I’m back

In both places, that is.  LiveJournal account is back in use – the threaded comments and locked posts were worth it for keeping in touch with friends.  This account is back in use – I’ve decided to have a public blog as well.  As, oddly, a part of trying to spend less of my time on blogs.  Blogger account is not in use – Trying to see if WordPress will deal with things better, since I find Blogger a little ugly.

We’re back at the dojo – Training is going well, despite a brief disruption due to ant bait toxins.  Last Saturday, Nate and I taught for the first time, and it went well.  Cooking is going well – I’m making chili a couple of times a week, and working on corn bread and potato soup.  Garden is going well – My livingroom is full of potted herbs, and the planters outside are overflowing with seedlings.

Software projects:

• Pachydermic – In early dev.  I’m learning a lot about how to work with databases from chatelaine, which will reflect back on this relatively soon.
• Chatelaine – Simultaneously in early dev and in use.  I need this one Right Dot Yesterday.  The minimal nature of my knowledge with PHP and JS means that I’m actually entering data manually a lot of the time.  But, Syncthia helped me with DB layout, so there is a place to enter the data into.
• Deske – Sidelined.  Chatelaine is more important, and I got tired of fighting with the PGDP interface to extract the elements for presentation in XUL.  Despite its simplicity, AJAX kicked my butt.

Flat floors simplify taijutsu

Happy year of the Rat, everyone!!!

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Last Thursday, I had a Discussion with the local vitaminist. One I didn’t want to have, yet blithely walked into anyway. I was foolish enough to mention that I’d stopped drinking caffeine (specifically redbull), and was therefore looking into taurine supplements. Instead of paying attention to the part of this that related to her job (ie. “hi, I’m looking for product x”), she went on a tear about how she “wasn’t going to say anything, but…” followed by judgmental statements about my drinking caffeine in the first place. From what I’ve read, something like 80-90% of adults in this country drink caffeine on a regular basis in one form or another. It’s also none of her business, my decisions are my own, there is no way an external person can have all the information involved, and it wouldn’t be their decision even if they did.

I haven’t hit the gym lately. Probably going to pseudo-fix that today with a bit of an indoor workout. Was just plain too busy last Thursday, and too angry on Friday. I lost a lot of weight far too fast, since I just hadn’t been able to get myself to eat for a few days, and burned off what little I did eat too fast with stress. Started to fix that Thursday/Friday so that I’d be able to go to dojo, and I’m glad I did.

Dojo on Saturday was fabulous. I broke my no-caffeine rule just before it with a drink from Jamba Juice, which I won’t be having again because by broke I mean pulverized. Even if I was still drinking redbull that would have been too much caffeine. This was a planned variation on theme though, and served as an appropriate test of the degree to which my sensitivity to it was adjusting, and the after-effects of individual doses in subsequent days. It was also, I admit, a crutch to get around the vitaminist issue having hit some twitchy points at a time when I could little afford it.

We all got a little bored waiting for Ben to show up, so started running through some stuff before class on our own. I don’t like training with other people outside of class, except for Nate, because I don’t trust my skill to handle whatever may come up and I don’t like not having an outside observer to spot potentially dangerous stuff that may be non-obvious in mid-technique. So, I just trained with Nate, going over Kihon Happo stuff. The other guys (Walter’s back! Yay!) looked to be doing Sanshin, which was cool. Ben walked in with a comment of “hey, I like what I see, lets run with this” and off we went. And went, and went… That was quite a workout. I took a few falls in ways I’ve never done before, and a lot of ones that pointed out to me places where my technique dissolves into “arms in front of face and hope”. Good stuff. Managed not to freak out about sitting on the right-hand corner when bowing out. It’s the first time in ages that I’ve been the highest ranking student present, I was surprised that the concept didn’t make me as nervous as it used to.

We hit WholeFoods on the way back to pick up some Taurine for me. Such helpful stuff. My brain, it has purrs. Then came home, sat around talking for a bit, did some more training, put my foot through the mats in the training room… I resolved to clean the place further, and soon.

Sunday, I got a blender. I can has organic smoothies! Such infinite tastiness, and foodfulness too. It’s a very small blender, but it does the job well enough for me. I’ve been eating better since we got it, and definitely getting more vitamins out of life, as opposed to out of the vitamin bottle. The difference between organic bananas and ordinary bananas is pretty stunning, I had much clearer dreams after that first smoothie. Too bad they weren’t pleasant ones. I’m also taking another whack at meal planning / cooking at home, this time with a focus on “simple, fast, get it done” rather than “aieee, try to cater to tastes I don’t actually understand”.

I’ve been battling an ant problem in the kitchen for most of the last week. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, really. My strategy for solving the ant problem wasn’t one that would be enacted in a day. First I traced their paths, found the entrances they were using, filled those with putty, let them wander to see if they’d find new paths, laced the ones I couldn’t putty with borax, killed all the wandering ants I could find. Waited, found more wandering ants, left a spot of honey out, watched trails form, traced the trails back, added more putty… And now I have no ants and a clean kitchen. With no poisons either. I’ve also got a clean training room, since I went ahead and dealt with that yesterday. Funny how having that room clean does so much for my state of mind, even though I don’t make as much use of it as I should. It’s the clear pool, untouchable, except when I let it get cluttered with boxes.

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Yes, there’ve been shootings locally. They aren’t a large danger to me. While the media is portraying it as a gang war, it’s more of a gang minor tiff with occasional bullets that’s keeping to the back alleys and residential zones that I don’t frequent anyway. I appreciate the increased police presence though, and look forward to them resolving this as fast as possible. It’s led me to some interesting research about zoning, unincorporated areas, and the geography of Los Angeles County. If anyone else is interested, the county planning office has a GIS interface.

Also, my birthday is on the 17th. I’ll be 24. Somehow, it doesn’t seem like as much age as I thought it would. Nothing’s changed, everything’s changed, I’m looking forward to it. And no, I don’t have anything planned.

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Next goal(s):

• Workout plan that doesn’t involve gym, so I can hand that to Nate.
• Workout plan that does involve gym, so I actually hit the treadmill.
• Waza and variations for new meal plan, both dinners and packable stuffs.
• Since North Lake failed it, consider a trip to North Hollywood for bokken, gear bag, better dogi.

Head first

Thursday afternoon I pulled a thigh muscle. It was a good thing there was no dojo on Saturday, since that leg wasn’t very happy until Sunday.

On Saturday, we went to check out a martial arts supply place people in the dojo had been talking about. It turned out to be in a far rougher neighborhood than I was comfortable with, especially with a nasty pulled muscle and a weak ankle. Snagged some bath salts at my new favorite soap shop, hoping they would help it heal faster, which they did. Unfortunately, Old Town Pasadena is not a place I should visit shortly after rains. I got quite poisoned by it.

Much of my week since has been taken up by recovering from that, and continuing to recover from ceasing to drink caffeine. I finally hit Taurine crash on Tuesday, nearly a week and a half after I stopped drinking the stuff. This may have been related to running out of vitamins on Monday. Unfortunately, the vitaminist hasn’t been getting shipments, and I don’t have an alternate source for the liquid multis, so I’ve been doing without. Not as well as I’d like, but… A combination of dark salads and chicken handles the Taurine issue. More salads, citrus, and throwing berries in my cereal seems to hold for the vitamins for now. Hopefully I can acquire more soon.

Something hasn’t been holding quite well enough. Either that or I’ve finally hit the headaches. I’m spending about half the day in ‘debilitated wreck’ condition, but I want to see what will happen if I just trudge through this for a few days. With luck it may be simple caffeine headaches and go away quickly. That would be nice. I don’t mind the pain, so much as I mind the lack of endurance and balance.

Garden is growing nicely, I still haven’t remembered to harvest my carrots. I always think of it at the least convenient times. Did get around to fertilizing everything though. The kitchen had an ant invasion today, so I pushed myself a bit to take care of the necessary cleaning. It will be good when these headaches are gone.

Also, some kind LJer appears to have set up a feed.  So if you want to read this journal on your LJ friends page, you can friend this feed.

Hail makes me happy

Friday: No hot water.

Saturday: Very hot water, barely managed not to get burned in the shower. Dojo was excellent fun, even though I was still sore from Thursday and Ben decided to make us do rolls for half of class. Ended up doing some training post-dojo as well, which may have been non-brilliant since it led to being sore and tired for several days. Accidentally didn’t drink any redbull, decided to stick with that. I’d been planning to drop caffeine at some point this winter, this seemed like a good time.

Sunday: I measured the water temperature. 164° F at the kitchen tap.

Skipped gym on Tuesday because I was dreadfully busy, ditto Thursday. I’m still off caffeine, it hasn’t been anywhere near as rough as I’d expected given previous attempts. The only hard part is figuring out what to drink in restaurants, since lemonades and citrus sodas are often adulterated with substances I don’t eat and I’m avoiding all caffeine at the moment (except a little green tea on Saturdays) so dark sodas are out. Currently I’m defaulting to orange juice, which is ok if overly sweet.

I’m making good progress at eating, aside from some issues with browning grass-fed ground beef. No, I haven’t made any progress on programming. Hopefully things will pick up again once the caffeine finishes wearing off and I get my metabolism back. This morning, I was woken up at 4:50 AM by a hailstorm. It made my morning very peaceful and pleasant.

I saw a sign at WholeFoods today saying they were going to stop giving out plastic shopping bags on-or-before Earth Day 2008.  According to this page, it’s company-wide.  As paper bags give me a headache, guess I’d better start being reliable about throwing extras in my pack.

Last week I finally accepted the obvious and bought a folding cane. My ankle’s been doing much better since, I’m down to only using it for long walks or heavy loads now, but generally it’s been very helpful for not pain overloading myself. Between that and a compression brace, I can actually keep the goofy thing in joint, even when it’s really messed up. This definitely helps it heal faster, and hopefully will help it heal more permanently. I do the most damage to it when tensing muscles trying to keep it stable on a bad day, the brace lets me keep it relaxed enough to not injure further without it sliding out and the cane keeps me from having to force as much balance through it.

Cooking experimentation is mostly stalled, although eating experimentation isn’t. I’ve been eating a lot more fruit, trying out as many varieties of oranges as I can find, etc. So far my favorite breakfast, other than “more oranges!”, is cream of rice with frozen blueberries tossed in. Should get more variety into this soon though, as I’ve got pears and avocados ripening in the cabinet.

Tuesday Gym Summary

Run: 5 minutes, much harder than expected, barely got up to 4mph pace.

Weights: Successfully killed my pects. 5lb is not the same amount of torque at full arm extension.

Pulldowns: 45lb 4 x 15, bored.

This was mostly a “get myself back into the right room” sort of exercise day. Not what I’d call a real routine. Mostly looking over the equipment, trying to memorize what was available, getting an idea of my current condition, then going back to hit the books and come up with something better.

Thursday Gym Summary

Run: Did two segments instead of one long, pushed up to 5 mph for most of the second segment. Not as difficult as I’d expected, ankle put up with it, should try in pants that don’t chaff next time.

Squats: Hah, I’m a wimp. I’m glad I went for 1/4 of 1RM est. for first time playing with this. As much as, yes, I CAN squat my groceries, doing 10lb 2 x 12 was plenty. (Dumbbells, I hadn’t found the bar yet, bastards hid it.)

Lat pulldowns: 30lb 2 x 15, and I barely even noticed that I was doing anything. Definitely underestimated on this one, should have tried rows as well.

Presses: Angle ones looked fun, so did that. Dumbbells again despite having found where the bar went, because the only hooks I could find for resting the bar were on the Smith machine and too far apart for the bar to go onto. 5lb ea. 2 x 12 was just right, mostly because my pects are barely recovered from Tuesday. I like the extra attention it takes to move dumbbells accurately as opposed to barbells, and I like needing less “ach I’m gonna drop a heavy bar on my face” concern.

Situps: 0lb 2 x 12 flat, and I’m embarrassed to say that was difficult. Doable, reasonable, I doubt I’ll be sore, but I was definitely having to focus.

So, not bad overall. Still got more reading to do, and I should be doing some stuff for my bad ankle other than subjecting it to controlled running, but progress. And didn’t kill any muscles today. Only one problem: I couldn’t find any place in the gym appropriate for chin-ups unless I can get the Smith machine stuck at an appropriate height. I’m not ready for them yet, but they’re on the eventual menu, so having appropriate equipment would be nice. Ok, so having appropriate equipment would be nice in general… The city gym is rather minimal in a way that indicates that the purchasing agents had probably never actually used a gym. As much as I don’t want to end up at 24 Hour FUDness, their weight room was at least complete-looking, and a year of compensating for the city gym may drive me batty enough to go for it.

It felt good to spend more of my time on free-weights than machines. I need to find the holes and fill them, but this was just an exploratory round anyway, so really… I did what I intended to do. It’s important for me to learn not to overdo it, and this was a key point in doing so.

Links

For gym stuff, I’ve been studying the articles at Stumptuous.com: Women’s Weight Training.

Some of my fruit-eating success was inspired by The Steve Pavlina Blog.

We’re back! Ow my ninja muscles…

Last week we went to the dojo, but there was no class because of rain. I froze my feet in wet tabi and got a hypothermia lesson instead. Apparently proper ninjas are supposed to know to wear wool socks. This week, there was dojo, and we went, and it was great fun. Ben, Celeste, and Jess were there. Apparently there’re some new people who weren’t present. We spent a while on Walk Like a Ninja drills (yoko aruki, step around, try not to trip over your own heels), then a while flinging Kyoketsu-shogei around. (Training versions, of course, made of cutting boards and dog toys.) I’m really happy to be back, and there’s more sense of family there than I’d really felt before in Ben’s dojo, which I’m very happy with. For about a third of class, we had a cat sitting in the dojo with us watching and playing. Apparently, this cat is so humanized that it goes for walks with its people, without even spending all its time on a leash. Very fun class. And this time, no frozen feet! *grins*

We got an AeroGarden just over a week ago, which is now growing happily in the kitchen. Wasteful or not, it is something that may get more plant experience into my head and more plants into my body, which makes it worth while. Separately from that, I’ve been eating more plants. Yesterday I had fruit, fruit, leaves, fruit, fruit, and a little cheese. It’s a welcome conclusion that there is no such thing as too much fruit. Cooked vegetables are unpleasant in quantity, I’m off most grains, but I can happily eat pretty much as much fruit as I have room for, and greens are feasible if I stay off the plain lettuces. The plants I put into plastic pots post-holiday are improving in their new environs, so I’m thinking that replacing most or all of my clay pots may be a good idea. I’m also, apparently, back to being able to eat mangos with caution. Yay!

Programming progress on Deske is moving along slowly but effectively. I’m starting to grasp a bit of JavaScript, XUL makes sense, DOM isn’t incomprehensible, I’ve used its CSS and Locale stuff before. Apparently now I need to learn AJAX techniques. Ok, I can do that. And once I do, I can start busting this out of the mockup stage. *grins* I’ve gotten enough assurances regarding my visual layout that I’m not too nervous about it anymore. And we’re starting to get the little Asus laptop in good enough shape for actually working on the go, which might increase my available coding time once I find my USB keychain so I can shuffle files sans network.

Ding, dong, 2007’s dead

Holidays survived, with only minor pain from encounters with laundry detergents. I ought to acquire a real bedroll to spare complication in the future. Spent some nice time with Nate’s parents, acquired plastic plant pots. Got a few books for Christmas that I’d been interested in. We also got a third laptop – a white Asus Eee, which is a sub-notebook, about the size of an A5 book. In fact, it fits perfectly in the case from one of my old day planners. Despite having only a 7″ screen, it’s very usable, and has the advantage of having no disk platters. Its original OS had quirks, but Nate put Ubuntu Linux on it, so it’s happy now.

After we got back, I finished updating move_current.lua for the current version of Ion 3. I haven’t gone through the tedium of submitting it, because Ion’s author has some rather unique ideas about patch submission, but I’ll throw it somewhere findable if anyone cares. This was the first programming task I’d completed in a long time, a good feeling. The Lua features in Ion 3 are quite extensive at this point, and he’s improved the overall design a lot recently. I suspect that most of what I would like to see is implementable with scripts at this point, and would like to spend some time on that at some point, but not until I’ve got a firmer specification for it. “Shiny and awesome” is a little too vague.

In the meanwhile, I’m working on one of several related proofreading interface projects, which are going under the working name of Deske. The current one will hopefully be an XUL interface to PGDP.net. I’ve got first revision mockups made, and some general idea of how to proceed, but I need to learn a great deal more JavaScript before I can write the entire thing. Not a problem–programming languages are great to learn on a whim. The other Deske project, being standalone, would probably be easier for me, but also very different in its redeeming value.

I’ve also been working on cooking again, now that my health is together enough to allow it. Today’s stroganoff was more than passable, so perhaps this time it will work well. It’s being a lesson in how not to write recipes–most of my old cards, while not useless, require more deciphering than I’d like and leave too many measurements to intuition. On Sunday, we re-organized the front room completely. Moved furniture, re-arranged plants, used some of the pots I got over Christmas. The apartment feels much airier and more companionable now. I even managed to put one of the plants in the kitchen, which makes working in it far more pleasant. It seems that I don’t spend time in places unless I put plants in them.

That was quick…

The training room is back together. Nate and I threw out 29 bags worth of trash from it on Sunday, much of which had been previously classified as non-trash. There’s more to be eliminated, but at least it fits in a closet now. On Monday I hauled a mattress to the dumpster, vacuumed, and laid the floor back down. Strangely, after all of that, I was neither sick nor muscle sore.

It’s been raining, and I finally got my hair properly full of henna again. I’m much more comfortable as a redhead. It’s gotten so long now, I had to make up 4 cups of mud rather than 2. I haven’t put the training room to much use yet, as the mad rush of holidays is beginning. That should change soon though, as I’m on track to be in shape for returning to the dojo in January. Nate’s anticipated schedule for that was much more reasonable than mine–I’d thought I would manage it in November.

As much as I’d thought months ago about what I might want for Christmas, when it comes down to the wire what I really want is just to make use of what I already have. No real goals until after the social dust settles.

Saturday, we re-tried the Japanese place up the street. Mmn, salmon… Fish make me happy.

Monday, I got my gym membership taken care of. Mmn, treadmills… Much to my surprise, running was a lot easier than it had been a few months ago. I guess my health improvements were bigger than I’d thought. Had a nice dinner, accidentally met Nate’s boss. I’m temporarily off red meat and soda, which is being strange. Plenty of chicken though, as some of the supplements I take don’t work without sufficient protein.

I’ve been putting in far too many hours on PGDP. That site’s addictive.

I managed to make Akregator, OpenID, and LiveJournal play nice with eachother, so I now have RSS for everything including locked posts. While the WordPress documentation indicates that it absolutely does not export locked posts via RSS, it actually does if you’re logged in and should have access to them, so this works for that purpose as well. This well serves the purposes of decreasing Firefox memory usage and not hitting refresh constantly, now I just need to find something other than PGDP to do with all that time I’m not spending hitting refresh.

Next grand plan: Clean up my training room.

Did I make it to a start?

I seem to be finally making my way out of the haze of unhealth that has permeated my life. My skin is finally healing, which was the last big problem, and I don’t anticipate any more as large as the recent ones have been. At least, not soon. Like most problems I encounter, it was multifaceted. I needed different soap, stricter gluten avoidance, fixing my lymph issues, turning down the temperature of my showers, more Vitamin D, and it’s possible I still missed something. Hopefully not something critical, I would like my wrists back as soon as possible.

One thing I have learned from this is that if I do something daily I must also do it moderately. Taking extremely hot and scrubby showers with fairly harsh soap is not a big problem if it’s done once or twice a week, but done daily and at a time of physical weakness it can become near-disastrous. Large swaths of scalded, abraded, chemical burned skin do not a happy person make. Of course, I thought a heat I could stand was sufficiently safe, forgetting my own tolerances, and I didn’t know the soap was harsh, nor that it was diminishing my ability to feel the heat, nor did I have any idea the showers were contributing to the problem. I thought I was being diligent, and was proud of myself for it. As I’m working on being diligent about eating, I’ll have to watch out for similar foolishness.

Plans on the horizon: Gym membership. A bit later, returning to dojo. Assuming my rib keeps holding up, my ankle doesn’t go out, my wrists heal, and I don’t do anything else to myself. Oh, and it’s raining. =)