greece.

Looking out into the Adriatic. If you look closely enough you can make out snow capped mountains in the distance. It was beautiful.

Some of the bikes in Thessoliniki. I swear people rode everything from scooters to dirtbikes to crazy rigs like this BMW deal.

I saw many different music fliers for great musicians but don't worry they still have Greek Geek acts like this one for "Theosoroius the Love Crooner".

You know the city is good when they have Pink Floyd tribute bands and bring acts like Public Enemy, Motorhead, and Iron Maiden into the hizzy.

One good thing (and really the only good thing) about teaching at our school is that we get both American holidays and local holidays off. This makes for many long weekends. Over Thanksgiving (God I missed that Turkey, pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes, stuffing, drool, drool, drool) we took advantage of the 4-day weekend and disembarked to the land of the grape leaf, or the land of slavaki, or the land of the gyro; or as I learned the land of the Greek staple- Lamb meat. I always felt kind of bad eating a poor, little, cute, lamb but after a few juicy tender bites I made my peace with it and grubbed like a fatty mcgee.

Well to make a long story short, our trip down there was epic. We missed the bus out of Prishtina to Skopje. Because we needed to make our 4pm train from Skopje to Thessoliniki we had no choice but give in to the road pirates and pay the 65Euros to get to Skopje. Fucking outrageous! Then, to add more stress and complication into the matter, we come to find that no train is leaving Skopje at 4 pm but instead the train now leaves at 8am. Well, this wouldn't have been so bad if we actually enjoyed Skopje and hadn't booked a hotel in Thessolinki for the night. After a bit of weighing out our options we decided it would be best to take another taxi to the Greek border and from there catch a shuttle bus to Thessoliniki. Once again we hand over our hard (and I mean years off your life HARD) earned money to the road pirate and spend the next 3 hours in a nicotine torture chamber. Awesome, this is exactly how I pictured my BIG FAT GREEK VACATION to start. Finally, we reach the Greek border and we look for our connecting shuttle to Thessoliniki like the taxi driver assured us there would be. Duped again!! That's right, of course there's no shuttle. Once again, we pay yet another road pirate to get us to Thessoliniki. Finally, after nearly 8 hours of travelling, 200 Euros less, and me boiling mad at the circumstances you get into not having a car, we finally reach Thessoliniki. After a short walk we crash for the night and hope that the next few days will be much better.

After a good nights rest and a free breakfast with REAL COFFEE (that made my day right there) we head out into the city to explore. Right away I felt about a million, no make that a gazillion times better walking around this city than in Prishtina. Thessoliniki was a real city with diversity in culture, food, music, art, architecture, etc. It is also beautiful with its location right on the adriatic. A few things came as a surprise to me: 2 out of every 5 people drive a scooter or motorcycle in the city, Americana rings loud in Thessoliniki with music acts such as Public Enemy and Strike Anywhere fliers pasting buildings, Starbucks on every other block. Ruby Tuesdays, TGIFridays, Applebees, and even Pizza Hut serving food in the city, and name brands like General Electric, Ford, McDonalds, Shell Gas, competing and probably outselling many of the local brands with the amount of billboards they were advertised on. Another thing that surprised me was how good I felt being in a clean (well as far as cities go) and modern environment.

After picking up our rental car (this car cost 18 Euros a day to rent compared to the 60 a day in Prishtina) we hightailed (or so we thought we would) it out of the city to where we would spend the majority of our trip- Meteora Greece. Navigating in Greece proved tougher than we thought. As I was driving trying desperately to not get into an accident or kill one of the thousand maniacal scooter drivers whizzing in and out of traffic, Tracy was reading road signs and checking our crappy Greek road map. Needlsess to say we lost over an hour taking countless wrong turns while we screamed at each other blaming the other for not doing his/her "job". Finally, we made out of the city. Whew!!!

Now, between yesterday's taxi musical chairs and today's navigational horror show the stress meter was redlining. As we began climing into the hills of the central Greek countryside both of us began to cool down and started to downright enjoy our vacation. We put on some traditional Greek music and rocked (uh, maybe rocked is not the word) out as we drove towards Meteora. After we couldn't take the Greek music anymore we tried the American rock station. Some of it was good and other songs were the absolute worst hair band rock acts of the 80s. Nothing like cruising through Greece at 140km/hr blasting some Poison knock off band.

I knew of Meteora because of my rock climbing obsession but we didn't chose it solely on the climbing. I knew that it was an absolutely beautiful location with ancient monasteries perched on monoliths nearly 1000 meters high in some places. I also knew that between the culture, natural beauty, and outdoor activities we would both enjoy it. When we finally arrived we were not disappointed. Pictures don't do this place justice but its all I have to share with you guys until I see you and then I'm sure I chew your ear off with stories. I'm getting tired and don't feel like typing much more so I'll let the pictures and captions tell you the rest.

OLD MAN WINTER CAME KNOCKING

The old, abandoned Serbian church

A few birds trying to get some food from a plant poking out of the snow

Pro-Credit Bank in downtown Prishtina

In front of our school, American School of Kosova

This past Saturday I awoke to a heavy snow falling. I remember wondering why it looked so light outside in the middle of the night when I had briefly awoken, but I shrugged it off to my imagination. Finally, around 6am when I got up for good I looked out the window and saw a blanket of white snow covering as far as I could see in the city. Immediately I felt the buzz that a snow storm gives me. It was as if the city was transformed into an entirely new environment. I knew from the swelling feeling inside me that I needed to submerge myself in the new environment. I also had this trip planned with my Outdoor Club from school in which we were suppose to meet at 7:30 am and go on a day hike in Matka Canyon, Macedonia. As I walked to school I realized that the chances of most of the kids showing up was slim, and even slimmer chance of getting the buses to do the 2 hr drive to Matka.

When I arrived at school only 1 student, Krenare, was there. She had the same buzz as I and was ready to make the most of this new environment. Within a few minutes another student arrived, Sami. He too was one of us. As a group of 3 we waited around for awhile for any other students but none came. We took one look at the bus which was running and ready to go, but decided that the rear tires were so bald, and the roads were to bad to risk the drive to Matka. So, we did the next best thing and walked through the city and made our way to Germia Park where we could get into the woods and hike the snowed in trails. Krenare wanted to take photos of the snowed in city so she went her separate way. Sami and I spent the next 7 hours or so hiking, helping stuck cars get out, and talking about life. It was great to connect on a different level with one of my students. Sami is an extremely bright kid with a great perspective on things. It was great to share with him and learn from him throughout the day. He hopes one day to design cars. I have no doubt that if that's the path he continues on, that sure enough, one day he will be the one shaping the future look of automobiles. Here are a few pictures that I took from the day.