Yay Us!

Mom and I were so good this weekend; I am very proud of us. We spent Saturday fixing, mending, and organizing cave gear (yes, it does take about a week to go through all the washing of gear; it's all very dirty). I finished putting the ripstop nylon patches in my new fitting coveralls, and I dropped the waist on my new long john pants (some pairs I could literally pull the waistband up over my boobs... waaaay to high for me). Then, Mom wanted me to do some mending of her gear, so I fixed her long john pants, too (too-tight ankle cuffs), and made her some fleece vests. It's always good to have a warm vest or something to put on in a cave in case you/ someone else gets chilled. The secret to speleo-temperature management is motion: active, mobile groups create lots of body heat and everyone stays warm. If you aren't exerting yourself much, you can get chilled really fast (the average North American cave temperature is 53 degrees F ... with no sunshine to warm things and cold rocks under your butt). So yes, we now are equipped with the best of fleecy vests and fitting long johns and indestructible coveralls. :) Life is good.

Then on Sunday, we attacked the front closet. grr! argh! Closet never stood a chance. This is the hall closet that everyone has where the winter coats get stashed... and the winter accessories, and the extra tablecloths, and the board games, and the misc tote bags, and the cameras, and the things brought from the grandparents' houses, and the leftover small-child toys, and all that random stuff you have no place for. Yea, THAT closet. But it was out first step towards our garage sale coming up this Saturday. We are getting rid of things! Yay! We have lived in the same house for almost 20 years, so the stuff has accumulated just a little bit. But Mom has admitted we have a problem, and isn't that the first step to solving it? So we are whittling away at the stuff and soon we will have a nicely organized house. I am excited, because then Mom will be able to find things and move about easily in her own house.

Remember: Garage sale next Saturday, May 10! Bring cash and a trailer! Records, board games, electronics, crafts, and books. Come one, come all.

Caving Spring '08

So last Thursday we rounded up the Girl Scouts and headed out to good ol' West VA for the Spring caving trip. Much fun all around. This was the first trip I was officially a solo female adult -- the last few trips I've been paired with another newer / less confident adult woman (each group tries to have both a man and a woman adult, along with a junior staff high school girl). But this trip it was just me, one of the guys, and my junior staff... and I was the driver for the group! Craziness. I'm not that old yet. :P Though I ended up recruiting another adult my age to help out with some group issues. Diffusion of personality clashes is always good. And Mom did remind to bring Garmy (my Garmin; yes, I know I am bad at naming things), so I have the schoolhouse, the showers, and two caves plotted into GPS. Take that, sucky directions! I am satellite linked! boo-yah!

You will understand my frustration at the directions we have to the caves if you have ever been out to WV. Most directions are "turn at the Uncle Sam mailbox," or "on the other side of the mountain" anyway, but when you leave town and head for the hills it gets real bad real fast. Case in point: one summer trip we were looking for the "blue building" to turn at according to the directions. Little did we know that since the directions were written, the building had faded to grey AND had been overgrown with flowering vines. We could hardly see the damn thing and drove past it like three times!! grrr....

You and the cow... that's all that's out there

ANYhoo... random anger over, I can say we had a pretty good group this trip. We are becoming strangely bottom-heavy in our experience levels among the girls. Usually, there's one or two groups of Rookies, a Second-Timer group, a Has-Been group, and a group of high schoolers who are being evaluated to be junior staff. But this time, there were two groups each of Rookies and Second Timers, and Group 5 (which is usualy pretty advanced) was only Third Timers! And the high school group was definitely not mature enough for junior staff. Good to have new people joining up, but very weird when everyone is so new and inexperienced.

Da high-schoolers

I had the smallest group, just three Second Timers, and we took then to Fox and Snedegars caves. On Friday, they were the most not-wanting-to-go-down-small-areas group I've ever had! And by "small holes," I mean anything that you can't stand fully upright in. They even tried to convince me they couldn't go down a passage... when it was the way out! They had already come up that passage that morning, but a few hours later it was too small. Goodness! So, to break them of their whining, on Saturday we shoved them down every small crawl we could find. mwahahahaha They were so tired of army crawling by lunch, but we kept at it to show them what was physically possible and what was just them being lazy. The standard rule is that if your helmet fits, you can fit, 'cuz the body is mostly squishy and bendy, but your helmet is definitely not. It's just soft tissue, girls, move it out of the way! :)

I also was excited this trip because [drumroll please] I HAVE COVERALLS THAT FIT ME!! woot! It's very exciting. All my previous coveralls were made for fat & short people (I swear, one pair is a 46Short) But now I have a 36 and a 38! Woot woot! So, now that I have fitting coveralls, what do I do but rip them... twice. :( So yesterday I went to the fabric store and got some rip-stop nylon to mend holes and reinforce knees and rump. Now that I have the proper size, I am determined to keep them in as good a condition as possible!

Both New AND Improved!

Hey guys, if you are just trolling for new posts, 1) don't be upset, I go to work tomorrow so I will write something about the recent caving trip I went on, and 2) to stave off boredom, look down the sidebar at all the cool new stuff I found! I like the word games that keep refreshing. I don't think I've played hangman since grade school, but I've already spent like 30min at it. And the spelling bee is fun too. Maybe I am just a literary dork, but I like them. :) Just a few things to keep your mind sharp and active; it's important to keep away the mad cow disease. (I'm Denny Krane!) ....But stay away from the spelling bee set on "Expert" if you want to keep feeling positive about your education. It gives you words like "proselytism," "obstreperous," "triptych" ... jeeze. :(

And I am watching you now! I have a nifty website hit counter down at the bottom now. The statistics it collects are seriously bizarre. Very CIA-tracking-your-life stuff. :/

(Though do let me know when my over-enthusiasm for neat stuff starts making my blog cluttered. That kind of feedback would be greatly appreciated.)

Engineers and Cats

As both an owner of cats and daughter of an engineer, this made me almost pee my pants I laughed so hard. (It's about 6 minutes long and you definitely need sound.)

I is for...

I is for ISKF (International Shotokan Karate Federation). I think this is the first of many times I'm going to fudge with the letters a bit. I already have K's (karate )and S's (Shotokan) planned, but no I. Then John suggested this solution. He's so smart.

So, Lara got started with the karate club in college, and I joined in too when I got to W&M. We had a pretty strong club up there: we had a nearby sensei who came to campus twice a week, and we were allowed to go to his dojo whenever we could make it. (You could always tell the people up for their black belt test; they headed to the dojo like every day) We usually had about 10-20 people at trainings-- Sensei wanted a club where he needed a megaphone to be heard. :) We also had the privilege of Sensei Teruyuki Okazaki coming to our testings and doing clinics for us three times a year.

Club Photo for 2005-2006. Okazaki Sensei is at far left, Sensei Pohle far right.
(I am in the middle row, fifth from the right in pigtails.)

Okazaki Sensei is the head of the ISKF and trained under the founders of Shotokan karate, Masters Ginchin Funakoshi and Masatoshi Nakayama. He was very influential in the start of the Japanese Karate Association, then was sent to the USA by Master Nakayama to help spread karate to the world. He's based out of the HQ dojo in Philadelphia, and visits entire countries, so to have him come to little ol' Williamsburg was super huge. We think our sensei must have rescued somebody's baby or something for our club to be so lucky.

Testing, Fall 2006. Kata section, Bassai Dai

I also went to Tokyo on a school grant to train at the JKA HQ dojo in the summer of 2006. That was an experience-- training with maybe one other person who speaks your language (I only had studied Japanese formally for two semesters before leaving). It's amazing, though, how much of "sensei speak" is able to cross language barriers. I could tell when he would be demonstrating something that we were doing bad [Japanese mutter mutter in low voice] and when he would show us what we were supposed to be doing [Japanese mutter mutter in higher tones]. Listen to any teacher of a physical activity and they do the same thing.

Testing, Fall 2006. Roundhouse to the face! I love this picture.

And I have to mention it- karate gave me my sugapi! I met John through the karate club... and I still say I don't understand karate relationships. I am definitely not looking my best at trainings and a gi is not the most flattering outfit ever, so to have a boy think you are cute when he only sees you at karate is a little weird. But I still love him. :)