I can't believe it's not Jesus!

So... what's up with me you ask? Uhh... stuff. Stuff's been going on. Nothing terribly exciting. Artistically, I've been feeling a bit of block with little drive to see things through... which is exactly the opposite of what I've been feeling for more than a year now. As commissions have been non-existent, I'm changing gears and going to try marketing a few different skills. All else fails, my old manager at the cafe said I'm welcome back in the fall when all of her college kids go back to school.

We have a seminar in Chicago this coming weekend. We're leaving early Saturday morning, all of us cramming into the van that Belrose Sensei chauffeurs his kids around in. There will be seven or eight of us in two rooms. I hear that Shinjinkai Dojo has no air and we'll be training for six hours on Saturday. I will admit to being a little worried.
I totally wanted to visit cookiebastard, but we'll only be there one night and we'll be dead dog tired with little time to socialize. We'll come to you soon, buddy.

Many of you may have heard about Spore, a video game where you create little monsters... it's like Monster Sims or something. Anyway, I was finally able to download the free monster creator demo and play around with it. This is my favorite fellow, Bob.

Here is a picture of Harley sprawled on my legs (toy in her mouth) and me leaning on her doing my impersonation of her.

Here are shots of the front and back of the tshirt I'm doing for our dojo. The front is finished but the back needs tweaking.

Here's a new character design I've been working on. Her name is Vera.
[rough design w/ colors]
[action pose - work in progress]

Brian's Great Aunt Doris died Saturday night. She and her husband have both been in the hospital for a month. She was suffering from chest pains and had terribly blocked arteries. She was deemed inoperable because of her age and her breathing problems. Russ went into the hospital first with some strange internal bleeding along his spine caused by a new medication he was on. He had partial paralysis, some of which is temporary, some not. Now he is suffering from some bad infections and things don't look good for him. I would like to stay positive, but I don't know if he is going to want to hang on. His sister, Brian's grandmother passed away just a few years ago and it was almost too rough on him and now with Doris gone... I just don't know if he has it in him to fight.

I've been playing Battlefield: Bad Company... a lot. I put more than 13 hours into the demo and we finally bought the full game last night. I totally don't get into the whole first person shooter thing at all. The last FPS games I played were probably GoldenEye for the 64 and the first installments of Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem for the PC. In fact, I think the Duke Nukem was a shareware demo or something.

What's great is even if you're getting creamed every thirty seconds, half of the time that you'd be frustrated with the game, it's hilarious some of the ways you can die. I've been run over. I've had a helicopter land on me. I've been a sniper and accidentally spotted another sniper through my scope just as he was spotting me and we killed each other simultaneously. My glory moment was when I came up behind a guy and knifed him, which is hard to do. Once I killed him, I realized he was the top score holder for the game we were in. He had like five times as many points as the second place guy... and I have his dog tags.

Other than that, Brian has been stressed out and busy, so we actually skipped Saturday's class and just sat around relaxing. He really needed it. We had dinner over at Jake & Rose's on Sunday and they even treated us to ice cream and donuts after. Mmmm.

Monday nights class was difficult, but fun. An hour of suwari-waza, followed by an hour of bokken work. Suwari-waza always hurts my feet and by a half hour, my legs are so tired that I get sloppy. I don't maintain good control through out the hour. We also did kokyudoza and I had the BIGGEST guy in the room. He was very nice and helped me out with some pointers though.
Every week something new hurts. This time it's shoulders, hands and feet.

This month has flown by so fast!

Gordian Worms

Snagged from ishte and outright SHOCKED by my result. I guess if you're somewhat secure in how you feel about yourself and your partner, it labels you as someone who doesn't want to settle down? Oh well, it's just an internet quiz... though the avoidance of intimacy is outrageous and hilarious... seriously:

Your result for The Attachment Style Test...

The Free Agent

27% Anxiety Over Abandonment and 31% Avoidance Of Intimacy

Take The Attachment Style Test at HelloQuizzy

I swear I will post something of more substance soon. I am just so god damned tired.

Snatched from ishte,

I went back and changed two answers that I was on the fence about, two times, I got Generation Y and once Baby Boomer Generation. I think it's funny that I jumped right over my OWN generation.

You Belong in Generation Y

You fit in best with people born between 1982 and 2001. You are cooperative, flexible, and adaptable. You know the world changes quickly, and you're eager to change with it. You are socially responsible, forward thinking, and open minded.

NINJA ATTACK!!!

Well, this is about the most idiotic thing ever. Why can't I sleep? I'm so tired. This happened to me after the weekend long seminar in the beginning of May. You'd think I'd be sleeping like the dead, but I keep snapping awake every couple of minutes. I have this feeling of needing to be constantly ready for something. I have no idea why.
"Gyaku Hamni Kaitenage... Hajime!"

Oh well, there will be plenty of opportunity for rest this weekend. I'm pretty curious about the recording of the test. I wonder if they take stills from the video.

My little sisters are going to be SIXTEEN on Monday.

I wonder if Brian is having any better luck sleeping than I was.

"Yame."

I passed my test. Brian passed his. I'm a 5th kyu and he's a 4th. Too tired to give details, but it was a good day. Now I'm hitting the shower, hitting the bed and tomorrow morning we will venture deep in the woods for some relaxation.

( click to view )

So I'm playing this game called Word Bump. OMG is considered a word in this. Ok, I can let that go... it's not a serious game, right? So I tried to use PENIS and it won't let me. I had the letters... last time I checked PENIS was, in fact, a word. So instead I used PENS and the I was left... so I lost.

In retrospect, I could have used SNIPE... but I had like two seconds and I was surprised by the fact it wouldn't take PENIS.

This weekend was awesome, except for that bit about the flooding. roninikoma and frog_songs arrived early Saturday morning with enough time to grab some food and get a tour of the condo before we left for the dojo.

Class was fun. roninikoma was able to keep up. There was some testing preparation during second hour and I got to "be the Sensei" for our group of three while everyone else practiced for the higher ranking tests. While showing roninikoma and Chris some irimi movements, Sensei noticed the bruise on my wrist that I was just getting over from last Monday. He smiled and gave my wrists extra hard squeezes while I demonstrated the exercise. Now both of my wrists have even more big, dark bruises on them. I call them sensei kisses.

A young student tested at the end of class. He was allowed to do so early because he was going to be on a month long vacation when the actual test day came along. He passed and as everyone was cleaning the dojo, Sensei came up to me while I was dusting a shelf in the front. He asked me some questions about what I thought of the test and in short, he TRICKED me into admitting that I pushed myself a little bit more, I could test for 5th kyu this month instead of August as I'd planned. Sensei is SNEAKY!!!

After we showered and returned to frog_songs, who had been taking it easy back at the condo (and loving on my bathtub), we went and had sushi. While we ate awesome food, we marveled at the storm outside. It was constant flickering lightning, strong winds and lots of rain. We laughed at the lake that had formed in the parking lot while we were inside and how it sprayed up when we drove out. I watched with delight as the sky continued to light up while we drove home. Brian dropped us off at the door and we headed inside. We were waiting outside of the door because I didn't have my keys on me. I started getting antsy because Brian was taking an unusually long time getting inside. Then another resident walking by us in the hallway said that the building was flooding. That's about when I started thinking the storm wasn't so cool anymore.

Turns out, Brian was dealing with the water that flowed into our garage when he opened the door. There were parts of the hallways in the lower level of the building that had about eight inches of standing water. One of those areas was right on the other side of the wall from our bedroom. Turns out, the only problem with our condo was a soaked carpet in our bedroom. I know that in terms of flooding, we were extremely lucky. This was nothing. There were actually six fatalities from the storm.

Brian and I put our mattress on the living room floor and have been sleeping there for the past three nights and will do so again tonight. Our guests slept on an air mattress in our loft. Over all, it just could have been much worse. The four of us could have had to get a hotel room, heh.

Instead of sitting at the dojo and watching us train for six hours, frog_songs hung back at the condo again while Brian, roninikoma and I practiced Aikido and Iaido with Nicklaus Suino Sensei - a world renowned swordsman and author. I am eternally grateful for her help in dealing with the maintenance men who came in to clean up the water in our bedroom, for taking Harley out, for doing our dishes, all without being asked and for being the most awesome entity in the universe in general.

frog_songs, you freakin' rule the universe...

...and now some pictures from the seminar: ( click to view )

After the incredible seminar, we gorged on good Indian food, drove by the beach and came back home to relax. All in all, the weekend was awesome. I just wish our guests hadn't had to deal with the water problems and hope they didn't feel uncomfortable staying with us.

I love you guys so much and this summer or fall, it's our turn to come visit you! I hope the drive home was relatively easy-going.

So for now, the next two weeks are going to be training, training, training! You're looking at (er, reading the blog of) a future 5th kyu aikidoka!

I know I forgot to mention about a billion cool/funny/awesome things that happened this weekend, but it's getting late. We get our bedroom back tomorrow. Which means I'll be able to stay up a little longer tomorrow night... unfortunately, if I stay up much longer, I'll keep Brian awake.

I was all happy about the storm coming through Holland. We haven't had a good storm in a while... then our bedroom (on the basement level) began to flood. Not so excited now.

YAY!!!

Class last night was SO much fun. We had several new students, so we had a pretty easy first hour. We did a lot of tai sabaki movements, but even though it was some of the basics, we practiced things I'd never done before. We lined back up to start second hour and Sensei rubbed at his beard and said "what do you guys feel like doing for this hour?" No one was saying anything. I looked around, then at Sensei and made the motion of swinging a bokken with my hands. I had no idea if I was going to get my way or not, but hey, as long as he's asking. So he nodded at me and said "Bokken? all right, everyone grab a bokken."

Woo-hoo! I felt spoiled. We learned an awesome technique, kokyu-nage with a bokken. As you deflect a shomenuchi cut, you slip up next to your opponent and hook the tsuka (handle) of the bokken on your opponent's wrist, while wrapping an arm around their head. From that you can step back, pivot and throw. Throwing with a weapon in your hand was something new for me... and so is falling. Sensei said, if you don't feel like you're ready or don't have control of your bokken, then just tell your nage not to throw you. Well, I was falling all right... not great, but well enough. In one instance, however, I was working with Brian and concentrating on making sure my bokken didn't fly up and smack him in the face when he threw me that I wasn't prepared to actually take the fall. I realized it in time for him to not throw me, but not in enough time to not be twisted around in a position where I should have fallen. Consequently, I pulled every muscle in my lower back. I am very sore.

I am so very fired up for the swordsmanship seminar on Sunday. I am very eager to have a certain couple of Canadians over... speaking of which...

Happy Birthday, roninikoma!!!

My new tsuba came in and I got to test it last night with the bokken work. I love it. It's bigger than the regular plastic ones and it feels like it absorbs more of the impact. Very happy.

As you can see, I've been back to banner making. Some of them I really, really like... others I feel are rather blah. Please feel free to state your opinions and offer suggestions, etc. I might not have responded to your comments in my last post regarding banners, but it does not mean I wasn't listening. I found the feedback VERY helpful. You're a smart bunch of people, f-list!

The project I was kind of hoping would get me started this summer fell through. It's funny how I didn't think I wanted the job originally, then came back to rethink it six months later. I took too long thinking about it and when I finally decided I wanted it, they'd already signed someone else on. Bummer.

( click to view all the banners I have so far )

I do, however, have some exciting news to post, but you'll have to wait a few days. :-P

( You know you're from Grand Haven when... )

The company Brian works for often has little outings for fun. Yesterday they all went to the dojo for a little intro class. I wish I could have been there. Brian works with some goofy people and it would have been great to see them trying Aikido. I have to settle for the pictures... BUT, I want to share two of them with you... mostly because I'm a picture sharing fiend but also because my husband is neat-o!

Pictures by Denise Brander (Brander Photography): ( 2 pictures under the cut )

Brian: http://www.wzzm13.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=92943
Brian: I saw this on the way back from a meeting.
Elizabeth: Holy shit!
Brian: uh, yeah

Brian and I have returned from deep in the woods. I missed camping so much. I...
ate bbq ribs and chicken with "up north style" potatoes and bourbon 'n brown sugar beans... then 1/2 a container of Ben & Jerry's Karamel Sutra,
played cards for days,
had pancakes for breakfast two mornings in a row,
sweat so bad the first night because it was so hot,
shivered the second night so bad because it was freezing,
listened to the wind blowing through the trees,
killed at least 50 mosquitoes... the majority with an electric zapper shaped like a tennis racket,
rescued a turtle from a busy road and released it in a nearby 20 acre parcel of heaven,
went without a shower for 56 hours,
and I would do it all over again if given the chance.

skyrend thinks I am a skank? Well... I think she's a skank!

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I'm not happy with my body right now.... but I think this is just gross looking.