It's not all rabbits all the time, I swear. This journal just makes it look that way, with smoke, mirrors, and um, six house rabbits. But lest this turn into the 24-Hour Lapin Channel ("All the news that's fit to chew"), I'll talk about how I was cockblocked on the ceiling last weekend.

There! Didn't see that coming, didya?

So for the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a climbing route that takes me up onto the ceiling of the smaller cave at PetraCliffs. It's the green route (for any PC-climbers who are reading this), the 5.9 El Dinero. It's on lead, and while it's terrifying in a kind of ceiling-involved way, the handholds are all really solid, jug handles as far as the eye can see, so really the hard part of the route is endurance. It's one long, burning, pleading conversation with your right arm (all the clips are left-handed) taking seven clips and winding up maybe 30 feet above the floor. Which is not that I'm poo-pooing the 30 feet. 30 feet is 30 feet, especially the closer you get to the 30 part, as opposed to the 0-feet-standing-on-the-ground part. But I digress.

Sunday. Cockblocking.

Last Sunday I was climbing with a couple friends, and we were working on this route. I had previously managed five of the clips before sailing magnificently away from the sixth because of some tricky crossed-hand move that takes you up to clip 6. It turns out to all be in the footwork, but I swear that's not the first thought through your head when your hands let go. Lisa generously let me practice my emergency belaying skills from the third clip, and Jeanne is our solid rocking belay gal. Seriously. I would trust her to belay me over fire, or chocolate or in a hurricane, she is just that good.

But this route is killer on endurance, so much so that I climb it by scrambling in a graceless mad vertical dash to the third clip, yelling "Take!", resting, clipping into the fourth and fifth, and then repeating the taking and the resting. It takes a lot out of you, and again with the thinking and the footwork and the 30 feet above the ground. (Laugh all you want, experienced climbers, but I've only been doing this for less than a year). And while I was resting after the fifth clip, I looked down and saw that A Very Experienced Climber had started the route next to mine, a harder (5.10?) blue route. And I'm looking down at him coming up towards me, and I'm thinking, if I miss this next clip, like I missed it last time, when I swing, I'm totally going to take this guy out. Just wipe him off the wall like some crazed and unfortunate Tarzan maneuver that may end in death, dismemberment or at least complete humiliation.

And it was very puzzling to me that he would have started a route so close to mine while I was still up there, especially because the two routes shared the sixth clip.

Here is where I feel honor-bound to point out that, as neophyte climbers, regardless of our positions vis-a-vis ceiling routes, we are still trying to figure out climbing etiquette. Who has right of way when? This is a fairly constant puzzle we work on. When is it okay to start climbing if someone next to you just started, or is getting ready to start? What about that guy about to traverse through your line of fire? And generally we assume nothing, and try to stay out of everyone else's way, what with the yelling and the falling and the raucous laughter. But I was already up there when the guy started making for my clip.

So, being that my options were either stay put or try a move I'd already fallen on, knowing I'd yank the Very Experienced Climber off the wall with an obnoxious whoop, I stayed put. But this guy then started his own clip-take-rest sequence and I was up there close to 10 minutes waiting for him to finish. And then after he finished (using my clip), he and his partner stood around and chatted about the route. Which is when Jeanne had to say something, which is good, because I was about to say something, and her something was so much more politer than mine.

I need a tshirt that says "Raised by wolves." Or business cards.

Luckily, I made the sixth, hotly debated clip while the Very Experienced Climbers hung around and watched but, hey, what was that all about?

(See, not all rabbits all the time. Next time I may even talk about the 130-lb bull mastiff in my living room. )