We never actually leave Grinnell

Just to add further weight to my father’s theory that Grinnell is not a college, it’s a cult, a story from this weekend.

On Sunday, as I mentioned, we took a field trip to the house with my parents and grandparents. As Mark and I got out of the car and waited for everyone else to join us, I actually noticed the street sign for the little branch-off cul-de-sac directly across from our house: Herrick Pl. I pointed it out to Mark and we smiled knowingly at one another.

Herrick, of course, being the name of the campus chapel at Grinnell.

It’s a sign that this was meant to be, clearly. We wouldn’t want to think we’d completely left the bubble.

Moving: The Trickle

I think it was the very next day after we bought the house that Mark initiated the following conversation:

Mark: Promise me something?
Me: Um, what?
Mark: That we will both agree to never drive to Durham without something in the car to drop off at the house.
Me: Okay.

I admit, it is a sensible suggestion. And even though we didn’t actually start doing it on Sunday, when we did indeed drive over to the house in order to show it to my parents and grandparents for the first time, we have been keeping to the promise every day this (work)week. Which is why we now have something like maybe as many as eight small boxes and bins in the house so far. At this rate, Mark estimates we will be done moving in just a few years.

Obviously, we are hampered in our moving efforts so far by not having had much time to really do any packing, and we are thus far only transporting things that were already in boxes, either because they are things that are naturally stored in plastic bins anyway (eg., electronics cables, art supplies), or, more embarrassingly, because they are things that were never unpacked from the last time either of us moved (eg., stereo speakers for the surroundsound system that never got set up, oversized books that never got a shelf built to live on). Hopefully this weekend will give us a bit more time to pack stuff that did actually make it out of boxes from previous moves. If I get my books packed up, that will be a significant portion of my non-furniture belongings!

I’m also hoping to cheat some by leaving furniture in my apartment for my brother to use, since he’s taking over the space until the lease runs out in September. After all, he’s the one who let me use the kitchen table and chairs that our parents had originally given to him in the first place, so those should stay. And the cinder-block-and-plywood shelves in the living room can stay. (I’m so generous, I know.)

TV rots the brain by filling it with useless knowledge

One of the problems with having hobbies that I prefer to do with something going on in the background is that it actually encourages me to watch more TV than I need to. I don’t mind this if I’m involved in, say, watching all of the first four seasons of Babylon 5 on DVD, but when I don’t have anything in particular to watch and have to instead rely on clicking through channels, well, things get kind of random.

Last night’s project was wrapping temari ball cores. I had already done the centers (rice hulls and bottle-cap rattles inside sections of an old trouser sock), and was now on to the part where all the centers get wrapped in lots and lots of yarn. This is not a task that requires a lot of concentration. I started out watching House, which I consider a worthwhile show, but when it ended, I wasn’t done wrapping, so I had to find something else to watch.

It turns out that the 10pm slot on Monday night has very slim pickings. I kept channel surfing higher and higher, until I ended up in the 120s, where there are mostly just very strange and ever more specific cable stations. One of them is the Sleuth channel, dedicated to reruns of old mystery shows. Thanks to this channel, I have now seen the very first episodes of both Magnum, PI and Miami Vice. Last night’s 10pm offering was Miami Vice again, and I must admit, having never actually watched the show before, it’s really not bad. I think it’s actually growing on me. The pet alligator is a nice touch.

But last night’s episode actually added to my extremely inadvertent store of 80s pop trivia. This was the episode starring a very young (1984) Bruce Willis. As an abusive husband arms dealer bad guy. According to IMDB, it was his very first credited role. I have witnessed historic television.

Our house, in the middle of our street…

Well, Mark and I have had an eventful week this week. We have finally closed on our house! For those who were unaware we were looking for a house, I admit that I did not do a lot of blogging about the process, because, well, I didn’t really want to say anything until we were sure which house we were going to get. And then I thought I’d wait until we’d actually finalized everything. And now we’ve bought it! So I have no more excuses.

The house is in Durham, since Mark and I both work there now, and very excitingly for me, it cuts my commute down to just four miles. Whoo-hoo! Plus, you know, it’s a house, which is very exciting. Wanna see it?

It’s a split level, with the living room, dining area, and kitchen on the main floor, straight back from the front door. The bedrooms are in the upstairs part to the right of the picture. The downstairs has a large open room, probably intended as a rec room, and another smaller enclosed room, which Mark intends to use as his cave.

As you may have noticed, the house is pretty much entirely painted yellow, which isn’t bad. One of the bedrooms is actually white, but everything else is yellow. Except…

Unfortunately, you are not hallucinating, the bathroom really is pink. At first I thought it was just a weird cover on the light, making the white walls look pink, but no, it was intentionally painted that way. Even the ceiling. With a blue toilet. That and the kitchen will be the first things to change. (Well, after the bit of the foundation in the front gets fixed. But that was the only major thing found in the inspection.)

I’ll probably be better about writing about the changes that we make to the house now that it’s ours.

Next step: moving.

Mild Annoyance Over Holidays

I find it kind of annoying that my Japanese-themed calendar* that I have on the bulletin board over my desk at work does not actually make note of any Japanese holidays. This has become an actual inconvenience because I am in the midst of coordinating a complicated group order of temari books and supplies from a seller in Japan, and she mentioned that it was going to take her a bit longer than anticipated to hear back from her book wholesaler due to it being Golden Week, and them appearing to have shut their office down entirely for the duration of the holiday period. Which I should have known, darn it, except Golden Week the year I was there failed to register because almost all of the national holidays it encompasses fell on the weekend anyway, cheating me out of cheap and easy vacation time, and my current irritating calendar isn’t making up for my lack of awareness.

Asian holidays are actually causing me a great bit of difficulty lately. There’s a long-weekend holiday period going in China right now, too, May 1 being Labor Day and May 4 being Youth Day. Unfortunately, this means that those incredibly irritating official forms I need so all my 80 summer study abroad students can get their visas so they can actually go to China and stay there this summer are being delayed yet more, and all the panicking students call me to ask how they can get the forms faster. And all I can do is tell them that they have to wait, because the forms are in China and I am in the US, and there is nothing any of us can do. (And because of the Olympics, no, they can’t just go on a tourist visa, because it won’t be renewed after July 1, so they’ll all be thrown out of the country.)

I do have the suspicion, though, that holidays in other countries would strike me as a lot less bothersome if I got them as holidays, too. I think I could use one about now.

*Hokusai prints, since you ask

Orange Skies Tea Tin

After spring comes summer! This tin turned out very bright and happy. I really love finding lace paper overlays that work properly with background papers. They can’t be too close in color, or it won’t stand out, but it can’t clash either, obviously. This one made a nice transition between the darker orange background and the lighter orange parts of the detail paper. I also like the way the detail paper looks like clouds, while the lace paper pattern looks kind of like a sunburst.

It makes me want to go to the beach. Hope you’re starting to have some warm weather wherever you are!

New Kata Mysteries Explained

I mentioned last week that my sensei has started teaching me a new kata from a different style, but that it was very hard for me to find any information about it, due to some linguistic barriers. Fortunately, last night he started teaching me a second kata from the same style, with a much less ambiguously pronounced name, and that has led to some clarification.

First of all, the style these kata come from is Shito-ryu (not Shiteryu, as my ears thought the heard originally.) Wikipedia offers this rundown of the basic history of the style. It is another Okinawan style (as those with more karate knowledge can probably tell from the name) and the founder, Kenwa Mabuni, was a contemporary of Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan. Though most Okinawan styles are closely related, this article lists Shotokan’s close cousin Shorin-ryu as being the more direct ancestor of Shito-ryu. An interesting analysis of the combination of styles behind it:

Shito-ryu is a combination style, which attempts to unite the diverse roots of karate. On one hand, Shito-ryu has the physical strength and long powerful stances of Shuri-te derived styles, such as Shorin Ryu and Shotokan (松涛館), on the other hand Shito-ryu has circular and eight-directional movements, breathing power, hard and soft characteristics of Naha-te and Tomari-te (泊手) styles, such as Goju-ryu (剛柔流).

Temari Class: Kiku Sampler

Goodness, I’ve gotten behind on my temari blogging. I just went to the last class Barb is having in preparation for EGA this weekend, and I realized I never got around to blogging about the class before that. That class was the second half of the intermediate session; we learned Maritime Stars in the first half. For the second half, we learned the design she calls the Kiku Sampler.

First, some basic terminology. The “kiku” stitch is the type of stitch that basically looks like a star or a flower, with points radiating out from the center of a circle. The stars on the Maritime Stars design are an example of a 4-point kiku. It’s one of the most classic temari designs, and has a huge range of variability.

To begin this ball, we divided the ball with a combination 8 division. That ends up marking the ball with shapes like these. We wanted to put kiku designs in each of the large open centers, marked on the diagram there as an 8-part square. We outlined the squares first by putting in green trefoil designs around each the 6-part triangles, which looked more or less like leaves. (Don’t worry, I’ll show you a picture and it will make much more sense.) Each of the kiku designs in the squares was a different variation on the design, hence the sampler part of the name.

Here is one of the most basic designs, which features two 4-petal kikus layered on top of one another. I made it look a little fancier by adding the green spiderweb stitch in the center. We learned a number of variations on this theme, with the two colors simply stacked or interwoven in different ways, but the end results all look pretty similar, in that they are all two colors of 4 alternating petals each.

This is a more complicated one, with color changes on each petal and more advanced stitching:

Look over there!

I seem to be writing a bunch over at Geek Buffet this week. Take a trip over there to read about:

• the continuing saga of my very weird high school history teacher vs. my high school
• my somewhat flippant thoughts on the symbolism of the Olympic torch
• and my further thoughts on the protest/counter-protest that took place at the university here over the issue

Given that a large part of my job now involves dealing with China, and will in fact soon involve sending a large group of students to study abroad in Beijing right before the Olympics (they’ll actually overlap by two days), this is an issue I feel like I should be keeping an eye on, beyond its inherent intellectual interest. Dealing with China is always quite an experience. I wonder if the Olympic Committee was being naive or was just really poorly advised.

Success from Failure, or something like that

The past week and a bit at karate has been interesting. It started two Fridays ago, when I was strangely the only student in class. (Maybe it was spring break? Or people were just lazy? Who knows.) After I warmed up, sensei had me start working intensively on Empi, my latest kata. I had to learned Empi before, way back in high school, but it was probably one of the later kata I learned, because I only vaguely remembered it. Anyway, at this point, I was past the relearning/remembering stage, and into the part that sensei refers to as, “Now you know it, so now we can fix it.”

I like Empi, I really do. It’s a fun kata, a pretty one, with lots of low stances and interesting implied wrist bends. Of course, all those low stances do get a little tiring, but I felt like I was getting better. The only bad part is the jump near the end of the kata. Now, I’m the first to admit that I am not a big flying and jumping technique person. I like to have at least one foot on the ground, thank you very much. I’ll throw kicks as high as you might like, but I don’t want to have to jump to do it. So I cannot even begin to count the number of times in the past month or so that I have heard the phrase, “Pick your knees up!” It’s easier said than done, I assure you. But it’s pretty much the only part of the kata I felt like I was having to learn how to do from scratch, so I figured I’d get better.

Then came the end of class, when sensei suddenly declared in the last ten minutes that he was going to start teaching me a new kata, from a different style. And it is indeed very cool, and probably more suited to the way I naturally move, and I like it, but my excitement about it is somewhat tainted by the suspicion that he decided to teach it to me because he became convinced that I would never be able to do the jump in Empi correctly and we should just give up.

Another strange thing about this new kata is that neither the kata nor the style appear to be mentioned with any kind of regularity on all the internet, so I don’t even have a way to confirm the name of the kata or what it’s supposed to look like. As far as I can tell, transliterating from Arabic-accented Anglicized Japanese, the kata is called Sinchin (which does not conform to Japanese pronunciation rules, but I’m also told that it is definitely not Sanshin, because that’s a different kata altogether), and the style is Shiteryu.