My Wushu Blog

One evening Michele was a little frustrated with me, about how I never really say anything. I’m a pretty private person even with my own family, so I don’t talk all that much beyond superficial “how’s the weather?”. Well, since I had this secret obsession with wushu, and I figured if Michele really wanted to know what I was thinking of I’d let her in. I believe she thought it was a little far-fetched, again, we didn’t know people who did martial arts especially adults.

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I broke it… Okay, I didn’t “break” anything, I decided to upgrade my server to fix some corrupted files (this is what happens when you let your server melt in 100+ degree weather), and in the process I sort of forgot to backup the large MySQL Database…. And to think people pay me to do this for a living.

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Mark’s Wushu Retrospective journal has made me all nostalgic about my own experience with getting in shape, loosing weight, and starting wushu at our beloved Wushu West. I had gained a lot of weight right after Michele and I got married in August 2000. Well, after high school (1998), I gained 20lbs, but I proceeded to put on more once we tied the knot. You would have thought it was my second full-time job, eating crap.

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This movie had Guillermo del Toro’s name attached to it, and I anticipated that it would be awesome and have some really cool creature effects. I was off on the latter, while the movie is a really good horror/suspense there is very little physical gore. One tiny part was graphic, and I made Michele mad that I had her watch the movie :) The premise is a little orphan girl grows up, and as an adult she adopts a little boy, and then buys the house that used to be the very orphanage she grew up in.

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Westerns never caught my attention, I avoided them at all costs. It’s mostly because my whole family was into all of that, and since it conflicted with my indoors only activities of computers and guitar playing, I rebelled against then and refused to watch Lonesome Dove. Also, it was an older movie, and I’ve discussed my aversion to watching older movies. Well, I was doing my usual workout where I’m half-way lifting weights but mostly preoccupied trying to find something entertaining to watch so the workout wont feel so boring and lifeless.

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The past few weeks have been pretty busy, Owen is still in the hospital (and we expect him to stay there another two weeks) and his collapsed lung has healed up. Now they doctors are getting him off the pain medication (down to morphine now), helping him feed on his own, and get his bilirubin resolved. We’ve been going to see him everyday, and we were finally able to hold him last week.

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My little boy was born ( 04/22/2008 @ 10:25am ), at a nice healthy weight of 7lbs and 13oz with a height of 20" ( all in all, almost exactly what Caralyne was, she was 21.25") We don’t have him home yet, and I’m sure I’ve keep almost everyone up to day, but he has a collapsed lung, or pneumothorax. This happens a lot, but most of the time it’s a tiny hole and the body just absorbs the escaping air and the lung heals within a day or so.

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After CMAT I had felt a little extra bit of motivation, it has dawned on me that this past year I had really digressed in wushu. There has been little focus for me, and work has been more and more demanding so I recognize that as an issue. Mostly though, the majority of ‘coaching’ I have received has been about the website and computer work. What I really need to do is to be less passive about what I want and be a little more persistent.

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After CMAT I had felt a little extra bit of motivation, it has dawned on me that this past year I had really digressed in wushu. There has been little focus for me, and work has been more and more demanding so I recognize that as an issue. Mostly though, the majority of ‘coaching’ I have received has been about the website and computer work. What I really need to do is to be less passive about what I want and be a little more persistent.

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Class has been a little laid back for me, which is alright, I haven’t been working as hard as everyone else so it’s not like I can even bust out a section of a form right now. It is a little hard to go to class when everyone is so fired up and is at their peak. Patti is still giving me new moves here and there for the broadsword form, and James said she really wants to give us (those of us who are just learning dao) a really good old school wushu dao form, which is every cool for me.

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