My friend and colleague TA Loeffler is climbing Mount Everest (for real!) Her is her entry from today. For those of you who wish to follow her, here is a link to her website

Puja 4/12/2010
Hi this is TA and Marian calling in from the Everest Hilton once again. Marian is packing and I don’t like that one iota. She is heading out with Bridget in the morning to start heading back to Namche and Lukla, etc. We have had quite the full and interesting day here today at Everest base camp. We had our Puja right after breakfast, definitely the most exciting Puja I have ever been through, having had a smidge to much Chang, which is the rice wine they give you at the Puja. The Lama who did the blessing was the same one that has done all of my other Himalayan blessings, so it was good to see him again. We ate Sampa cake which is made from the buckwheat flour, we smeared flour on each others faces and wished each other good luck, long life, may we all reach the summit. We raised the Puja pole where the five strand prayer flags fly out over our tents, and now that they are flying it means that both our Sherpa team and us as climbers can start to venture into the ice fall which we will do somewhat tomorrow. We got to spend part of the afternoon once we had recovered from the Puja practicing with our ascending rigs, practicing ascending as well as repelling, and getting everyone on the same page in terms of the safety systems we will use. We continue to hear rock falls and avalanches as they come down around us, fortunately our tents is in such a situation that we can just watch them with wonder and be amazed at the sound that they make. It is almost time for the resting at base camp to come to an end and move on. One of the highlights of the day was giving out the RJG t-shirts that my sponsor sent up to all of the Sherpa staff and turns out yellow was the most favorite color. Tim gave out the Peak Freaks t-shirts at the same time so it was very celebratory at the end of the Puja to see the staff running around in either the brown Peak Freaks t-shirts or the yellow, blue or white RJG Construction t-shirts. So thanks again to Robert Giovanni at RJG Construction for both his support of me and the gifts he gave to the staff up here. I have to go and hydrate and dehydrate again because I’m still recovering from the Puja



So catch you from tomorrow.



For those of you who have the SAT phone number just so you know we are switching phone numbers so Marian will have the phone I had and she will have mine.



Thanks, bye



TA