Flight arrived on time! It is off to Pekin!

We’re just a few short hours from Easter, and it is yet another end to yet another Lenten season. We finally got turned on to a Catholic Church near our place, so we’re going to check that out tomorrow. I’ll be spending part of Easter on a plane back to Peoria, we’ve got a work session planned for 4 days out of next week. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to see my extended family on Easter or not, but if my flight comes in early or their party goes long I might get to see them all.

Aside from that, I’ve got a full dance card for my after-work time this week. Karate Monday and Tuesday, visiting both of my cousins, Matt and Sarah, and my parents all in four evenings. This trip is long overdue from a work perspective, but that’s not going to keep me from taking my out of the office time to visit friends and family. That’s about all I’ve got right now… looking forward to seeing all of my Peoria crew this week!

Speaking of this week, I’ve got a lot to look forward to. Tomorrow is my 5 year service anniversary at work, Friday is our 5 year wedding anniversary, and Saturday I’m going to see Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover Live in Colorado Springs. Good times!

Tonight’s D&D session will be dedicated to the memory of Dave Arneson, who was the co-creator of D&D. He passed away this week from cancer at the age of 61. Tonight, we are crawling a dungeon in his memory.

It’s time to go eat my feast of cheese pizza for Good Friday, so I’m off!

Bell X1 on Letterman, 3/17/09. Totally awesome.

Tonight I took advantage of the nice weather to grill out! It got up over 70 degrees today and it was a shame to be indoors all day. At least I got enough work done so I should be able to take Friday off!

That’s all for me right now!

Tonight’s workout was a good one, Sensei Yaguchi was out tonight so we got his assistant instructor.  I got to lead warmups, I don’t think the group here enjoys Japanese situps as much as I do.  We also did pushups, which some of them seemed to struggle with.  The rest of the class was a fine mix of basic combinations, partner drills, and kata.  In fact, we had a little mock double elimination kata tournament judged by the group, and I won the loser’s bracket with Sochin.  Bragging rights all around!

One of the Sandan’s in the club also does Sochin and he and I got to talking about it so we did a few together after class.  He’s got a good fudo-dachi and some good points about the timing of the kata, so I think this may become a common occurance.  It was a good one tonight, hopefully Thursday will be the same!

Tonight was a weights workout, it was somewhat busy at the gym tonight so we did some bicep and tricep machine work while we waited for the lat pull machine to open up.  Felt pretty good tonight, so we opted to try to do some chin ups after the bulk of our weights workout.  I was able to muster an embarassing two and a half.  I’ve got work to do!  We ended up at Buffalo Wild Wings for a protein-rich dinner including a few Blue Moons for good measure.

Tomorrow night is karate night, getting ready for a good solid week fo work before heading back to Peoria this weekend!  Not much else to report, aside from being tired!

Slept in, did grocery shopping, and now I’m watching Family Guy.  On a side note: why does the week drag on so far yet the weekend fly by so quickly?

I really don’t have much good to add to the mix today, aside from the fact we’re up to saving 74.28% on our groceries so far this year with TheGroceryGame.com.  Good stuff!  Now its time to go and pay the bills before another work week starts… oh boy!

Today my team lead messaged me and wanted to know if we could work out at the Louisville Rec Center again.  Usually it isn’t a problem for us to borrow a room up there, but today it was unusually busy.  Not a big deal, we just worked around the other people that were doing spin bikes, yoga, or random cardio exercises.

Our focus today was on endurance basics.  We worked on stances, punches, all varieties of blocks, and partner drills.  Our goal was 1000 techniques and we made it!  My team lead wanted to end the workout with a few Heian Shodan katas, which I was happy to oblige him.  It’s nice to be able to have a personal workout up there, and even better to have a target to aim at.  It felt very much like our Saturday workouts in Mapleton today.

I’m planning to get back down to the Denver dojo next week, happily we didn’t get as much snow as they were expecting today so I was able to get my second workout for the week in this way!  Good stuff!

Tonight was a good one!  My team lead and I worked on a myriad of good karate stuff tonight… I introduced side thrust and snap kicks, back kick, and we even did some timing and distance sparring drills.  I had a good sweat up before the karate portion of the night was done, and then we hit the weights.  I have found that if I warm up with karate and stretch out like I am accustomed, I can put up a LOT more weight.  It felt good to workout again, I’ve been missing it a lot.

We’re underway for another 8-12″ of snow tomorrow, so sticking close to home is the way forward!