Sunday, July 22, 2007
Harry Potter weekend *MADNESS*!!!!!!!
I…haven’t read it yet.
Jess and I have been trying to get back on something like a normal schedule after having Grammy come and visit. Mostly that just means getting back into our exercise schedule, swimming at lunch, and then TKD and Hockey. We managed to get back to the pool and start turning out laps, which is a great way to break up a workday, let me tell you. And then Friday we took off swimming because we met up with some people to do Volleyball on Friday. Then we split up and she went to Hockey, where her team won, and I went to TKD, where I lost.
Well, that’s not really true. If we were doing our TKD on an ‘Olympic point style’ thing, where the referee awarded points and declared a winner, I would have lost. But we didn’t really do that, so I didn’t really lose. I sparred with ‘Mr. P’, who is a pretty tall, lanky, older guy with a lot of experience and power. He’s really good for me because his technique and body type perfectly matches my most glaring weakness in sparring. I don’t fake before I attack. When your opponent has longer legs than you, the *first* thing you have to do before you can even think about attacking them is get past the distance where they can attack you. Their legs are longer, which means you enter their ‘threat range’ before they enter yours. Further still, Mr. P uses a lot of ‘front leg’ techniques. What that means is that he can see me coming in and all he has to do is just lift his leg up and I plow right into him. I do this to younger students all the time whenever I get to spar them. (Which isn’t often. They tend to keep us in proper weight/size classes).
This means that before I can even think about *approaching* him, I have to fake him out. It sounds silly, but the few times I’ve managed to make it work, they results have just been astounding. This is what it does:
1) It forces your opponent to try and determine if every motion you make is a kick or not. The more they’re thinking, the less they’re kicking.
2) The less they kick, the better chance you have of predicting when the kicks will come, and therefore the better chance you have of avoiding their kicks.
3) When you fake, your opponent will often go ‘flat footed’, literally leaving their feet flat on the ground as opposed to on the balls of their feet. This makes it much harder for them to move out of the way.
4) If they’re preparing to counter you, a fake will often make them throw out their counter kick, which means you disarm their ‘weapon’ and then have the initiative to kick them back.
5) A fake takes only a fraction of the energy of a full kick, which means you get an extra thread for essentially ‘free’.
If that isn’t a good enough list to convince you that I need to work on my fakes, nothing is. I’ve been working on my footwork and fakes outside of class, but my problem has always been that whenever I get into a sparring situation, especially once I get tired, I tend to fall back on more ingrained, less effective techniques. So next time I go, I’m only, *only* going to work on faking. No special techniques, just faking before every single kick.
These are the kinds of things I think about on the way back from sparring.
So Saturday I had a roll-playing game session scheduled with some friends, and so I went off and did that while Jess kept herself busy with some shopping and the new Harry Potter book. She’s currently about halfway through it and going strong, and I’m quite content to wait my turn, so no one call me up and start blurting out story twists quite yet.
So I’m just going to sit down and play my most recent Video Game obsession (Odin Sphere) next to Jess, reading her book. Ta ta!
-N
I…haven’t read it yet.
Jess and I have been trying to get back on something like a normal schedule after having Grammy come and visit. Mostly that just means getting back into our exercise schedule, swimming at lunch, and then TKD and Hockey. We managed to get back to the pool and start turning out laps, which is a great way to break up a workday, let me tell you. And then Friday we took off swimming because we met up with some people to do Volleyball on Friday. Then we split up and she went to Hockey, where her team won, and I went to TKD, where I lost.
Well, that’s not really true. If we were doing our TKD on an ‘Olympic point style’ thing, where the referee awarded points and declared a winner, I would have lost. But we didn’t really do that, so I didn’t really lose. I sparred with ‘Mr. P’, who is a pretty tall, lanky, older guy with a lot of experience and power. He’s really good for me because his technique and body type perfectly matches my most glaring weakness in sparring. I don’t fake before I attack. When your opponent has longer legs than you, the *first* thing you have to do before you can even think about attacking them is get past the distance where they can attack you. Their legs are longer, which means you enter their ‘threat range’ before they enter yours. Further still, Mr. P uses a lot of ‘front leg’ techniques. What that means is that he can see me coming in and all he has to do is just lift his leg up and I plow right into him. I do this to younger students all the time whenever I get to spar them. (Which isn’t often. They tend to keep us in proper weight/size classes).
This means that before I can even think about *approaching* him, I have to fake him out. It sounds silly, but the few times I’ve managed to make it work, they results have just been astounding. This is what it does:
1) It forces your opponent to try and determine if every motion you make is a kick or not. The more they’re thinking, the less they’re kicking.
2) The less they kick, the better chance you have of predicting when the kicks will come, and therefore the better chance you have of avoiding their kicks.
3) When you fake, your opponent will often go ‘flat footed’, literally leaving their feet flat on the ground as opposed to on the balls of their feet. This makes it much harder for them to move out of the way.
4) If they’re preparing to counter you, a fake will often make them throw out their counter kick, which means you disarm their ‘weapon’ and then have the initiative to kick them back.
5) A fake takes only a fraction of the energy of a full kick, which means you get an extra thread for essentially ‘free’.
If that isn’t a good enough list to convince you that I need to work on my fakes, nothing is. I’ve been working on my footwork and fakes outside of class, but my problem has always been that whenever I get into a sparring situation, especially once I get tired, I tend to fall back on more ingrained, less effective techniques. So next time I go, I’m only, *only* going to work on faking. No special techniques, just faking before every single kick.
These are the kinds of things I think about on the way back from sparring.
So Saturday I had a roll-playing game session scheduled with some friends, and so I went off and did that while Jess kept herself busy with some shopping and the new Harry Potter book. She’s currently about halfway through it and going strong, and I’m quite content to wait my turn, so no one call me up and start blurting out story twists quite yet.
So I’m just going to sit down and play my most recent Video Game obsession (Odin Sphere) next to Jess, reading her book. Ta ta!
-N
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
When we last left our heroes, they were getting scuba certified. Let’s check back in with them.
Scuba certification went off without a hitch. No latent underwater claustrophobia setting in, but there were some interesting twists and turns.
The first thing you do when getting certified is some classroom work, and Jess and I both stomped the test. (100%!) So yes, college is good for something. After that, you practice skills in a pool. The first time we went down, the pool was so murky that it made practice difficult. The teacher would be a mere five feet away and just barely visible. When we did our ‘swim around on the surface’ test, we had to hold our hands out in front of us to keep from running into the walls. The next two days were much clearer.
We also had to meet minimum swimming requirements, 200 yards swimming without equipment. Jess and I do that for a light warmup nearly every day, but we were doing this in a pool that was about 20 feet long, so it kinda threw off our timing. ‘Stroke, stroke, flip, stroke, stroke, flip, stroke, flip’. I had to abandon my flip turns because I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to be breathing. Jessie, of course, just tore up the course.
After all our practicing, we went out to Catalina, an island off the coast of California where there is an underwater national park with kelp forests and lots of fishies to see. We had to get up at 4 in the morning to catch the boat out to the island, though, which was not a lot of fun. We got geared up, though, which was an adventure all to itself. Cold California currents require a seriously thick wet suit, and a hood. Jess didn’t like the hood one bit. It was rough for me at first, especially as we had all our gear on and we had to wait for a couple of people to get their gear together and checked out. Keep in mind, wet suits are designed to very efficiently hold your heat in, and so I was pretty hot inside there, with all that gear and 30 pounds of weight on my waist. After we got in the water, though, I was glad we had all the heat-retention. The water was so cold that our faces were turning white underwater. Not warm.
So most of our open-water time was taken up demonstrating our ability to perform tasks like float in the water by controlling our buoyancy, clear our masks of water if they come off. Unfortunately, that meant that we spent a lot of time sitting around and waiting while other people did their skills. Jess and I practiced our sign language alphabet while we waited, and I got pretty good at taking in the minimum amount of air so as to make my supply last as long as possible. Unfortunately, the idling meant Jess didn’t get to move around, and she got really cold a couple of times. She didn’t have a lot of fun diving in California. Between the hood and the cold and the waking up at crazy hours to catch boats, it might be a while before I get Jess back in the water for Scuba. Heh.
The site itself was pretty nice, when we got to look around. Whenever we were just sitting around, Fish would come up and just stare at us sometimes. We would wave back. We would go on ‘tours’, too. Which are like giant games of ‘follow the leader’ with teachers in front and in back and above, just in case. We started a tour on our third dive and I was watching as my supply got lower and lower. Eventually Jess and I (partners underwater, too) decided we just needed to head to the surface, as the tour had fallen apart a bit, we weren’t sure where we were supposed to be going, so we just took our time and came up to the surface. We met everyone else up there too and they told us ‘good job’ for taking the initiative and going up to the surface when we needed to. That made me feel good. (By the way, for parents that might feel worried about such things, ‘low air’ is 500 PSI, and I started out with 2200 PSI. I could have hung out underwater for probably about 10 minutes more on that air. Safety first!)
Overall, I had a pretty good time, though I have a feeling I’d enjoy myself more if I was just cruising around with Jessie and looking around. Following people and trying to stay out of the way of other scuba divers takes a lot of concentration. Not to mention making ones way through the kelp forests. I enjoyed it, but I’m unlikely to make it a common activity. I have enough hobbies as it is.
The 4th of July was nice. We went out to a friends house for a BBQ and ate WAY TOO MUCH FOOD! Jess made Hamburgers (she makes good hamburgers!) and I made some desert. Mom’s peaches and blueberries in balsamic vinegar. Delish! I made it for us at home, too. Jess really likes it.
Also, visitors! Jessie’s grandmother (Grammie) came over from Florida to visit us and attend cousin Scott’s 40th birthday party. The party was pretty great, they hired a steel drum band and some fire-eaters for entertainment. The fire-eaters were pretty great. We also took Grammie to the Getty center, to the very place where I asked Jessie to marry me. (grin!) We even, and this is exciting, *went inside*. Certainly a lot of stuff to see up there, one guy had made a musical instrument that used up the entire central atrium, filling huge air bladders and playing them through long, winding tubes. It was called the Uberorgan. Check out the link to see some pictures.
Then, in a couple more weeks, Jessie’s sister and her youngest Nephew come to visit. People everywhere!
And…that’s pretty much the scoop. I’ll let everyone know if anything else interesting happens.
-N
Scuba certification went off without a hitch. No latent underwater claustrophobia setting in, but there were some interesting twists and turns.
The first thing you do when getting certified is some classroom work, and Jess and I both stomped the test. (100%!) So yes, college is good for something. After that, you practice skills in a pool. The first time we went down, the pool was so murky that it made practice difficult. The teacher would be a mere five feet away and just barely visible. When we did our ‘swim around on the surface’ test, we had to hold our hands out in front of us to keep from running into the walls. The next two days were much clearer.
We also had to meet minimum swimming requirements, 200 yards swimming without equipment. Jess and I do that for a light warmup nearly every day, but we were doing this in a pool that was about 20 feet long, so it kinda threw off our timing. ‘Stroke, stroke, flip, stroke, stroke, flip, stroke, flip’. I had to abandon my flip turns because I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to be breathing. Jessie, of course, just tore up the course.
After all our practicing, we went out to Catalina, an island off the coast of California where there is an underwater national park with kelp forests and lots of fishies to see. We had to get up at 4 in the morning to catch the boat out to the island, though, which was not a lot of fun. We got geared up, though, which was an adventure all to itself. Cold California currents require a seriously thick wet suit, and a hood. Jess didn’t like the hood one bit. It was rough for me at first, especially as we had all our gear on and we had to wait for a couple of people to get their gear together and checked out. Keep in mind, wet suits are designed to very efficiently hold your heat in, and so I was pretty hot inside there, with all that gear and 30 pounds of weight on my waist. After we got in the water, though, I was glad we had all the heat-retention. The water was so cold that our faces were turning white underwater. Not warm.
So most of our open-water time was taken up demonstrating our ability to perform tasks like float in the water by controlling our buoyancy, clear our masks of water if they come off. Unfortunately, that meant that we spent a lot of time sitting around and waiting while other people did their skills. Jess and I practiced our sign language alphabet while we waited, and I got pretty good at taking in the minimum amount of air so as to make my supply last as long as possible. Unfortunately, the idling meant Jess didn’t get to move around, and she got really cold a couple of times. She didn’t have a lot of fun diving in California. Between the hood and the cold and the waking up at crazy hours to catch boats, it might be a while before I get Jess back in the water for Scuba. Heh.
The site itself was pretty nice, when we got to look around. Whenever we were just sitting around, Fish would come up and just stare at us sometimes. We would wave back. We would go on ‘tours’, too. Which are like giant games of ‘follow the leader’ with teachers in front and in back and above, just in case. We started a tour on our third dive and I was watching as my supply got lower and lower. Eventually Jess and I (partners underwater, too) decided we just needed to head to the surface, as the tour had fallen apart a bit, we weren’t sure where we were supposed to be going, so we just took our time and came up to the surface. We met everyone else up there too and they told us ‘good job’ for taking the initiative and going up to the surface when we needed to. That made me feel good. (By the way, for parents that might feel worried about such things, ‘low air’ is 500 PSI, and I started out with 2200 PSI. I could have hung out underwater for probably about 10 minutes more on that air. Safety first!)
Overall, I had a pretty good time, though I have a feeling I’d enjoy myself more if I was just cruising around with Jessie and looking around. Following people and trying to stay out of the way of other scuba divers takes a lot of concentration. Not to mention making ones way through the kelp forests. I enjoyed it, but I’m unlikely to make it a common activity. I have enough hobbies as it is.
The 4th of July was nice. We went out to a friends house for a BBQ and ate WAY TOO MUCH FOOD! Jess made Hamburgers (she makes good hamburgers!) and I made some desert. Mom’s peaches and blueberries in balsamic vinegar. Delish! I made it for us at home, too. Jess really likes it.
Also, visitors! Jessie’s grandmother (Grammie) came over from Florida to visit us and attend cousin Scott’s 40th birthday party. The party was pretty great, they hired a steel drum band and some fire-eaters for entertainment. The fire-eaters were pretty great. We also took Grammie to the Getty center, to the very place where I asked Jessie to marry me. (grin!) We even, and this is exciting, *went inside*. Certainly a lot of stuff to see up there, one guy had made a musical instrument that used up the entire central atrium, filling huge air bladders and playing them through long, winding tubes. It was called the Uberorgan. Check out the link to see some pictures.
Then, in a couple more weeks, Jessie’s sister and her youngest Nephew come to visit. People everywhere!
And…that’s pretty much the scoop. I’ll let everyone know if anything else interesting happens.
-N
