Tag: karate log

Wednesday June 10th, 2020

I put up a rather long entry last night for Sunday, along with a photo of “dirty laundry.” Actually, the photo showed clean laundry on the ground, lying around a rolling rack. It felt like a fitting metaphor. I had “aired” some of the concerns we’ve encountered while trying to pull the dojo community together. That’s an unconscious brain at work for you: making connections.

The photo was also interesting because the larger, rolling rack, full of clothes, neatly enclosed both a smaller rack and a little kumquat tree. The larger rack had fallen over both without damaging either. A white gi, IFK symbol visible, along with my ichi kyu belt, were right on top of that pile, unsoiled. So odd, how neatly the picture encapsulated a metaphor for me. Poetic, too, given its backstory: the wind knocked down the rack. Looking at it, my eyes go straight to the gi and the tree.

But I’m supposed to be logging my daily exercise in preparation for my test through this blog. I did exercises this morning and this evening. Today got up to 97 degrees, so my evening exercises were tough. We are not running the air, since we’re expecting the heat to pass in a day. I also ran for twenty minutes on the treadmill and, once again, called a close friend.

We discussed strategies for getting through a mound of reading for graduate school. She’s taking her second graduate course. The timeline is compressed, since it’s a summer course. She’s also taking the course on-line. I told her how I’d learned to skim and scan large amounts of text in a short period of time.

As a literature student in graduate school, I had the advantage of discussing strategy with both professors and Phd candidates in person. I could ask, how the heck do you get through such a huge volume of secondary sources, along with your primary ones? I’d faithfully read everything as an undergraduate. While doing graduate work, you see there’s often simply too much information out there. You learn to skim and scan, in order to figure out what you actually need to read in depth for your particular topic. Often, I explained to my friend, you just need to know how and where to find important information. So surveying the available literature is primarily about understanding what’s already out there, and how to find it when you need it. I had my mentors, older graduate students and professors, to thank for that strategy.

Saturday April 18th, 2020

Current Log

Last night I was late for karate class, but managed to enter the Zoom class while kihon was still running. Sensei asked me to lead and call blocks as soon as I was in the class. Both kids were feeling tired and didn’t join, so it was just me, in our bedroom, and this laptop.

Sensei rotated between students to call the kihon exercises, so luckily I did not need to call kicks. He had us do an increasing number of push-ups, sit-ups and squats between blocks of exercises, too. “Go as fast as you can! Thirteen push-ups, sit-ups and squats, now!” he instructed. The number he called increased by one or two each time. We ended with a set of twenty.

I managed to stay on my toes for these and usually did “tricep-style” push-ups, in which you focus on bending your elbows under your body to work your triceps, rather than “out,” as in a traditional push-up, which works more your chest. I did switch to chest for one or two sets. If we made it to seventy total, I don’t know, but we did more than sixty. So I was in the neighborhood of the requirement for my Friday evening set. I was out of breath by the end of the workout.

I’m writing outside and I keep hearing this low hum, like a giant bee or a weed-wacker that is more quiet than usual. I’m pretty sure it’s a humming bird. They like our lemon tree.

Well, back to karate. I got up the ichi-kyu-diary website homepage, introduction and privacy policy. WordPress has you do some kind of “what-we-do-with-your-info” pages and they provide you with a canned version that you can customize, so I kept theirs with some modifications. I have two versions of my partner’s mural up, and the header image display for this website is supposed to randomly change between the two. However, I think it does the switch for the entire site and not on a per-page basis, as I’d prefer. One day I need to delve into the design side of blogging and add flexibility to the site. They do have a calendar widget, which could be pretty useful as a way to link daily blogs.

My daughter, F, read what I had posted yesterday evening. She was my editor. I also found a fabulous work of art that she’d made, and I want to put that up, but I should ask her. I’d like to one day have a little art gallery attached to the site.

AP, a good friend, co-worker and amazing artist, who creates sculpture, paintings and photography, in addition to working in visual effects, has put a lot of work into her site and it’s really cool.

So today, here are my goals: jog on the treadmill for twenty minutes, put this entry up on the website as the first actual log, and drop off a cake to C with F. Because it’s Saturday, I have off from doing the exercises (push-ups, sit-ups and squats) but not cardio. Running this past week has helped. The scale says 107 and last week I was 109 in the morning. I’m trying to check at the same time once a week. Also, I’m not indulging in quite as many sweets.

And F also has a goal: it’s C’s birthday. She made her a cake. We plan to drop it off at her house. Maybe I should text her parents and find out if they want us to leave it some place in particular. C is one of F’s closest friends, and her family usually throws the best parties. C is also a great kid.