I have taken to keeping tabs on several bargain sites, and the recent Tom’s Hardware article on building a high end gaming rig inexpensively has me tempted to build another system.

The interesting thing is that my laptop serves all of my needs. I have a desktop system upstairs that I hardly ever use, however for some reason I am compelled to consider building another machine. Part of me wants to have a system downstairs, however I have no good place to set it up or use it. Setting up a computer desk in the middle of my LOTR themed basement would be an eyesore, and there really isn’t anywhere else in my house that another machine would be suitable.

So far I’ve been able to resist, and its not been overly difficult. Until a time comes that a game exists that I am dying to play that my laptop can’t cut it, I think I’ll be OK. Here’s to being responsible! 🙂

The past few days I’ve been slightly under the weather. I suffer from chronic aphthous ulcers, which started when I was in grade school. Mine are moderate to severe… I’ve actually had to have a few of them burned out with silver nitrate, especially painful considering they tend to appear in the back of my throat. Let me tell you, that is a fresh hell that I don’t wish on my worst enemies.

I’ve found that it is easy to treat the ones that appear in a servicable location using hydrogen peroxide, Listerine, and various combinations of Orajel, but when they show up deeper in my throat or in my sinuses they are impossible to treat and they make me miserable for weeks at a time.

This time, luckily, the ulcer has appeared inside my lower lip which is easily treated. As the article indicates, its some sort of weird immune system response to some stimulus. I just wish I could figure out what that stimulus is so I can eliminate it. I’m not overly stressed right now, I’ve been eating normally and working out hard. The only thing that I can think of is that I’ve been outside much more lately and maybe its an allergen that is causing the trouble.

claims to have a medication that his dentist provides him (he suffers the same affliction) that can take the healing time down to around three days, which is a marked improvement from my usual. Hopefully it is something I can convince my medical professionals to let me try, because these things suck. Bad.

STILL waiting. The case is still in arbitration with PayPal, the seller has faxed PayPal three seperate times. I don’t know what he can possibly be attempting to provide, however I expect this thing to be resolved one way or another any day now. It will likely take another week or two, but I can hope.

I don’t understand the mentality of someone who would knowingly misrepresent an item like this and then attempt to weasel their way out of it once they’re called onto the mat about it. I do not believe that this guy honestly believed that he was being truthful, however apparently he has three faxes worth of data to attempt to prove his innocence.

So there’s the update, you’ll know more when I do.

I was able to put back 15 Sochin tonight before class… I had arrived around 5:55 pm in order to kickstart myself into working out since I was having motivation problems. Kata felt pretty good tonight, I did quite a few of them as “walk in the park” kata, but the ones that I put the mustard on felt solid. I’ve been working on keeping my shoulders down and my butt tucked under me and it seems to help the amount of power generation and stability that I have.

I led warmups tonight, and then Sensei Brewer took us through a nice casual basics workout focusing on lunge punch, front kick, and the deepness of our stances. I will be the first to admit that I need to work on this, for some reason my front stance hasn’t felt low enough in a long time. It may be, but something in the feeling is not there.

We also got a primer on our new ASKA passport books that will be used as an official record of rank, judging certifications, and clinics attended. I purchased mine tonight and will transcribe my belt progression into it from my blog, since I recently updated it. Its a pretty nice record and very well put together, even though I will miss our CISKA workout cards I think that this will be a worthy replacement.

During the second class we got the opportunity to watch a new video that purchased of Sensei Osaka performing Bassai Dai. The video was made in the early 80’s, as evidenced by the background music that was very reminiscent of “Eye of the Tiger” but the technique and the power that Osaka Sensei puts into the kata is nothing short of outstanding.

We finished off the class working on Bassai Dai ourselves for fifteen minutes or so. I really enjoy that kata, unfortunately it has been one of the casualties of the Year of Sochin. I’ve probably done more of Bassai Dai than some of the others, but I have a feeling next year may be a bit of a kata sampler goal like the others are doing this year in order to re-round out some of the neglect. Time will tell on that, but it was nice to get a chance to work on Bassai Dai again.

Since posted his update, I realized that I have been lax about reporting my progress on my annual goals.

The Sochin goal marches onward, I am at 1005 of 2000, or 50.25%. I’m feeling pretty good about my progress here, but it will be hard work getting the other half this year. I remember at the start of this year doing 10 Sochin kata in a row was extreme effort, and now we are regularly doing at least 15, oftentimes 20 kata. That amount of progress itself feels good and makes the effort worthwhile.

Part of this post was spurred by my parents, as my Mom talked about Oprah’s Debt Diet series that they ran last week. This reminded me of my own goal to eliminate debt this year, so I figured it was time for an update on this front. Tasha and I have eliminated 23.92% of our credit card debt. Things have been going somewhat slow lately with Teddy’s illness and some other incidental bills, but we are still making positive progress. I can honestly say that I never expected to be this far along at this point in the year. Taking the time to audit ones finances and watch where money is going is really helpful… Tasha and I are starting to plan for Christmas and we intend to continue making good progress into next year.

I may do these goal update posts a little more frequently, but because I am tracking my Sochin goal progress in each karate post and my financial goal doesn’t change *that* much month over month I may continue to space them out a little. We will see how things go!

Dad and I decided to work on the fence some more this weekend. We had decided to rig up a fix to the double swing gates and build the gate for the front of the lot. On Day Six, we set out to build the front gate and stretch the remaining piece of fencing. Stretching the fence was no problem, in fact it went so well that we were starting to feel good about things. What hubris had we!

We built the gate, commenting how nice it looked and how great it was going to be along the front of the lot. We measured three times to ensure that we’d have enough clearance for the hardware, we were confident in our calculations. Using the DeWalt SawzAll that loaned us for the weekend, we made our cuts, stretched the chain link along the gate. We went and hung the hardware to swing the gate, everything looked great! We attached the closure that would keep the gate secure along the neighbor’s fencepost. It looked a little snug, but we thought we’d be OK. We were wrong.

The gate closure has a small lip underneath on which to attach a padlock. It was by the width of this hinge (only 1/2 inch!) that we were off in our measurement. The gate would close, but did not have enough clearance for the closure to swing down and latch. That finished us off for Day Six, we were defeated.

On Day Seven, we decided that we would take the gate off, cut off another 1 3/8″, reassemble and rehang the gate. That went quite well, everything went according to plan. Onward to the double swing gate. The plan was to take an extra section of 1 3/8″ top rail, drill holes through it and one of the gates, attach the mounting hardware for the E-Z Latch assembly to it, and screw the top rail to the side of the gate acting as a spacer. We drilled our holes, slid the mounting hardware onto the top rail as a test-fit, and put the bolt through the gate and spacer. Too short! Argh!!

So a final trip to Menards secured us 3.5″ bolts, which worked perfectly. We attached the hardware to the spacer bar that we made, attached it to the gate, and attached the E-Z Latch. Success!

This left the final portion… the lattice. We had to cut down our 4 x 8 sheet of lattice to fit under the roof of the neighbor’s garage. We then drove two sections of rebar into the ground (the same ground that sliced my finger open, take that ground!) and used fence wire-ties to secure the lattice to the rebar.

It was finished! We closed the gates and let Teddy frolic in his new environment! After a little while, he was done with exercising so we put him back in the house and I proceeded to use ‘s SawzAll to lay waste to the growth that was coming from the two stumps along the lefthand side of my lot. Let me tell you, that saw was a Godsend… some of these branches that were growing sideways were almost three inches thick! After I was finished fighting the urge to laugh maniacally, I piled the carcass of the Shambling Mound that I had destroyed along the side of my house for my brother-in-law to haul away.

It was a pretty satisfying day of yardwork. Teddy’s fence is complete, the stumps are de-forested, and no fingers were lost in the pursuit! Hooray!!

Teddy was on a forced “no food and water” order from the vet until 4 pm today, when he got 1/3 of a can of bland science diet prescription dog food. So far, things have progressed well. He has not been sick today, but he has been sad at the lack of food. Hopefully good updates continue and my dog is happy again!

Today was a forced gasshuku, due to the summer cleaning closure of the Mapleton dojo. We decided to go sideways across the lot this time, making use of the thirty degree incline hill. It took about 50 technique to get to the base of the hill, and another 20 to go up the hill. We did lunge punches forward, downward block reverse punch backwards down the hill, front kick forward, rising block reverse punch backwards down the hill. We did inward block/elbow strike/backfist strike/reverse punch up the hill, fifty side kicks over the crest of the hill on each leg, and then we did a leisurely jog down the hill alternating reverse punches.

This was all before kata. I was sweated out, so I removed my gi top for the rest of the workout. and I proceeded up the hill and rocked out 25 Sochin kata. I was so sweaty by the end that my Sochin rosary slipped out from around my belt and was briefly lost in the grass. Luckily, an eagle-eyed saved the day and found it for me.

It was a very good day of Karate Stuff, much fun was had by all. I am now over halfway home on my Sochin goal, with 24 workouts comprising 1% or more. So far I’m proud of the results, but there is a long way to go before the end of the year. I’m going to try to milk the nice weather to get some more progress made soon. Thanks to everyone that has helped to drag me along so far, I really appreciate it. More Sochin comin’!