Starting last year about this time I have been searching for a martial art activity for myself. Initially I started with karate as that is what I had done before. Being out of shape and trying to return to something I was once very good at was disheartening to say the least. The mental image I had bore no resemblance to the physical reality I was experiencing. My return to karate lasted exactly two evenings.
Discouraged, I sat out the entire winter, thinking about doing something but never following through. Eventually I decided to go and watch the local kendo club. Since I had never participated in kendo before I wouldn’t have prior experience clouding my expectations. At first I really enjoyed kendo; it was new, the people were nice, and it felt good to be out doing something again. That I was also altering my lifestyle so as to lose some weight helped.
My enthusiasm for kendo has diminished, however. It is more tightly focused than karate and therefore more repetitious. My karate experience encompassed principles and techniques from jujitsu, judo, aikido, and plain old boxing. The focus of practices were varied. The kendo workouts have become predictable and a bit boring. I find that I always look for excuses not to attend, and when I do attend, I spend the entire time looking forward to the end of class.
Organizations or clubs are like living organisms. And like all life forms they will reject that which is foreign to them. I don’t feel rejected by the club or its members, but I don’t feel like I fit in either. My goals or objectives are being met by the style or practice, or the style of the art. In short, I need to move on to something else.
There is some sadness at ending my kendo workouts. I will miss the shared camaraderie of two hours in 108 degree heat, I will miss the people. I will not miss the feeling that I have to go. I need to keep looking until I find something I want, so that attending is what I do, not what I have to do.
Last evening I went out for pizza. While in the restaurant a large group of women and their daughters gathered in one end for some kind of awards dinner. There was laughter and shrieking and the general mayhem that accompanies a gaggle of ten-year girls. Eventually they got around to passing out awards and praising the efforts of different people. After the awards I became aware that the girls were performing cheers or chants of some kind.
One of the cheers/chants that was repeated several times involved the line, “shake your booty” and an actual shaking of the booties of all performing. Even the moms got up and shook. My thought as soon as I heard and saw this was one of dismay. These ten or eleven year old girls were being objectified without their even being aware of the process. That the moms were going along with this behavior, encouraging it, and participating in it was even more disheartening.
I do not condone, nor do I support, any thinking that absolves boys or men from their actions. Males in our society need to be taught right and wrong, they need to understand the violence is wrong, and that other people have a right to personal safety. No action by a girl or women “makes” the man do anything. So, should these young girls now, or when they become young women, be molested or sexually attacked, I hold the boys or men responsible. However, teaching young girls that they can get attention by using their bodies is dangerous ground. Abstract thinking skills, the ability to understand consequences, is not something children possess. I fear that we as a society show young people a way to act without also imparting all the ramifications of those actions.
I’ve been a regular user of instant message chat since ICQ first became available (my ICQ id has only 6 digits). With AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, and now Google all offering semi-proprietary chat clients I have accounts on each service. Running five different chat clients is cumbersome and somehow not elegant.
For years, when I was primarily using Windows on my personal machines and at work, I used Trillian as an all-in-one solution to multiple chat services. Upon switching to Apple and the Mac OS nearly four years ago, I started hunting around for a multi-protocol client once again. At first I was using Proteus, but I soon switched to Adium.
Changing employment engagements to a client with restricted Internet access, I once again needed a new solution. Enter Meebo. A web-based multi-protocol chat client, meebo has rapidly replaced all my other clients, regardless of operating system. I get the same look and feel on any machine, on any OS. Better still, using the “load page in sidebar” feature of Firefox, I can have Meebo up an running along side my regular browsing - I don’t even have to switch to a new window or tab to continue a converstation. Each new release of Meebo brings more desktop client features to the mix as well. If you haven’t tried it yet, and you are a fan of more than one chat service, I high recommend Meebo.
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a light comedy with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. Neither the best nor the worst light comedy every, just good clean fun.
Rating: He doesn’t say “Judy” in this one either.
On my way home from work Friday, one of the overhead information displays on the bypass read: “VEHICLE FIRE. EXPECT DELAYS. PAST 69 HWY” Having abandoned the highway for surface streets in the past when there was some delay I know that the frustration of traffic lights is worse (for me) than staying on the highway and creeping along with everyone else.
The slow down this time was a good two miles from the actual incident. Worse, the fire had occurred on the far side of the highway - everyone around me was slowing down to gape in wide-eyed wonder and the smoldering ruin of a mini-van. Not two car lengths beyond the flashing lights and fire trucks we resumed driving at the posted speed limit.
I understand the curiosity in humans to stop and look at what happened to someone else, but still. Maybe the emergency crews should erect large opaque Mylar sheets around an accident so that the rest of the traffic would keep moving.
Yesterday Nekko had her first follow-up visit with the vet since she was diagnosed with diabetes. The past four weeks have seen her return to her normal self, but I have not been successful in administering her insulin every twelve hours as prescribed. Nekko is not a cuddly cat, and getting near her at times is difficult. Rather than chase her I’ve opted, thus far, to sit in her favorite overstuffed chair and wait for her to jump up on the back, before injecting her.
The doctor was fairly adamant that she start getting two shots per day regularly. Because she hasn’t so far he felt there was no reason to run an expensive blood test during the visit yesterday. The problem isn’t just the twelve hour period, although that is a challenge. The problem is getting access to her with out keeping her locked in a small room all the time.
Her hiding place of choice is under my bed. It’s a king-sized bed so there is a lot of room under there - she can easily be out of reach. Inspiration struck on my way back to work: I have an inflatable mattress, why not slide it under the bed and inflate it thus blocking half of the space. With the mattress in place I am able to reach Nekko and inject her while she is under the bed. Her PM shot yesterday, and AM shot today, were both given while she was safely hidden away under the bed.
Henceforth I’ll be able to give her a shot when I get up, around 5:30 or 6:00 AM, and then another in the evening. The doctor allowed that I can overlap the shots by as much as three hours without endangering Nekko. So if an evening shot doesn’t occur until 9:00 PM the morning shot could be administered at 6:00 AM. I may not get all fourteen shots a week in, but I think I can dramatically increase from the five or six shots a week I’ve been averaging.
I’m thinking about moving….
I stopped in the apartment office yesterday after work thinking about alarms and left thinking about moving to an upstairs apartment.
There is an alarm option. $30 one time installation fee and then $25 per month for the monitoring service. It is an intrusion alarm that will trigger a call to the police if either the front or patio doors are opened and the code isn’t entered. So, $300 per year for an alarm.
I asked about upstairs apartments for the same rent. It turns out there are two 2-bedroom models upstairs that are roughly the same rent as I am paying now. Their floor plans are different than my current apartment, but both are about 200 square feet bigger than this one. Without making any calls about renting a U-Haul or van I would guess that it would cost about $300 to move from one building to another.
One of the upstairs models is in the center of the building so it has windows on both sides - cross ventilation. They both have private balconies, 2-bathrooms and 2-bedrooms. Without visiting the empties (I saw the models yesterday) I am not 100% sure, but I am confident they would both get sunshine year round.
It is very tempting to move, however I need to sleep on it for a day or three before deciding. I don’t want to make a hasty decision that I’ll have to live with for a year. There would be no penalty - my lease would transfer, but the term of the lease would start over again on the day I moved. I could set the term to 6, 9, 12 or 13 months.
My skin still crawls a bit when I think about the pond-scum that were in my place a couple of days ago, so moving to a fresh apartment might be the silver lining in this particular cloud.
It would appear to be National Blog Posting Month, so I’ll be attempting to post at least once a day for the entire month of November.
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Upon arriving at home yesterday at around quarter of five I discovered that I had been robbed.
Yes, robbed.
When I opened the connecting door between the garage and the kitchen the lights were on, and as I came further into the room I saw that my desk drawers were pulled out. I couldn’t quite grasp what I was seeing so I called out, “Hello?” and got no answer. Reaching the open end of the kitchen I could see into the main room of the apartment. Some of my luggage was on the floor packed with stuff, the bathroom and bedroom lights were on, a lamp was knocked over.
Someone or someones had been in my home.
I called the apartment management wanting to know if anyone had been in my apartment that day for any reason. I guess I still wasn’t processing the obvious at that point. I was assured that no maintenance worker had been in my place that day. Hanging up I called 9-11. Within ten minutes I had a member of the Overland Park PD in my living room. The officer took pictures and fingerprinted three items that he felt had good prints. (Later I learned from him that there had been another burglary in the same area; he didn’t know yet if it was similar to my break-in.)
It appears that they searched my closets and found the luggage (a suitcase, a small backpack, and an old gym bag) and packed then full of DVDs. The three bags were all left behind. The desktop computer speakers and some other computer cords were in one bag. It looks like they had just started on the computer when they were scared away.
There is a patio door that was forced open. It turns out that the dead-bolt lock wasn’t working properly. The mortise in the jamb wasn’t deep enough to allow the bolt to be completely extended. When it isn’t fully extended the bolt can be pushed back into its receiver with almost no pressure. The complex maintenance supervisor came out last evening and drilled out the mortise so now the bolt fully extends and locks into place requiring that the level be used to release it.
By the end of the evening I had managed to straighten up most of the mess that was left behind. Items from some jewelry boxes were scattered all over the bed, and the floor was covered with things they had tossed aside. I happen to have a list of all my DVD movies (I know, “nerd”) and so I was able to determine that only three titles are missing. Also missing is my digital camera, its bag with the charger and spare batteries, and USB cord. A spindle of 3 inch CD disks that the camera uses is gone, including the 15 or so disks with every picture I’ve taken in the past four years, is gone. I have copies of all the pictures but I hate that someone else now has my memories. Some $1 gold coins and silver dollars are missing as well.
What the bastards didn’t find was the good jewelry, nor did they recognize the value of the paintings on my walls. Nothing was damaged or harmed. It could have been a lot worse. But I still want to wash everything I own.
Today I’ll call the insurance company and start that process.
Some how I had missed this Meg Ryan / Andy Garcia movie about addiction. When A Man Loves A Woman is an excellent look at the impacts addiction has on a family. What I especially liked was that it showed not only the behaviors of the addict, but the behaviors of the enabler as well.
Rating: Sobering