{"id":2960,"date":"2014-03-25T23:58:37","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T03:58:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=2960"},"modified":"2014-03-26T19:31:38","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T23:31:38","slug":"climbing-blood-work-houses-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=2960","title":{"rendered":"Climbing, blood work, houses, food"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Climbing goes. I actually had a really good day today&#8230; got my first top-out on the big top-out wall (this yellow V2 route that Austin is climbing):<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514climb1.JPG\" \/><br \/>\nand also got my first real V2\/3. (I&#8217;d gotten a few V2\/3s before, but they were clearly misrated V1\/2s or V2s.)<br \/>\nHere&#8217;s the view (and Maja) from the top of the wall.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514climb2.JPG\" \/><br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been dumping climbing photos at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alanv.org\/p\">my photos site<\/a> in case that interests you. March climbing will be dumped after Friday, since that&#8217;s the last climbing day of the month.<\/p>\n<p>In other less happy news, I went and had a routine physical at the beginning of February and had routine blood work done as a part of it. I have now been billed over $300 (after insurance) for the blood work, since apparently they sent the blood to a hospital to process, and I got charged a bunch of hospital rates for the work. Sigh. At least I have insurance&#8230; it would be well over $600 without. But I am never getting blood work done again. :\\<br \/>\n&#8230;And they wonder why people are reluctant to seek medical services.<\/p>\n<p>House hunting continues. It had been slim pickings for a while, but the market seems to be heating up now that the weather is starting to heat up. We saw two houses this past weekend that were interesting.<br \/>\nThe first one had a huge, two-story, covered-in-glass room in the back that was really nice. Unfortunately the rest of the house was not so great&#8230; it had &#8220;three&#8221; bedrooms, but one was really awkwardly shaped to be used for anything but an office, and the second had a built-in desk that would make it weird to put a bed in. The kitchen was also rather tiny and had no counter space.<br \/>\nThe second had &#8220;four&#8221; bedrooms, but one wouldn&#8217;t have fit a queen bed, a second wouldn&#8217;t have fit *any* bed, and the third in the third floor had the stairs in the middle such that you can&#8217;t fit anything other than a couch-mode futon in there. So that was fun. They were also asking way too much for it, according to our agent.<\/p>\n<p>In other things, Ben was in town late last week for Simiao&#8217;s match day for med school. She got her first choice (yay!) and afterward we all went to dinner at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.curepittsburgh.com\/\">Cure<\/a>.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s probably the fanciest restaurant I&#8217;ve been to (at least on-par with Salt of the Earth and Toast), and featured a lot of interesting things. The menus were on nice wooden cutting boards.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure1.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Simiao&#8217;s drink had little fruit juice beads on an orange peel that looked like caviar and mine had a super-thin slice of some fruit with fruity foam on top.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure2.JPG\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure3.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Juice beads made another appearance in Greg&#8217;s cream of mushroom soup, this time in a lime variant. The soup was poured at the table into a plate containing crab meat and other tasty things.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure4.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Simiao got the foie blonde, which came with delicious crumbly pistachio stuff, and Lilli&#8217;s beef tartare had some odd foamy gel stuff.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure5.JPG\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure6.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The food was, of course, delicious. Greg was not eating meat that day, and was contemplating ordering the lamb gnocchi minus the meat. In the end, he ordered the chef&#8217;s vegetarian special and was pleasantly surprised by gnocchi, minus meat, plus veggies.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure7.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I ordered the spaghetti carbonara as a safe choice (I really don&#8217;t like my meat red, and they don&#8217;t serve meat over medium-rare here), and it was delicious. The egg was gummy, so it was cooked through but not so much that it was hard&#8230; Simiao thought they&#8217;d probably done it sous-vide. Delicious.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure8.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Everyone else got hanger steak.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure9.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Dessert was also very good&#8230; Ben got chocolate souflee cake while Greg, Simiao, Lilli, and I had frozen creme brulee with passion fruit and blood orange.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure10.JPG\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/032514cure11.JPG\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Ben was silly and paid for the whole thing. Poop on you. But thanks very much. :) It was tasty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Climbing goes. I actually had a really good day today&#8230; got my first top-out on the big top-out wall (this yellow V2 route that Austin is climbing): and also got my first real V2\/3. (I&#8217;d gotten a few V2\/3s before, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=2960\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,17,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climbing","category-food","category-houses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}