fwaggle.org

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.

Much to my dog’s delight, I decided that since I missed Karate on Thursday it would be better for me to get off my fat ass and actually do something, and since it was (comparatively) a nice day out that a walk to the park was in order.

It became apparent about half way home that I need to do this more often, because my shoes started feeling terribly heavy and my legs quite spongy.

I took quite a few photos while we were out, but only a couple of them turned out even remotely well. I left the flash on force-flash,  so most of them turned out either murky or blurry, but this one came out reasonable after some photoshopping. Enjoy a photo of Ruby enjoying herself in the small creek that feeds the river.

Tonight, Nick and I both went for and passed our promotion at our local Karate class. We both now hold Yellow belt ranks in two forms of Karate: Shotokhan, as well as American Bushi Kai (which I don’t actually know too much about save from where it differs from traditional Shotokhan).

I spent the last week trying to ready myself for it, and because of a bunch of goings on in our household it’s been rough, but we both made it through. The promotion was actually a lot harder than I thought it was going to be – our regular classes are usually pretty laid back but one of the black belts kept yelling for intensity so we worked a lot harder… by the end of the two hours, during my Kata my left hip began to give out and I thought I was gonna mess it all up, but thankfully it was about my third run through so I guess I’d already shown enough, because despite the hiccup I still promoted.

So despite the fact I ache head to toe, it was a fun night. My partner for our one-steps actually kicked me once, and I think it’ll bruise, but it’s not the sorest part of me. Overall though, I had a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the next one.