The climbing wall

While Rachel was gone, I took Matthew and Melissa home teaching with me. When we arrived at Jasper's, we had to knock several times to be heard over the roar of the vacuum cleaner: a bad sign. Moments earlier, their three and five year old had been discovered industriously carrying packing peanuts from a shipping box upstairs, to shred them on the carpet. Apparently they'd been at this for some time before they were caught.

Jasper's wife was pissed ("do you know what your children have been up to?") and Jasper, who was no dummy, knew what to do: stay out of sight until the storm blew over. So Jasper decided this would be an excellent time to show us his climbing wall, safely out of the combat zone in the garage:








For scale, Jasper there is 6' 4". (He's also struggling to gain more weight than his current 160 lbs. Just to make all you people like me with the opposite problem feel worse about yourselves.) Not shown: the other half of the wall, off to my right.

After we left, Matthew asked when I was going to build a wall like that. "Maybe when Grandpa Ellis visits next, he can show us how to build one," I offered. "But first we have to buy a house instead of renting."