Yesterday morning a bunch of us planned to get together and make our first real foray into parkour training. While sitting around waiting for the others to show up, I jokingly posted to twitter: Waiting around for the other wannabe traceurs. On the menu: rolls, speed vaults, turn vaults, kongs, precision jumps, and emergency rooms.

Let me tell you, as I lay in the emergency room, the bone in my shin exposed to open air, that joke was hilarious.

I’m fine. It was a stupid fluke accident. I encountered a wall about waist high, put my hands on it, vaulted over it, and as I landed on the other side, the top tier of concrete blocks came free and landed on my left shin and foot. It looked and felt really, really bad. Luckily I was running with Billy. He sprinted back to where we’d left the cars, rushed me to the emergency room, saw to it that I got admitted right away, and called everybody who needed calling. He also waited throughout the day to make sure I was okay, then gave Deirdra a ride to get the things we needed for an overnight hospital stay. He was a real hero.

It turned out that it badly lacerated the flesh of my shin, did some minor damage to a tendon, but no harm to the bone. At the hospital they gave me a tetanus shot, antibiotics, painkillers, x-rays, and eventually put me under so they could clean out the wound and piece me back together. I spent the night and got released this morning with a keen pair of crutches and a nifty mug. I go back in a week so the doc can see how I’m healing and what needs doing next. It looks like I’ll be okay, in time. The doctors were very reassuring. I’ll probably be taking a few days off work to recuperate, but I’ll be online here and there.

I wanna thank Billy, Marg, John, Ashley, Michael, Sifu, Katie, and all the countless people who called, wrote, and offered to help. You guys are awesome. Most of all, I want to thank my wife. She made sure the doctors and nurses did their jobs, went to get me food when I was starving, sat up with me when I couldn’t sleep and needed painkillers, and generally made herself sick with worry and caregiving. She puts up with my stubbornness and without her, I’d be…well, I’d really rather not contemplate it. She hasn’t yet beat me up for getting myself hurt. I think that says it all.

I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour.” I may try it once and discover that it was a monumentally bad idea, that my hands can’t take it or my upper-body strength needs more work than I’m willing to do or I’m just not that into running, even with the extra stuff to add interest. I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour” because I don’t want to tell a bunch of people that I’m all about it on Thursday and then be over and past it by Tuesday. I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour” because as far as I can tell, there are no traceurs within an hour’s drive of here so there’s nobody for me to learn from. I’ll be relying on YouTube and an APK tutorial DVD and bootleg compilation videos and that might not be enough to keep me in it. I don’t want to say “I’m getting into parkour” because it might not take, and then I’m a quitter.

I kinda felt the same way when I started studying martial arts, though, and five years later I’m helping out with classes and I’m one of the top students at my school, just one more rank from being able to open my own kwoon, take on my own students, and further develop Lung Shou Pai by adding my own contributions.

I only have one regret about kung fu: I wish I’d started sooner. If I had started studying when I moved to Jackson, I’d already have my master rank by now.

I’ve been talking to some other people about parkour and gauging the level of interest. I know that things like this are easier when you have training partners, and if I end up faceplanting into a wall I want somebody nearby to drag me to an emergency room. Half a dozen guys have already said they’d like to give it a shot. We have all kinds: guys from my kwoon, a skateboarder, a gymnast, guys with no experience at all.

My training DVD is on the way. I’ve been pulling technique tutorials from YouTube to put on my phone for easy field references. I’m looking into getting Jump London and Jump Britain as inspiration, even though there’s no way I’m going to be doing any roofwork.

The plan right now is to get all the wannabe-traceurs together, watch the DVD, then go out to a playground and start working on the basics. The fundamental parkour roll is very similar to a breakfall that we practice in Lung Shou Pai, so I’ve got a headstart there. I expect that before long, one of us will hurt ourselves. I expect it’ll turn into a lot more conditioning and fundamentals drilling than you’d expect from watching compilation videos. I expect it’ll be a lot more work than it seems. I may quit.

Right now, though, I’m getting into parkour. I hope that before long I find myself wishing I’d started sooner.

After hearing exhaustively about it on MacBreak Weekly for week after week, I finally broke down and got a twitter account.  I decided that I’d give it 48 hours and if I wasn’t completely engaged, I’d quit.  I think that within about 12 hours, Deirdra was already annoyed with my incessant checking on my phone.

I’ve found a decent iPhone-enabled webclient and I’m using Twitteriffic on my Macs, but I haven’t found anything worthwhile for Linux yet.  gTwitter sucks.  Since I don’t want to have to compile anything or install a gazillion dependencies, I’m probably going to have to resort to just using a webclient.  Any recommendations?

Also:  OpenID logins are broken.  I’m not sure why, but it’s resisted all attempts at troubleshooting.  Since WP 2.5 is out now, I’ll probably just migrate to a fresh install of that rather than spending more time trying to fix it on an older version.  Look for that soon.

As of the beginning of the latest session, my friend Jay has started studying at our kwoon. If you enjoyed the stuff I was posting back when I was a beginner student, you should check out his blog, as he’s doing very similar things there.

It takes about a year, minimum, in Lung Shou Pai kung fu to go from getting your black belt to testing for your second degree. The second degree test is, in some ways, less strenuous than the first. It’s less rigorously defined, for one thing. You aren’t called on to demonstrate everything you’ve ever learned. You demo everything the lower-ranking classes have been working on, plus all the forms that you’ve learned in your time as a black belt student. For me, that meant eight levels of colored-belt material, plus Ssu Wang (the first black belt empty hand form), the chain whip, and the kwan dao. Plus an endurance test and a 3-man pyramid sparring test.

I did well on everything. I didn’t work as hard preparing for this test as I’d planned, but I felt like that ended up being a good thing. My endurance was never an issue, my familiarity with my material was as good as I could’ve wanted, and my sparring felt pretty acceptable, even if I did get a shiner. I always get hit in the left eye. I should probably do something about that.

I’ve got two years of training before I get tested again. That one will be another serious, comprehensive examination, but now that I can relax and breathe again I have a lot of stuff I want to work on. Tai chi, for instance. Chin na, too. During a break from testing, Sigung showed us some chin na applications that did things I hadn’t even considered.  I’d like to put in some work toward developing my sparring using more forms applications so that my fighting is concretely kung fu, not kickboxing.  I want to do some documentation on some of our higher-level material. I’m looking forward to the change in pace.

Also, I need to get my new certificate framed.

The guys over at Macheist have put together an awesome bundle of Mac apps for under fifty bucks.  There are only two of the eleven programs included in the package that don’t really seem like I’ll use them:  iStopMotion and CoverSutra.  I don’t do stop-motion animation, and I rarely listen to iTunes directly, usually only through my iPod.  Every other program looks really useful.  I’m especially happy about Cha-Ching.  I’ve been needing a new personal finance program anyway.  I’m tired of booting into Windows to balance accounts.

If you use a Mac and any two of these apps look worthwhile, you’re saving yourself a chunk of change by buying the bundle.  Check it out:  Macheist Bundle.

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:

Starting next weekend, I’ll be teaching private lessons at my kung fu school.

One of our other black belts has recently decided to take some time off, so we were one instructor short and there’s a test coming up soon, meaning that there were students who want private lessons but not enough hours to go around.  Hopefully I’ll be able to help take up the slack.

I’ll have my own key to the school so I can open it for teaching, plus the privilege of working out there anytime.  I’ll get a cut of the profits from the lessons, but it’s not really a lot of money.  I’m doing it for the teaching experience and because I honestly enjoy doing it.  I’m really looking forward to this.

A couple of weeks ago Deirdra and I drove up to Memphis to visit my parents for my mother’s birthday.  While we were there, we met up with some old friends for some gaming.  I hauled most of my indie games, but we ended up playing The Shadow of Yesterday.  I’d had an idea kicking around in the back of my head for a one-shot for a while, so I was happy to GM.

The setting was a melange of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Fairy-tinged England and (obviously) Pirates of the Carribbean, with some strong influence from Farscape, since I’ve been re-watching the whole series.  All but one of the PCs were convicted criminals on a prisoner transport ship being hauled off to an island prison.  The sole standout PC was the ship’s pilot, the only one able to control the living vessel.  We started the game with their escape and overthrow of the ship’s crew and captain.

We had a grizzled terror of a pirate who had got religion in prison and reformed, a gypsy witch imprisoned for striking down a corrupt bishop, a half-breed son of a noble fairy house with a grudge against both his heritages, an ambitious pirate captain who loves long odds, a noble lady-in-waiting framed for the murder of her mistress, and the sea-touched liveship pilot.

They avoided engaging with another ship flying the flag of the Church, navigated to a port on the Barbary Coast to take on supplies and a new crew, tangled with the locals, shipped out and sailed up to the North Sea to raid English shipping lanes, befriended Viking pirates, and eventually faced down a corrupted liveship with a voodoo priestess pilot and a captain driven mad.  It was pretty great.

I should be going back to Memphis in October.  I think next time we’ll probably play some Capes and/or some Primetime Adventures.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Last week was my birthday.  I’m sure my instructor didn’t intend it as such, but I’m considering this my present:  on the thirtieth anniversary of my birth, we finally started working on a basic tai chi form.  It’s not the actual Li family set, not yet.  First we learn a simple series that’s repeated several times on the left, transitions to the right, then repeats several times on that side.  We get to practice that set as we learn the principles and the building blocks before we move on to learning the real deal.  Even so, it’s really great to be moving into something internal.