Losing It

Is it just me, or is it ironic that I somehow manage to keep losing my compass - a navigational tool designed to prevent me from getting myself lost. So when I lose it (which I have), I could lose myself. Does that make sense, or did I lose you?

Other notes on the Mountaineers scrambling course, now that I've completed the structured part of the course (I still need to sign up for 2 hikes of my choosing to graduate):

• The age range is a bit too large for my liking. One person referred to it as a club for those that just realized that they were old and still wanted to prove that they could get outside and be active (some of them are actually in denial about that).
• I suppose it's better than a bar for a social dating type service, but as I said, many people are a bit too old for me, and even on the ones that look like they could be young enough, it's often hard to tell who's married and who isn't since they ask that you not be wearing any jewelry (rings can hinder your ability to properly grasp a rock). Plus, technically-inclined males such as myself (known by some as nerds or geeks) still are the majority. So sorry, dad, but I haven't followed in your footsteps of rescuing damsels in distress on mountainsides just yet.
• Actual scrambling is quite fun for the most part. It allows you to be a little more adventurous than the average hiker while not requiring (usually) all the technicalities of ropes and things. The only thing I didn't enjoy is doing a whole bunch of bushwhacking in an attempt to find a trail, only to end up at the edge of a cliff which required us to backtrack all the way back up through the bushes we just finished whacking. In other words, scrambling is more fun with GPS.
• Getting 50+ people off a mountain can take forever. 'Nuff said.
  
• They have funny terms that mean really simple things (I guess that's common for a lot of clubs if you think about it). For example, glissading basically means "sliding down a hill" and plunge stepping is just another term for "walking down a hill".
  

So it's been fun, but the jury's still out on whether I'll attempt any other courses within the Mountaineers (basic climbing, advanced scrambling, etc.) As long as they don't involve too much useless bushwhacking, I might give another one a try. But too much more of that and I might lose it (and I don't mean the compass).