My wife Deirdra is about to start her second Yoga Teacher Training program, detailed here. She’s already certified in Vinyasa yoga, but she’s branching out into Anusara as well.
As you can guess, a fight at my house looks exactly like this:
To go along with the new webhost and the new Wordpress version, I’ve added new comment- and trackback-spam catcher plugins to help filter out the trash that’s been collecting. While I wasn’t looking, the old spam-collection stuff had racked up sixty-five thousand spams. Hopefully the new trackback-spam verification and the javascript comment-spam checker will weed out some of those.
I’ve also set up OpenID. I thought it was pretty lame that you have to register and create an account on every single site on the internet just to drop in a comment, so when OpenID came along I was pretty enthusiastic about it.
OpenID works on a system of trusted authorities. Rather than every site having to redo the job of keeping track of your username and password and profile and all that, you just login using your OpenID url, which is probably the URL for your Livejournal or your AOL profile or your Technorati account. Then the site asks Livejournal (or whoever your provider is) if you are who you say you are. You may have to login over there and then get redirected back here. If you’re already logged in, it just happens in the background.
You may already have an OpenID whether you realize it or not: Since SixApart was pretty much behind the OpenID concept, LiveJournal and Vox both provide OpenID logins, and so do a ton of the other LJ spinoffs like DeadJournal. So do AOL, Yahoo, Technorati, Smugmug, and all the blogs hosted by Wordpress.com. I didn’t have an account at any of those, so I got my own OpenID through MyOpenID.com and I use my url here as my OpenID login, though I could’ve gone through a zillion other providers.
Of course, if you don’t want to bother with any of that, you can still just register here to comment. But why would you?
After many years of fantastic hosting courtesy of Anna and Kurt, I’ve moved my site to a new home at Dreamhost. If you’re looking for a cheap quality webhost, you could do a lot worse.
At the same time, I’ve upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress. My design template continues to work well on the new ver, but I’m feeling like it’s about time for a change, so I may put some work into it sometime soon.
In late July I got to return to Taiji Legacy for the first time since 2004. I didn’t take notes as well as I did then, but we got a lot of video and I’m working on cutting it to DVD. I should have a post about the event pretty soon.
Thursday was my first night sparring since I went in for my elbow surgery. I was really hesitant and protective for the first few minutes but my arm was fine. I didn’t even notice it. My sparring hardly suffered at all for the absence, and one of my sparring partners even asked me if I’d been working on my kicks because they seemed faster. With one of the more advanced students, I tried out some of the Shuai Chiao I learned in Dallas and it worked beautifully.
My post-black-belt training continues. We’ve finished learning the chain whip form using our practice ropes and we’ve started working with actual chains. The first one I got was a heavy nine-section whip that turned out to be too short for me. Since I’m going to replace it with an eleven-section, I’m going to get a lighter chain that will be easier to manage. Swinging that heavy one is murder on my arm.
Since I made black belt, part of my training has involved teaching some of our classes. I usually run one Intermediate and one Advanced class each week. I almost always enjoy it, but lately I’ve been having a little trouble with the Advanced classes. We’re covering the stick, the fan, and nunchucks this level, so it’s a huge mass of material to cover. I always end up feeling like I either spent too much time on one thing or I tried to cover too many things too quickly. I’ve gone through all my notes on that level and written up some ideas to try to give it more balance and still make it a good class.
We have regular adult classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Mondays and Wednesdays some of our black belts hold extra classes for people who need more work or missed some of the usual nights. Until now, those classes have only addressed Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced students, but we’re seeing a need for White Belt makeup classes as well, so one of the other black belts and I volunteered to each lead one class a month. Last night was my first one. I only had one student, so it was a lot more like a private lesson than a class. We didn’t cover a whole lot, just some basic foundational material and some work on the first form, but I felt like I helped the student make some good progress. I’m still a little surprised at how much I enjoy teaching.
Back in September or thereabouts, I noticed my right arm was bothering me. I was having trouble straightening the elbow and there was some pain around the joint itself. Certain movements hurt. At the time, though, my knees were the really pressing problem, so I got those fixed first.
Eventually I got my knees sorted out and decided it was time to get the elbow inspected. It was pretty plainly medial epicondylitis (golfer’s elbow), but the usual simple treatments (physical therapy exercises, cortisone shots) didn’t seem to help. We got referred to an orthopedist and he spotted an unusual bit of bone growth on one side of the joint, preventing it from straightening, which meant the exercise and cortisone just wouldn’t do the job. It meant surgery.
It was supposed to be a simple thing and I should’ve been home the same day, but apparently I’m an enthusiastic bleeder. I spent a night in the hospital, and although I was all hopped up on goofballs for the majority of the time, I was aware enough to know that my wife was fiercely watching over me. Without her there, I’m sure the whole thing would’ve been nightmarish.
After a week with my arm mummified in bandages and plaster from shoulder to fingers, we finally got to see the doctor’s handiwork. It was kinda horrific. The doc told me to keep it elevated, dry, and to try to use it as much as possible without actually doing anything painful, and it seemed to me that I was paying an awful lot for a guy to babble contradictory nonsense at me. A week later, I got to start my physical therapy.
I did PT before, you may recall. My knees are in great shape, by the way. Compared to that stuff, this routine of therapy has been a summer day in the park. Some dumbbell curls, some weighted pronation/supination, an easy build-up to strengthen and rebuild the tendons and muscles around the elbow. I don’t even have to grit my teeth and tolerate ice packs this time. Instead I get heat packs on the elbow. The hardest part is the active stretching, where my therapist actually puts a fulcrum under my tricep and pulls my elbow straight. I thought trying to resist joint locks was bad, but try just sitting there and taking it while somebody tries to bend your arm backwards.
I’m nearly done, though. When I started PT, I was routinely starting the day with my arm unable to get less than twenty degrees from straight. Now with just a couple of minutes warming up, I can easily achieve zero degrees, straight as an arrow. There’s very little pain for most activity, including weapons training. I still have some pain for certain movements, like a palm-down curl, but my therapist says even that should disappear over time. This is the same place that fixed up my knees, so I’m inclined to believe them.
I started back at kung fu last week. All together I was out for roughly forty days or so. Waiting until I was sure I was ready turned out to be a good idea, though, because it was a tough workout and my arm came through it beautifully. On Wednesday I go in for a follow-up with my doctor and he may turn me loose from PT entirely.
So now I’ve got a pretty good elbow. I also got a cool scar.
A brief dump on a bunch of stuff:
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This weekend my dear wife and I made a significant lifestyle choice.
You see, we have 110lbs. of dog. Two of them, split not quite evenly. Once we got them both housebroken, Sam (not to scale) and The Professor (ducks and lake not included) were allowed to sleep at the foot of our bed. Our queen-sized bed. This worked out pretty well for everybody. At the time, The Professor was full-grown at fifty pounds and Sam was still a puppy at about thirty.
Now Sam is sixty pounds and has never outgrown that puppyish tendency to sleep in piles. He’ll cheerfully sprawl directly on top of your legs. He also loves to streeeeetch out and occupy as much space as he can. If that means pushing you right the heck off the bed, fine.
This has begun to wreak havoc on our spines. The dogs seem unaffected, but Deirdra and I are walking wounded, crippled by our own canines. Unacceptable.
So this weekend, we took a chunk of our tax refund and bought ourselves a king-sized bed. We’d expected it to make our room look crowded and small but it turns out that it seems to work just fine. Of course, despite each of us saying “Oh, I’m pretty sure my frame will adjust to fit a queen or king, even if yours doesn’t.” Neither will. It doesn’t matter, though. Now there’s room for both of us and both dogs. There’s even room left over for the cats, which seems to make them very happy.
At this point, you’re probably thinking “If it were ME I’d just kick those dogs to the floor. No way would they sleep on the bed with us.” That’s what everybody else has said. That’s fine, I suppose, if you’re a cold and heartless robotronic Vulcan animal-hater with no feelings who gets a charge out of kicking puppies. You evil bastard. How do you live with yourself?
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