Cleaning cats

We all know that cats like to keep themselves clean, but come on!

Nice weather

We had a nice break from the chilly days & got the boys to their favorite swimmin' hole.

Store Wars

Not the best animation in a spoof, but the character names crack me up!
Join the Organic Rebellion.
On a par with The Meatrix.

Congrats!

To my wonderful wife on her graduation from the master's program at Virginia Tech!!
I wonder what life will be like with two full time incomes in the house?!

I love you, sweetness.

Get ready to slurp

Free Frosty Day!

I picture myself driving around the county from restaurant to restaurant.... with a cooler of dry ice in the trunk to store them!

And in case you haven't tried it, a little (or a lot of) kahlua in your frosty is a pretty wonderful thing...

Raze the roof..

But please don't let it fall on our heads!
As well as installing a new chiller unit on our building, the university is replacing the entire roof. Why they couldn't have done this before we moved in to the top floor, I'm not sure.
It sounds like a freakin' herd of elephants over our heads at least five hours a day, and will take another couple of weeks before the work is done. It's surprisingly hard to concentrate when it feels like the ceiling is about to fall down on you.
This must be what it's like to live in California!

The rare & improbable free lunch

What a treat, not a huge treat, because it was Burger King, after all, but still nice. I ordered lunch at the BK nearby, and whipped out my credit card to pay for it when the manager said that their card reader was down. I was out of cash, and that's all I had to pay with... .
But he wanted repeat business enough that he wrote the meal off rather than see me head up the street to the competition!
I wonder how much money the store will lose today because there was no backup system in place?

Find Your New Imaginary Girlfriend Today!

Imaginary Girlfriends. How cool and bizarre is this?

Control the Center

In class last week I was teaching a variety of knife techniques & noticed that people really got too focused on the knife. Now, it's a good thing to know where that knife is when it's coming toward you, but like so many things, the more you concentrate on it, the more it slips away.
As with tai jutsu, if the attack is coming from uke's center, then that is what has to be controlled.
A good blend, tenkan, followed by good entry, irimi, is still what is needed.
What needs to be different is how we think about the blend when there is a weapon involved... . Going inside may suddenly be more dangerous than going outside, and vice versa, using ikkyo instead of gokkyo, etc.

I guess that I have enough time on the mat (but nowhere near enough!) that I don't think conciously about those changes too much in the middle of technique. I suppose it's good that they're becoming second nature, & getting into my muscle memory, but it takes more thoughtfulness to remember those details and to teach them now.

Too Tired Dogs

Over the weekend we were in C'ville & took the opportunity to run the dogs at Darden Towe Park. We stayed for almost two hours letting them play & have an all around good time, the took them for a little swim in the Rivanna River. All in hopes of tiring them out for the ride home Sunday evening.
It obviously worked — not only did they sleep all the way home, but when I got up on Monday morning they stayed in bed; they didn't even get up long enough to eat breakfast! And it was yesterday evening before they even felt like playing again.
Of course, we were worried about Rudy since he almost always gets car sick, & hates to travel. But this trip we switched him from Benadryl to knock him out to Dramamine.
Man, what a difference! He still drooled a lot over the first part of the trip, but he didn't get sick, & he was even a little perky when we got there! I think we were both tickled to death over how much better he did.