This needs to stop before DRM goes too far. Bastards.

Due to circumstance, tonight I was charged with teaching in Mapleton. McCabe and were both tied up at their respective workplaces, so the duty fell to me to put the Mapleton crew through their paces.

I decided early on that I wanted to do something in the vein of a test review, since they have a pending kyu exam next week. I also decided to do things sans official warmup. They took to this quite well… we warmed up by doing standing punches and alternating front kicks. We eased into the workout by doing some basics. I took the opportunity to weave in elements from the session that I taught last week on pull-back and what that means for technique.

I saw that the class was having trouble with the notion of pull back during blocks, so we focused on that for awhile. I had them focus on scraping their elbows so they didn’t wing their whole body out of alignment. We moved on to inward block with reverse punch. Everyone was having trouble with arm position, so I had the class gather around and poke holes in my technique as I displayed different symptoms of bad inward block.

One of the students mentioned something about keeping your elbow in one place, which triggered a memory of an old drill. The drill goes as such: partners stand facing each other and then do each block in turn: inward block, downward block, outward block, and rising block. Each block will clash with the partner’s block, so you get some nice feeling of contact and also the understanding of how simple lack of elbow movement can enable a myriad of different blocks.

It was a fun aside… then I brought the class back together and we went through Taikyoku Shodan, Heian Shodan, and Heian Sandan. The whole class made it through Heian Sandan with some coaxing, and most of them had applied a little bit of hip action and pull back to something along the way. That’s why I consider tonight a rousing success!

Sensei Brewer even had some nice comments afterwards, which is always incredibly humbling and awesome.

Sensei Brewer had come in a little bit through the first class, and we were ready to roll for the second class. It was more basics, more hip action and power generation, more partner drills (the classic front stance hold down), and some more great time spent on kata. It really is amazing how quickly a simple concept can escalate into a full class when you’re having fun.

I got a good sweat up while doing kata with the second class, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to get some more teaching experience. I sure am glad that I have good Senseis though… teaching this stuff without good examples sure would be tough.

I’m going to try to get through 625 Sochin this week, however I made no progress tonight. I was talking over my nagging knee discomfort with Sensei tonight and he recommended that I take about three days off to allow this thing to heal up. I tend to agree with him that this would be a good idea, I may take his advice and take it easy during the Saturday workout.

I started tonight with no ambition. I got three Sochin in, because I thought I needed 13 to get to 600 this week. It turns out I was wrong, I needed 12. I ended up doing 13 anyway thanks to the motivation that comes from doing kata in a group. We got ten Sochin in between the first and second classes.

Back to the workout… for the first class, we did a fun set of combinations leading up to jab, front leg front kick, reverse punch, rear leg front kick. We did this with partners, and that rounded out the first class. For the second class, we did a few Kanku Dai kata. This is the longest kata in Shotokan, so I was really feeling my Sochin effort in my legs after about three.

Shortly thereafter, we revisited the sparring combination from the first class. We worked with a partner to get more of an idea how to use this combination… I only got a good feeling out of about two attempts. Sensei had us add in spinning back kick, I had trouble chambering the kick properly and ended up winging it pretty often. helped me get at least one that didn’t completely suck. I want to work on this some more, I think its a good kick to work into the rotation.

That’s about all right now… I’m pretty tired tonight, I will likely post more tomorrow after the workout.

Last night’s dream was weird. I was sitting at my house all by myself, and I get a phone call from my high school friend, Jill. She wanted to have some cappuchinos at Maurie’s in Pekin, which was transformed into this trendy coffee bar with weird stuff on the walls like Applebee’s.

I walk in and approach the counter, after spotting Jill sitting up on the second floor balcony drinking her coffee. I wave before going to talk to the clerk. He was a young kid that I didn’t recognize and he looks at me with that “I know everyone in the world, and I don’t know you” look. I order a black cherry cappuchino (a dreamworld manifestation of the Black Cherry and Vanilla Diet Coke I tried yesterday) and he asked me if I wanted water with that. I said yes, and then he asked if I wanted pepper on the rim of the water. “Uh… sure,” I reply, not sure what that meant.

So here I am, trying to carry a tray with cappuchino, creamer, and a black pepper-rimmed glass of water upstairs. They have a side landing with a door marked “Upstairs”. I open the door up to find a hallway that is vaguely nautical themed (like Long John Silvers), and proceed to drop my tray.

There is this weird looking white chinese dragon, that looked very alive but vaguely like a stuffed animal or flocked statue. It writhes around and says “I AM THE NIGHT WOLF, I AM FEARSOME AND YOU WILL BE DESTROYED.” Then it changes back to a statue, and this weird fight music starts playing.

I run up the stairs, figuring by now that Jill is long dead. I get to the top of the stairs, and realize that I’m holding the machinegun from Quake4. I stop to think “damn, I wish I had the shotgun right now” before kicking the upstairs door in to fly into battle.

This is the point where I wake up. It was so vivid that I clearly remember wondering what pepper-water and cappuchino should taste like. Then I resolved to post this post, and here we are.

After four and a half hours on support tonight (I don’t want to talk about it), I got some ambition up. I got the difficult wall of my bathroom scraped. One should never have to have his head two inches from the underside of a thirty year old toilet.

But the difficult wall is done, and the stuck piece of trim has been pried up. That trim is so marred up that I may just replace it completely after we paint instead of trying to put it back. Let me tell you one thing: DIF wallpaper paste remover is amazing. You have a certain window of time to work in, but once you figure out the timing you can remove a lot of wallpaper in a short amount of time.

Now I’m being lazy. I think I earned it. 🙂

I was thinking about something that my fearless Team Lead said last week as I sat up tonight. He asserted that all nerds have varying levels of OCD.

That put me into stock-taking mode. Its true, I do. When engrossed in either a support or design issue, I must have something in my left hand (no Dave, don’t go there). Usually, this something is a small object on my desk (the staple-puller or a thumb tack are my usuals). When musing to a coworker about said problem, I sometimes spin the object in my hands (again, staple-puller or loose pair of scissors are good suspects here).

Barring having objects to mess with, I tend to chew on my nails. This is a habit I’ve had since childhood, but it sticks with me for this simple reason. The pain of “chewing too far” often sparks some of the best development ideas I’ve ever had. I almost pulled my little fingernail on my right hand off one day in college and while I was stemming the bleeding I came up with the solution to the loophole in my genetic art software that allowed me to complete it.

I also tend to line up my fallen Diet Coke cans alongside my tower until the end of the day, when I am often seen shuttling a small herd of cans to the recycling drop off. My Dad always says I should take the cans home and recycle them myself, but I am just too lazy for that.

I’m sure someone with an armchair psychology major could do a number on why it is that these interactions occur, but I don’t really care.

I’ve known nerds to have various ticks, compulsions, and other odd behavior. One of my professors in college would, when “processing” an idea, rub his hands together at an alarming rate of speed. He would also be known to pass some rank gas in the middle of lecture, but I don’t know if that was a compulsion or just him being gross.

So I ask you all: take stock yourself. As fellow nerds, embrace your odd behavior by replying here with the details. If I get no replies, I will know I’m just strange and thats all there is to it. I’m fine with that. But I’ve seen you all doing some weird things, so I will call you out. Just so you know.

This week saw the second of three planned examinations, this time it was predominantly a youth test. After a very thorough class by , our test candidates did a fantastic job. I managed to get 11 Sochins accomplished before classes started, I secretly wanted to do a few more.

I got that chance on Saturday. With the help of Garls-san, , and I put away another 20 Sochin kata, bringing the totals to what you see below. I hope to cross the 600 mark this week, hopefully making it to 625 by the end of the month. Dad and I did Sochin alternating with Bassai Dai for the first 20 minutes of Saturday’s workout. It was nice to do a little Bassai Dai again… I haven’t focused on that kata much for a long time.

Not much else to report aside from the excellent job done by our test candidates. They should really be proud of their accomplishment, karate is not an easy thing.

Teddy After Bath 1
Originally uploaded by dalcher.

Here’s our good buddy Teddy reclining on the loveseat after his bath. He just sat here and stared at me while I took these shots.

Obviously, Tasha and I are both in trouble for making him have a bath. He was stinky and needed it though!

I just wanted to give my good buddy some extreme to the max thanks for donating his copy of Quake4 Deluxe Edition to my cause. Apparently his system was unable to handle the sheer voluptuous glory of Quake4, so he passed it off to me.

Let me tell you, this game looks GOOOOD. So good, in fact, that my brand spanking new system can barely hack it at 800×600 resolution in High Quality graphics mode. The scanned specs recommend Low Quality at 640×480, but I may take the middle road and try Medium at 800×600.

I intend to get through Doom3 before I get too far into the new Quake, but suffice it to say that the 10 minutes that I played with it was more than enough to tell me that, yes, it will be as good as I expected.

Thanks buddy!