Today’s workout was small… just Garls, Rush, , , and me. We spent the whole class doing kata, something that felt really good. We spent a great deal of time working on the Tekki katas (for the brown belts), Sochin (a few times), and Jitte (quite a few times).

It felt good to work out again, hopefully my schedule will get better and I can make it to karate more often.

Earlier in the week, before my job got the best of me I started in on The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. So far, this game has been outstanding! I’m loving the tactile swordfighting and horseriding and the story has been pretty interesting so far.

The other mainstay in the Wii right now is Wii Sports. I’m approaching Pro status in Bowling, and we’ve already had some friends over for Boxing. We’ve played only a little bit of Wario Smooth Moves, however I am sure that will change if I get more than a few minutes with some other people in the room to play along.

I’m finding that there is a significant amount of fun in creating Mii’s (the little avatars that you get to use in the games). So far we’ve done Mii’s for me, Tasha, , , , and her boyfriend. Anyone else who comes over to play needs to expect to spend about 15 minutes making themselves a character.

For inspiration, I submit to you ShowMii.com. This site presents a celebrity Mii look-alike each day, so you can see what is possible with the relatively simple palette that you are provided.

If you want to try out making a Mii, there is a Flash-based clone interface that you can play with. Fun stuff!

For the first time in awhile, I made it to Mapleton last night. I got to lead warm-ups and around 15 minutes of the first class, after which they were treated with news that there would be a surprise test next week. The test was taking place in order to best accomodate schedules and to make sure we got a test in before people started going off on their summer vacations to get all fat and lazy.

The workout was good… I was having trouble keeping my feet under me, but by the time the class ended I had mostly worked it out. We did basics, kata (I broke off and helped teach Hemp-san Heian Yondan), and then some basic sparring drills before the night was all over.

Between work and waning motivation, getting to the dojo has been exceedingly difficult lately. Invariably, the nights that I feel good, strong, and ready to work out are the days that something blows up at the office and I’m there until 7:30-8:00. Then there are days like today, where I got home a little later than I would’ve liked and all of my energy was gone. Had it not been for dinner, I would’ve just gone to bed immediately after getting home that’s how bad it was.

Instead, after dinner I worked on a side project for work for four hours. Part of it was fueled by the fact that a few bugs were found in my code today, and of course they remained dormant just long enough to make it a scramble to get them fixed in time for this week’s faux concrete testing date. It has been a little rough for the last few days.

All that aside, I plan to make it to Saturday morning’s class before I get back to work on Saturday. I know, that’s what I said about Thursday… but duty calls!

Dragging itself up the road using its arm alone. But I’m betting it is. I couldn’t see any branding and I’m not up on my product models enough to know. *sigh*

Thanks to the efforts of and her husband, Tasha and I are the proud owners of a new Nintendo Wii.

We set it up and got a few hours of play in before our family get-together for Mother’s Day, and let me tell you it is excellent. After we got back from the party we decided to try the other games available in Wii Sports… Bowling and Tennis are excellent.

I enjoyed the Fitness Training for the rest of the sports, however I’m all thumbs at the Golf game so far. I intentionally avoided starting The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for fear of not making it to work tomorrow.

When I heard about the concept of the Nintendo Wii (then code-named Revolution), I thought that it was either going to be a spectacular success or a spectacular failure. After only a few hours of play I recognize that special happiness that I’ve not felt since the days of Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt. Nintendo has taken the focus of gaming, which recently has been more of a graphics arms-race, and shifted it back to what gaming should have been all about from the start: having fun.

That’s what the Wii is. It’s fun.

Fun is waving a controller around to make a cartoon version of yourself ride a cow down a country road. Fun is wondering if the neighbors think you’re crazy as you and your wife both swing the controllers around to play air Tennis. The best part is that we haven’t even gotten into the “party” games yet.

For those of you hungry to get a Wii for yourselves, be patient. Don’t give into the lure of instant gratification and get an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 (both of which cost 2-3 times more than the Wii). You won’t be sorry, the wait is worth it.

Tonight, Tasha and I attended the fourth birthday party for the daughter of a former contract employee in my section at work. Some astute readers will remember this coworker as the one that introduced me to Indian food last year, an experience that I will treasure with every singed taste bud in my possession.

I received an e-vite from my friend and his wife two weeks ago, and my wife and I were excited to attend as we had not seen them since he moved away to a different contract job elsewhere. When we arrived tonight, we knew we were in for an interesting experience.

We were met at my car by a small group of my coworkers that were helping to set the party up. They lived in the same apartment complex that the party was being held at, so they helped provide some entertainment by way of a stereo system and a laptop to play some Indian music.

“This will be an experience for you!” one of the guys said. “I bet you’ve never heard Indian music before!” Well now I have. And the weird thing is that I swear that I have heard one of the songs from somewhere else, maybe an advertisement or something.

Anyway, before long the room had filled with around 40 people and Tasha and I were the only ones that didn’t hail from India. It was nice knowing some coworkers there because we had some things to talk about. That got us introduced to some of their friends, wives, etc. with whom we could do the normal small-talk that is best suited for events such as this.

The Indian guys would be talking to each other in their native state languages, during which I would occasionally hear my name and they would gesture at me. They would drift in and out of English to ask me things (my karate exploits were mentioned regularly, as were work-related topics). There was another couple that had come in from my friend’s new workplace and they didn’t know anyone else either, so we spent quite awhile talking and getting to know them.

Tasha and I marveled at how similar birthday celebrations are across cultures. They sang “Happy Birthday To You”, had birthday cake (although the child fed part of the first pieces of cake to their friends and family, like we do for weddings), and they had pizza. What I couldn’t get over was the scale of the thing. It was a BASH, tons of people were there. The kids were all having a blast playing and running around, in fact I found out later that I was batting a balloon around with one of my coworkers sons and didn’t even know it. I think we were both expecting a little more variation, given the cultural differences that we experienced during our first visit to their home.

One neat thing was that the guys were all dressed in jeans and polo shirts, however almost all of the women were dressed in saris, which are traditional Indian dresses. The birthday girl was dressed in a princess outfit, a point of which she reminded me frequently throughout the night. “I’m a princess, see my crown?” she’d say as she came by. She’s really into Cinderella right now, we found out.

It was really nice to get to know a few more of those guys outside of work and get to meet their families… we talked about movies, the differences in Indian music, television, etc. I am really glad that I went, Tasha and I both had a really fun time.

Today’s workout was abbreviated due to frequent calls from my car dealership trying to coordinate everything they needed to service my car. I was still able to get some interesting combinations in and some sparring drills with and Rush-san accomplished before we had to quit for the morning.

We did a set of moving forward in front stance and backwards in back stance with towels under our feet. Stance is much harder when you don’t have connection to the floor. I can already tell that I will have “never used those muscles before” soreness tomorrow. We also did a set of 3-5 time sparring with a bungee cord strapped around our waists. I actually felt this was a lot better than it was before, probably thanks to The Year of Sochin. We rounded out the morning doing a roundhouse kick combination while moving to the angles. I felt pretty good at this too, however I need to work on a bit more fluidity.

That’s really all there was to it, we left around 9:45 am so I could start a marathon of running around that had to get done today. Lately, life has been getting in the way of karate a lot. Hopefully this will change as the weather heats up.

Tonight we were trusted with the care and feeding of the class. led the class through a long bout of strengthening and stretching, then Garls-san took the white and yellow belts into the other room to work on kata.

I was charged with taking the rest of the class through some kata, but I decided to do it in the vein of Hartman’s House of Pain and add a twist. I split the class into two groups and had one group do katas by my count. While they were doing kata. The rest of the class was told to do a certain strengthening exercise to the same count.

Every two katas, we would switch groups to let both groups do the strengthening. We made it through Taikyoku Shodan, all the Heians, and Tekki Shodan. The strengthening exercises were Japanese situps, tricep dips, incline push ups, and skydivers. Everyone was glowing at the end of it, and I was pleased with the results.

For the second class, led us through the Heians again, with emphasis on holding tension at the end of every technique. The first five techniques of each kata were easy, but after that it got really difficult. You can really tell when techniques weren’t connecting in to the center, I need to do more kata in this fashion.

After that, ran the class through further sparring drills relating to distance from your partner. It was fun and it felt good to spar a little after all that kata. All in all it was a great night. Much pain and much karate stuff was accomplished, I’m looking forward to more of it on Saturday!

Company Man
Originally uploaded by dalcher.

Monday night, Tasha and I were watching Heroes. Shortly thereafter, I was told by my wife: “Stop looking so serious! You remind me of Thompson from Heroes!”

For those of you that don’t know, Thompson is played by Eric Roberts. “But he’s old!”, I exclaimed. “Well… maybe a young Eric Roberts.” she said.

Fast forward to tonight. The room had become dark, and I noticed that the laptop had started casting weird moody shadows on my hands. With my camera nearby, I decided to try to capture “serious Josh” on digital film to see what she was talking about.

I can *kind’ve* see what she means. Even though, I still think I’m a long was from Craggy McOldPants up there. I’d love to have one day of interest on his bank account, I can tell you that for sure.

After hearing of my plight, the Former Miss told me to ask Tasha a very important question: Does she find Eric Roberts (young or old) attractive?

Tasha’s response: “Oh God, no!”

*sigh…*

Despite all this overwhelming praise, I did manage to get one shot tonight that looked totally awesome. I can’t wait until I have a good camera!

The Waffle Ninja Lives…
Originally uploaded by dalcher.

Despite being seriously wounded, the Waffle Ninja appeared at my house tonight and convalesced before disappearing back into the night.

She will live to fight again.