The lightning took out our Internet, the garage door opener, and my upstairs computer! More details tomorrow!

Tonight, Tasha and I went shopping for light fixtures.  You see, one of the more irritating features of a home built in 1973 is that the light fixtures are… well… from 1973.  As a result, many of them are worn, starting to break, or butt-ugly.  Sometimes, all three.

My brother-in-law is good with such things, and after some budgeting and discussion we decided to part ways with $320 and buy seven new fixtures for our place, including a truly awesome chrome and white ceiling fan for our kitchen.  I’m not entirely sure when he’s going to come over and help us install them, but I’m really looking forward to the updated look they will bring.  We’re still looking for a light fixture for our foyer to replace The Orange Globe of Death and I want to shop a bit more before selecting new exterior fixtures, but we’re getting somewhere!

This week my “Honey Do” list consists of painting the basement ceiling and helping to prepare for our garage sale this weekend.  There’s probably more, but I that’s what I remember right now!

Today was the first day that Tasha and I car-pooled to work.  To my mind, there are a lot of positive things about doing this:

1. More time with Tasha – This is a huge plus.  We actually had time to talk to each other in the morning and it was nice and relaxing.
2. Less Gas == Less Money – This was the main driver to this decision.  Gas is climbing, and while we can still afford it we thought it made sense to conserve since we work so closely to one another.  As the title says, this is a money decision first, the planet benefits as a side-effect.
3. At Work Early – I got into the office a full 45 minutes earlier than I normally do.  This doesn’t mean that I get to leave early because Tasha doesn’t get off until 5 (most times in the past I fill in the extra half hour at home each night to finish up email), but I can sneak out for lunch with the guys or take a few breaks during the day and be just fine!  Plus I get more done in the morning.

Also, I had enough time to pack up breakfast, I had some Total cereal.  I don’t know if it was the extra vitamins or what, but it shot me straight awake at around 9 am and my energy has stayed up all day.

w00t!

Today was busy as well! This weekend flew by in an instant, but at least we got some things done!

Today, with the help of Tasha and my parents we:

• Painted both upstairs bathrooms (green and blue respectively, woot!)
• Pruned the apple tree in the back yard, which took my Dad and I around four hours
• Sorted and priced several additional boxes for our garage sale

It doesn’t seem like that much in bullet points, but trust me it was a lot of work! I had been out in the sun too long (heh) and worked up a pretty decent headache. It took a 20 minute nap before dinner to shake it off… but I’m good now.

In other news, I’ve been researching the field of homebrew multitouch interfaces. I’m thinking about trying to build myself a cheaper alternative to the Microsoft Surface.  I firmly believe that this type of technology will be everywhere in a few years, and I’d love to understand it front to back.

As with my MythTV, I think it would be a cool nerd project and I’ve been needing another of those lately.

I got a lot of things done today! Here is a quick list:

• Got woken up by Tasha, who needed help getting Teddy to drop a freshly killed young rabbit.
• Went to the bank, paid my mortgage, and went to Menards to buy paint.
• Got my wedding ring cleaned, along with one of my One Rings that I am going to sell.
• Came home and got most of the way through deep-cleaning the rabbit room, while my Mom scraped the walls down on our partially finished bathroom and Tasha started painting our master bathroom.
• Went to Goofy Ridge to visit my father-in-law for his wife’s birthday, where I ate hot wings for the first time.  Oddly, I like hot barbecue sauce much more than I like sweet barbecue sauce.  The OCD part of me hates the fact that they are so messy.
• Completed May Blog Posting Month (or I will as of this post!!)

I’m going to head upstairs to find some boxes to unpack and price for the garage sale that we’re having next weekend!

Tonight’s workout was an interesting kata-flavored event. During the first class, it was left up to just us Nidans and we elected to split into belt-level groups to work on kata. I ended up with Jane-san, so I got to work on Heian Yondan for an extensive period of time.

We had a really good time, she was asking questions and we ended up focusing for quite awhile on the side snap kicks and the elbow strikes. For awhile it was too loud in the dojo, so she and I ended up in the yard adjacent the dojo since the weather was nice. She has a lot of potential to have insanely fast footspeed, so we played around with that for awhile before getting back into the kata in earnest.

Sensei Quinn showed up for the second class and ended up teaching in his street clothes, explaining that this happened commonly in Japan. It was a first for me, for certain! We had a master’s class on the kata Empi, which I had done as “my kata” for well… most of a decade. As always, Sensei Quinn took us on a very detailed path of exploration through the kata, and many of the suggestions really helped to hone areas of the kata that always felt a little off to me.

His application of rising punch is fundamentally different than I had ever experienced before and I had some trouble with it. In addition to that, I found that my stance has gotten a little weak and my legs were screaming at the onslaught of doing the downward blocks behind me.

It is very tempting to give in to the overwhelming feelings of frustration and inadequacy that come along with having a kata that you thought you were comfortable with exposed from a new perspective, however I left tonight’s class energized because I got to learn some new things that felt better in practice.

All this and we only made it through the kata once!! I’m going to steal a page from ‘s book… “and much fun was had by all!”

P.S. – and I did a set of regular 15-10-5 perfect pushups, so I’m back in action on that front today as well. I was pretty happy with how strong I felt, despite the slight tightness in my chest and shoulders.

I got my new iPod today! Now those of you that have been paying attention the last… well… forever know that I like to get a bargain, and I got a bargain on this one.

I found a black 8GB nano on Buy.com for $139 and I had a $10 off coupon if I checked out using Google Checkout for the first time. I’ll take over 1/3 off for something that hardly ever goes on sale!

The only hitch was that it was a refurbished item, which comes with a few inherent risks. I was checking out the reviews from other people that purchased refurbished iPods from Buy.com, and there were mixed results… most of the people had no problem at all with their iPods, but others had some superficial damage to the case or the screen was mounted crooked in the case.

Tasha assured me it would be fine, and as usual she was correct. As I suspected, the iPod came with truly crappy generic earbuds (most every recert shop does that, except for Apple) but I was a little surprised to find that it came with a sync cable as well. The player itself didn’t have a scratch on it and everything is in working order. The only thing that was remotely non-pristine about it was that you could see a little wear on the clickwheel under the right light, but that’s no big deal.

My entire library of music fits on there with a little room to spare! I’m really pumped! I was even able to pick up a acrylic case and still come out way ahead.

will be happy to hear that I named the device Winslow.

Tonight was a great night again… we spent the first class on basics and partner training. Mercifully (for a change) pitted us across from the white belts as we worked on partner basics. I was across from this young kid that was able to raise his leg in strange quarters that I have not even seen do, his kicks were a little pushy but he wasn’t afraid to make contact. It was really fun to watch him have fun.

Sensei Brewer took over for the second class, and we started out with some basic techniques. My hip action felt like it was working pretty well and I was covering some decent ground with the techniques. By the time we started doing a few partner drills I was starting to tighten up. I had this unshakable nerve about me tonight… it was ok while I was with but as I progressed through the rest of the class it got increasingly worse.

I got across from Sensei Quinn again, which is always a good time but I was tight, tentative, and unsure of myself. I knew halfway through sparring him that my rabies were in full force, I was making some weird unholy noises but was still calm on the inside. Usually that is a good thing, but for some reason it was less than effective on him… I think I might’ve gotten one or two techniques in that I would consider passable. The rest of the time I just ate a whole variety of round kicks, reverse punches, and front kicks.

Among the other banes of my existence tonight was Erbe-san. He was like sparring a large angry yeti, complete with his manhandle attack. Once (and I mean once) I threw a round kick that would’ve brained him had I connected but of course he came in after that and threw me around like a rag doll. That aggravates me a little bit that I can’t figure out how to get away from his charge when that happens, but I will persevere!

I had good moments tonight, but as pointed out my brain was having difficulty switching between kill mode and recover from attack mode, so that was probably a major contributor to my lack of an expeditious retreat. It was still a very fun and cathartic night, much needed after a few long weeks of work related stress.

That’s the real reason I love karate, how readily you can sweat out the normal stress of life. Even when you have an off night like I had tonight, you can still walk away knowing you did more in two hours than most of your coworkers have done all month. That perspective feels good, no matter how much your body hurts at the end!

Today we got the patchwork finished on my basement ceiling! came over and helped finish the work, including the texturing. We ended up using a paintbrush to match the texture and it worked perfectly!

came over today and we ended up going to Iron Man at Kerasotes ($5 Club for the win) along with a few other friends and my parents. It was just as good the second time around, I think this is my favorite Marvel movie so far.

Tomorrow its back to work, unfortunately… luckily its only a four day week and we’ll have another weekend on tap!