Today I went to observe an aikido class. Someone else showed up to observe, only she wanted to actually try it out, so I ended up trying it out, too.

It was reasonably fun. I guess I'll give it a shot.

(Do I sound less than enthused? It was fun, and will be good for me, but for some reason martial arts really don't appeal to me right now. This is a little weird, given that I used to be really into martial arts, and aikido was one I always wanted to try. I have a feeling the mother archetype and the warrior archetype are too far removed from eachother, at least in modern society.)

(For those who did not actually know me in high school, which is most of you - I practiced karate for three years, so I was pretty into martial arts in the past. My most recent experience was with the world's most negative Tai Chi instructor 3 years ago, which, having observed other Tai Chi classes since, I no longer have any regrets whatsoever about dropping.)

The other new person and I spent the whole class rolling. I felt a little bad. She was, I think, entirely new to it, while I was mainly remembering skills I hadn't used in 7 years, or had learned slightly differently, so I was having a much easier and quicker time of it.

I'm not entirely sure if this is my One True Class. The sensei seems a little sharp-tongued, but not to an obviously intolerable point. It's a very small class (only three regular students, plus us two new people), which may be an indicator that he has trouble retaining students. Or perhaps just that not as many people are attracted to it in the first place.

Part of my hesitation is, honestly, dumb - my freshman roommate took aikido at the same place, and didn't like it. But it's been 7 years, and the teacher has likely changed, assuming it is the same teacher at all. Even if it is, there's nothing to say that her dislike has any bearing on whether I'll like it. It's not like we were all that close.

In any case, unless I end up really hating it, I'll give it a shot until I get pregnant again (probably not for at least another 9 months, given that both koyote and I were born about 3 years apart from our siblings and don't feel it's an ideal separation), and then see what I want to do from there. That should be enough of a trial for me to know if it's something I want to stick with.

There is a stinky skunk somewhere nearby.

Anyways, I feel like we're finally breaking the holding pattern we've been in. koyote has a job, and is taking hapkido 5 times a week. I guess I'm doing this aikido, probably taking over the superwork at the co-op (4 hours of volunteer work a week in exchange for a 16.5% discount on groceries), and this Saturday I'm taking the class for the volunteer doula program at the local hospital. Leif has story hour at the library tomorrow (we'll see if it goes better than previous attempts - he's more into books now than he used to be), and I think we'll sign him up for a gymnastics class starting in October (well, "Movement Education" actually. They don't start calling it gymnastics until age 3). It seems like the type of thing he'd like.

Yay.

I'm feeling a little like Margaret right now, debating whether to take classes at the YMCA or the Community Center (though not the Jewish one).
( gym stuff )

I'm lusting after baby stuff. Clothing, diaper stuff, carriers...

I'd really like to get some kind of carrier that distributes the weight a bit better than the sling. Both slings I have now hurt my back after about twenty minutes. We got a baby backpack while on vacation, but it's a baby carrier, not a babywearer. There's a difference.

I should wait until after Christmas and see what he gets.

I should go ahead and buy a swim diaper soon, though. Classes start Jan. 5, and if I don't have a cloth swim diaper by that point, I'll have to buy disposables. Actually, the community center class says you can use cloth diapers with a cover, but that seems like it would be awfully bulky. But if it's only for a class or two...

( I'm also lusting over classes for myself )

I have $8.25 in invite code coupons. Maybe I'll use it to buy a paid account for lemurbaby, so that he can make a phone post and everyone can hear the adorable noises he makes. When a paid account expires, are the phone posts still accessible?

innn hy n 7 h er g zmkjjkkjk nnnnnnmwwcdm4sn3nnnnn2mwwsaaYU4T X CXGVV44ÍD fgyhegfgxfcxAeecsrffww22t3r4

That's what Leif says.

Now I must eat.

Suddenly I not only have appetite again - I have energy, too. I've actually been pretty productive at work this week, and right now I actually feel like going to the exercise room. I think this is a first.

Everyone is being deployed. On the pregnant friends page, I've read posts from several people whose husbands are being deployed within the next few weeks. Many of them are expecting babies shortly. A friend of mine is trying to find the money to visit her fiance in Hawaii one last time before he's deployed. I hate this. Why exactly are we sending all these people over there to have their lives potentially destroyed?

Oolong, the bunny that balances stuff on his head in my userpic, apparently died today :( Poor bunny.

Finding a seemingly brand new first edition hardcover Michener book from 1986 for $1.00 in a thrift store is quite fun. It's worth probably 10 times as much.

Signs is a great movie. I highly reccomend you go see it. It's at least as good as Sixth Sense. Plus, the director is hot, so he must be provided with money from overpriced movie tickets :)

Really though, it's an excellent movie.

Class is over. I think I did well enough - if I did decently on the final I should get an A. It's a relief. I never know how a class is going to turn out until it's actually over, since the place I most commonly screw up is the last big project.

In a way, it's a good thing. Keeps me from getting overconfident.

6:00 AM Tai Chi class makes for a very long day.

It's hard to believe it's August already. August-Septemer-October has been, for the past several years, a time of upheaval and change. I wonder if this cycle has ended, as other cycles in the past have ended. I suspect it has for various reasons, but I'm still curious as to what the next several months will bring.

So classes are off to a great start...</sarcasm>

I left work to catch the bus, and arrived at the bus stop just in time to see the bus leave, discovering simultaneously that I didn't have my wallet. Oops.

Really, it's better that both things went wrong. Had it been just one or the other, I would have felt even more stupid.

I went back to the office to find the wallet. It wasn't there. I was about to head down to the coffee shop to see if I'd left it there, but I decided to check my backpack first. It was there. Very sensible place indeed, since I never put my wallet in my backpack.

So, I went to catch the next bus. While riding it to the apartment complex where the class was taking place, I checked the schedule, and realized the class started at 4:30, not 4:45 like I thought. That means that I'd be 15 minutes late, rather than barely on time. Oops again.

I got to the apartment, and looked around for the community room where the class was supposed to be taking place. There was no obvious aerobics looking class. A man asked me if I was there for aerobics, and told me that I was in the right place, but class was cancelled today because of a basketball game.

At least I had the good sense to be late on a day that didn't really matter.

I decided to walk home, since I didn't feel like waiting around a half hour for the bus to come by again. There's a new pedestrian overcrossing over the freeway, which happened to start just on the other side of the apartment complex, so I decided to take that.

Unfortunatly, it apparently isn't quite as finished as it appeared, as there was a fence blocking the entrance. Being the law-abiding citizen that I am, I decided to walk through the field instead. That turned out to be quite a good workout itself, between wading across the squishy ground and the head-height forests of reeds.

I saw a number of egrets, some birds which I'm pretty sure were pheasants, and an honest-to-god owl (is it obvious I'm a city kid?). It was mainly white, with brownish-yellow spots. Possibly a short eared owl, which is apparently rare around here, but not unheard of. It was really neat. It was a nice walk, though I ended up feeling rather guilty about disturbing the birds.

Then again, in a few years, the whole area will probably be apartments, anyways :/

I would have loved that area as a kid. Hell, I would have loved a lot of Davis as a kid. I was, and still am, obsessed with the book Bridge to Terebithia, and wanted a Terebithia of my own. Some hidden place of my own that nobody else knew about, except maybe a close friend or two. Never really found it till I went off to college. Like I said earlier, I was a city kid. There was nowhere around open enough to really be secluded.

I decided to drop the C++ class I was going to take. I don't feel like killing myself this semester, and I'd rather get a good grade in one class than a mediocre (at best) grade in two. Plus, it would be awfully hard to get from the aerobics class back downtown in time, since the two classes are only 15 minutes apart.

While looking at the schedule on the bus, I realized that I could still take another class. A fun class, like I've been missing. They offer a number of classes which only meet one evening a week. This is something that I already knew, since I've taken classes like this before, but it didn't hit me until today that it could be useful.

Of the classes that only met on one day that I could take (no prerequisites, meeting Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday), the two that looked most interesting were Human Sexuality and Women in Film and Literature. I think I'll take Women in Film and Literature. It meets on Thursday, so it'll be a nice ending for the week. Plus, it meets in a theater!

I just realized that, assuming the classes I took at Davis transfer, I only need about 2-3 classes on top of the ones I'd already planned to take in order to get a Women's Studies degree. Cool!

Probably next to useless in reality, but still really cool. Suddenly, I'm hyped about school again :)

...But it doesn't have anything to do with the rain being gone. In fact, it hasn't rained in weeks, and that was just a piddly drizzle.

Today is my first day wearing my new contacts, and its shocking how much difference a slight change in prescription makes. When I first put them in this morning, the increase in contrast and detail was so great that it was almost disorienting at first. There were so many more things to see!

I rode my bike to campus, which was absolutely lovely. It's the same road I take home from class all the time, but it's the first time I've seen it during the day, and with my new, improved eyes. Not that it isn't nice at night - it's lovely in its own way, with the stars bright in the sky and the toads croaking. The smell of the fields after a warm day always reminds me of summer camp.

The road runs along the edge of town, with houses on one side and farmland on the other. According to Mapquest, the trip from my apartment to campus is about 3.5 miles, but that's going by the freeway, which is quite a bit more direct. I'd guess that it's somewhere between 4 and 5 miles on bike. Quite a nice ride.

I'm thinking I need more happy music. Looking through the case of CDs that I take to work with me, I realized that this one is the most upbeat of the lot - it's only borderline angsty. The lyrics are generally depressing, but some of the songs sound upbeat, which is good enough, I guess. BNL would probably fit into the same category.

The server I migrated on Friday is having weird authentication issues. Guess that's what I get to work on this afternoon. Gotta get it to ignore any username the client may happen to send, and just allow anyone who provides the right IP address. The previous server did that, why isn't this one?

Meeting time. Whee!

Original: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/3/15/0216/27725

This morning, I woke up at around 6:15 (an hour and 15 minutes before I usually wake up). Lay in bed for about 15 minutes worrying about work and taxes, and realized that I wasn't going to get back to sleep. So I got up and went for a run.
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