So, after around 4 years out of the harness and tight shoes, I finally came back to the sport of rock climbing. Lauren and I went to the gym with two of our friends (thanks for getting us out to the gym Aaron and Jenny!!) for a few hours of blood and sweat.

We went to Rocks and Ropes climbing gym on the other side of Tucson. It’s a very versatile gym with combination of grip-painted woodie walls and some “natural” panels that have the feel of a rock surface. They have a killer “natural” feeling boulder in the center for getting pumped quickly and a woodie cave in the upper level for horizontal fun.

There are no pictures to share of this event, but there will defiantly be some in the future since Lauren and I had a blast. I did a 5.7+ with one fall as my first climb back and then proceeded to do a 5.5 and 5.7 each with a fall. Lauren learned how to belay, did a few routes up and was quite successful at learning the basics of climbing. It won’t be long before it’s in her blood.

All I can say is that I’m definitely going to feel this one in the morning…

Tomorrow night, Lauren and I are going to a wine and cheese party thrown by some friends at my company and I have no clue what kind of cheese goes with each type of wine I have hidden away in my closet. After doing some quick searches on Google and weeding out all of the restaurants, I finally found a really well prepared website that helps people in the very predicament I’m currently in.

http://www.thewineman.com/winecheese.htm

From that site, it looks like bringing my bottle of Echelon Cabernet Sauvignon will go well with Brie, strong Cheddar, Camembert (whatever that is), and Danish Blue. I chose medium Cheddar to suit a wider range of people and because Lauren doesn’t like the strongest Cheddars… I’m thinking that it will work well enough to not be noticed.

I’d highly recommend checking that site out if you ever plan on going to or having your own wine and cheese party. I also found the following websites to be helpful as well: FoodNetwork Article and Global Gourmet Article

I’ve been looking for a good solution to adding cover art to my collection of MP3s for quite some time now and finally came across the perfect program to add the album covers to each track. That program is called “iTunes Art Importer” and can be found at http://www.yvg.com/itunesartimporter.shtml.

The program queries the Amazon.com database of images for the individual album covers and will embed the covers into each audio track. The only downfall is that it can’t automatically go through all of your songs and add the missing ones; you have to select the individual tracks for each album to search for the cover art. Except for that, it’s quite a nice little Windows application and would be useful to anyone that uses iTunes to manage their music collections.