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My brother-in-law and I have been doing Karate for about 2 years now, and we’re finally up for our 6th Kyu promotion (“Green belt” in our system, though with the exception of white, black and sometimes red, belt colors in karate are mostly arbitrary), which is considered the first of the “advanced kyu” grades – which isn’t saying much, Kyu is still a rather demeaning grade, but in the traditions commonly held around where we live, people below 6th Kyu aren’t supposed to read the master text.

What I’m mainly looking forward to is not the belt or the rank, but the acknowledgement that I’ve improved. I’d still probably do karate anyway – it’s fun and it’s the only thing in about the last 10 years besides BMX that I’ve actually stuck with in terms of exercise, and I haven’t stuck with BMX as a form of exercise since the necessity went away.

In a little bit I have to go and pick up Shaina from her new job at Walmart, and I’ll probably pick up a case of bottled water while I’m there – it’s ridiculously hot and humid today, and I’m going to be in a stuffy building sweating and exercising for probably three hours. We have a whole house water filter, but Montpelier municipal water still tastes terrible since our water softener exploded one winter… so I find it’s just as easy to pick up some bottled water every so often and leave it in the fridge at the Dojo.

I’ve been nursing a sprained toe or two for the last few weeks, so hopefully the promotion goes off without a hitch.

Yesterday we went out to play paintball in the woods, for the first time in about 2 years. My Spyder‘s still in pieces, so I borrowed Trevor’s 98… which wasn’t fun at all. Trevor’s had an A5 for years now, and it’s in tip-top shape – but the 98 is in desperate need of a rebuild.

Even though with the baby due any day, we’re forced to cut back on toys… I’ve been looking at the parts necessary to get my Spyder up and working again. I’m going to buy an aluminum clamping feed neck, because I’m sick of breaking the stupid clear plastic ones that Spyder thought would be a good idea. Then I just need to pick up the stuff from Mouser to drive the solenoid from my MSP-430EZ, and I’ll be able to finish writing the firmware for my custom trigger board and I’ll be in business.

As to how it went yesterday, it actually wasn’t bad. Usually when we play Paintball in Indiana it consists of me going out there after not having played in 12 months… running around for about 20 minutes until I think I’m going to die and then spending the rest of the day recovering.

Yesterday, we were severely lacking in people so we only got two games in, and despite trying to run my ass around the entire woods to flank Trevor… I felt pretty great. Perhaps keeping up with the karate is finally paying off!

So on Wednesday me and my brother in law had our promotion ceremony for our Karate class… I now hold an 8th Kyu rank in two styles of Karate and in American Tae Kwon Do, woooh!

This promotion was actually easier than the last one, I think because I’m in a lot better shape. I was still sore for a day or two afterwards, mostly because of the extended time we spent in horse stances (my legs were shaking after the second set of questions)… but on the whole I didn’t get knocked around as much this time. Heck, even the weather cooperated, it was a cool 66F on the day!

I can’t help but think about what tremendous motivation combat sports are for fitness. Paintball, Karate, Aikido… nothing motivates you to move like the potential for getting your butt whipped. The hardest part is finding a school or club that doesn’t get all macho and turn it into a traumatic event, but once you get that out of the way it’s time to spit out that liporexall and get moving!

While there’s no bigger fat burner than having to walk absolutely everywhere, it’s about time we got a vehicle that runs again… So I spent today working on the Suburban, as I detailed in his weblog. The problem with the e-brake was basically a stuck cable, which I butchered with complete disregard to how expensive they were.

Our neighbour was pretty sure that they’re expensive, but it looks like I can pick the part I cut up for about $10 online, so I can’t imagine it being much more in town.

Because the brake shoes are about wore out, I just stuck it back together to keep the weather out (though I think it’s supposed to be nice for the next few days), and I’ll go buy the parts tomorrow. The wheel is free now, so if I put it back together properly it should be driveable – I just don’t care for the idea of driving it around with almost nothing left on the shoes.

Hooray!

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you know our poor truck is broken again. What’s worse is my little brother in law borrowed my bike a couple of times, and now I have a flat tire too. But since the weather’s been nice, we’ve been “hoofin’ it” everywhere for no other reason than we can.

It’s come to my attention that two hours of karate a week plus whatever practice I get the motivation to do at home isn’t going to be enough to get rid of this buddha belly. I’m starting to feel pretty good after each session at karate, so it’s obviously doing something, but it’s just not fast enough.

Rather than sit on my arse scoffing down apidexin, we figured on just walking more places throughout the summer. We took the dogs out for a walk this morning, even though the weather was a little nasty, and they really enjoyed it. We needed coffee creamer, and I was like you know what let’s walk the dogs up there and buy it. We enjoyed it, they enjoyed it, and we got our delicious coffee creamer. Everyone wins, except the fat cells.

Now I just have to remember to start taking my camera. Oh, and I need to upgrade to flickr pro again.

I’m thinking I might try and play some more paintball this summer.

I have a pretty old Spyder Flash, and since I don’t really play that much any more a while back I decided to build a custom trigger board for it as a project for Hungry Hacker Industries. The project is going moderately well, I’m just waiting on buying some parts from Mouser to rebuild the solenoid circuit and then it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the firmware (which is probably going to be the most fun).

We used to be so crazy into paintball, it was amazing. Every weekend we’d play, usually outlaw-ball in a place called “the pit”, which was a giant hole in the ground where homeless people used to live until one of them set fire to it and the authorities ran them all out. It was probably 150′ deep and about 50 acres or so, and when you were down in there no one up on the roads would hear the slap slap slap of paintball guns because it was right next to a busy highway.

A couple Christmases back, everyone got gift cards for Walmart and basically all of it went on paintballs. My body was in a perpetual state of recovering from a mess of welts and sprains from tripping on a tree root or something. I was, however, pretty fit – nothing motivates you to run like a half-inch plastic ball traveling at almost 300 feet per second, coming at you with about 20 of his friends. So much fun.

Heck, even my wife used to play. I’m one of a few people not currently incarcerated who can honestly say he’s shot his wife in the face.

… a bit under two hours actually. I’m trying to clean up our “office space” because it’s a mess, but I’m also trying not to do anything strenuous so I keep stopping. Hence this entry.

But to continue from an earlier theme, I really love our Karate school. I used to hate safety equipment, preferring to free-form spar without any pads or anything – but I’ve had an epiphany a while back… sparring at quarter speed, or sparring “trying to maintain control” is a bit counter productive. I honestly have no interest in points kumite – I take Karate primarily for fitness, and also so that in the event I should ever have to, I have the ability mess someone up with my bare hands.

And that’s what’s great about Shotokan (and by extension, some of the Krav Maga stuff the Senseis throw in as a bonus), it’s basically all about messing someone up with deadly precision and efficiency. None of this dancing around and “ground and pound” stuff that people think is awesome because it’s in UFC – self defense is about exactly that, self defense. You want to end the altercation as quickly as possible.

The worst parts about Karate though? The fact that even a few months into it, I’m still nowhere near as fit as I should be. Add in the “no jewelry” policy, which means I spend about a good two minutes getting “un-married” beforehand because my wedding band is such a tight fit over my knuckle. Other than that, I’m having a blast.

I love training in Karate, but it’s become pretty apparent that the twice a week I go isn’t enough to keep me in any kind of good shape. Recently I’ve started doing some easy weight training, and I’ve pledged to ride my bike more for cardio. My body’s getting the knack of it, and I’m pretty confident that in a couple months if I can stick with it I’ll start to feel a whole lot better than the miserable sack of shit sitting in front of a video game I’ve been for the past three years.

What my wife and I really want though is a treadmill. A long time ago, we had a treadmill that we got at a flea market near closing time for a measly $7. It worked quite well too, but we had to downsize and wound up throwing it away. Now we’ve got plenty of room, we’ve gone through several used treadmills trying to find one that actually works – it seems “used” and “works” are mutually exclusive when it comes to treadmills. Going for the cheapest thing Walmart has doesn’t seem like a great idea either, because they don’t look particularly sturdy.

I guess it’s one of those things we’ll just have to look at as an investment, and spend a good amount of money on one. In the meantime, I’ve got other things I can be doing.