Nearly Finished

Well I have completed all my chapters, now I just have to wait for the boss to read them. In other exciting news I went climbing on Sunday at mount piddington in the blue mountains and did a staggering three climbs in a full day. Still it was really nice to practise leading and I have a slight suspicion that some of my placements may have even held if I had slumped on them gently. Still managed to climb the wrong route at the end of the day due to guide book error. This ended up being a bit of screw up as it took me quite a while to battle up this other route as it was a 16, which should have been quite easy. However, it was raining making the less than positive holds rather unpleasant and the bolting was rather archaic and very well spaced out, nonetheless after scaring myself a bit by nearly falling as I went to clip until I noticed a reasonable foot hold that made it a bit easier I eventually made it up despite a huge amount of rope drag. The immense rope drag mainly being caused by the two wet single ropes that I was trying to use as a pair of doubles on a 55m pitch, the huge dogleg in the climb wasn't helping much either. After getting to the top and setting up a pretty crap anchor I then tried to belay up Dimpy but couldn't see him or hear him and I sure as hell couldn't feel his weight on the end of the rope due to the drag, so just pulled as hard as I could and hoped for the best and after a while he made it to the top. We then proceeded to cock up our decent. As the belay anchors had been removed from the top of the route and the tree we were belaying off was a long way from the edge we decided to find a better tree to abseil off further down the cliff. About 60m further on we found a nice sturdy eucalypt to abseil off but what looked like nice from the top turned out to be rather interesting experience through alot of scrub and the top of a tree. To top it off the ropes still couldn't be pulled anyway and we had to walk back around to the top of the cliff to get them in the dark. Anyway if you are ever climbing hocus pocus a three star 10 at piddo the guide (2003 or 2002?) is wrong the climb is actually a bit further to the right.

Not doing much

Slowly dribbling towards the completion of my thesis so I haven't been doing much lately.
I did get to have a meeting with Jean-Marie Lehn as part of a lecture series that he is giving in Australia. As he is a Nobel prise winner I though a good 50 people or so people would show up and I could just stand at the back looking gormless and not have to do anything. Sadly only about 10 people showed up and they were all nearly as slack as I was so for most of the 20 excruciating minutes Jean-Marie asked us questions.
Also managed to wander around the Olympic Park with Simon and Marty and see a few critter namely a nice blue tongue and some long neck turtles as well as a double barred finch.