This is getting old

Perhaps just because we are entering tournament season, or perhaps because the Talented Trio hadn’t been in class for nearly 2 months, (they do have their own dojo where they teach, but they have been away from Sensei’s watchful perfectionist eye,) Sensei has become very enthusiastic about exhausting drills this week, as if he had been saving it up for their return. The rest of us just get to “profit” by virtue of being in the same class at the same time.

To be honest, it wasn’t bad on Tuesday, because I don’t mind basics drills, especially when the basics being drilled are really short segments of kata that I need to work on anyway. But last night was sparring night. I have been trying, really I have, to at least overcome demonstrating my extreme dislike of sparring and just do it, since it is part of class and so on. I think I was even at least partially succeeding last night. Unfortunately one of the drills he came up with involved a throw. Again, not so bad when we were just working with partners. But then we got in a line and each had to serve, one after another, as the person to get thrown by whoever was facing the head of the line. I made it through probably 15 throws before I finally hit the floor weird and landed on the wrong shoulder. The bad shoulder. Which of course immediately reacted to its contact with the floor at that angle by popping out of joint and then back in again. Grrrr.

Fortunately, it didn’t get stuck out of joint for any time at all, so I only have to suffer minor soreness for a day or so. But every time something like this happens, I get irritated all over again at my shoulder, because it reminds me once again that I will never be able to use that arm fully and there really will be things that I can’t do, even though, most of the time, it seems like there’s no reason I can’t. (Archery! Why did it have to eliminate archery? It was the one projectile martial art I had been looking forward to learning, ever. I suppose there’s still always atlatl.)

Shocking Rudeness

A very bizarre conversation happened last night after karate class ended. The subject of my upcoming trip to Japan and China had come up, (since I’ll be missing the next 3 weeks of classes, but also because people were interested and jealous, neener, neener,) and the conversation took a turn that went like this:

Nearly College-Aged Guy: One of my friends said the people in Japan are really rude. Do you think that will be true?*

Me & Talented Trio sister (who has taken a lot of Japanese classes): *look confused*

Me: Well, I mean, I think sometimes Americans can think that the Japanese are kind of stand-off-ish, if they’re used to people being all like “Hi! How are you?” with hugs and stuff…

Nearly College-Aged Guy: Oh, well, he said he refused to use any of the honorific language and just called people by their names without “-san” and stuff. He didn’t like that kind of thing.

Talented Trio sister: *looks shocked*

Me: Well, that probably had something to do with it.

Temari Ball: Spinning Fire

While I’m sitting here waiting for the plumber to come take the stubborn washer hose off the spigot, I decided to put my time to good use by getting all the pictures I’ve taken recently off my camera so I can begin catching up on my blogging. The plumber is now half an hour late, but at least some good will come of this.

I’ve decided to start with the temari ball post I had been holding back on because I made it as a gift for Hilary and I was waiting for it to get to her in Germany. Alas, the German postal service tried to deliver it while she was out and never made a second attempt. We’re assuming it is on its way back to me in the US. In the meantime, I thought she (and the rest of you) might at least like to see it.

Progress and Otherwise

Well, the triumphal installation of the new washer & dryer in the house was not to be this Saturday, although we did at least get the cable & internet up and running. Technically, really, the dryer is actually installed. The installation guy even turned it on to do a short cycle just to prove it ran, and at the end it played a little song. So cute! Not even my “Fuzzy Logic” Japanese washer did that. Now I wonder if the washing machine does the same thing. If only we could find out!

The problem, you see, is that the previous owner of the house left behind the old washer hook-up hoses. Why? The installation guys immediately guessed correctly that it was because they were rusted on. Awesome. Even after Mark went and got some WD-40, nobody could get them off right away. Mark continued applications of WD-40 for the rest of the day, and at some point late in the afternoon, he got the cold water hose off. The hot water one, though, remained quite stubborn. He borrowed a more hefty plumber’s wrench, some Liquid Wrench spray, and a hacksaw from my dad, and it’s still on there. He even tried heating the metal with a hair dryer in the hopes that would loosen it up, to no avail. So now we’ve had to turn to a professional plumber, scheduled to come tomorrow. *fingers crossed*

In other news, though, my mom finished the mock-up of my wedding dress earlier this weekend and called me over to try it on on Saturday. It looks good, the alterations we had decided to make on the pattern seemed to work pretty well, and it actually fit based on the provided measurements! This never happens to me. Anyway, she proceeded to order all the silk and other stuff (buttons, etc.) for the actual dress, so yay! I won’t be able to worry about any wedding stuff for pretty much the rest of the month, in any case, because I’ll be on a business trip for almost 2.5 weeks. Hooray for exciting progress!

The Unread Book Meme

Via k8 at Harmonia’s Necklace, I came upon a meme that, despite my usual apathy toward memes, I simply must participate in. The explanation:

This is a list of the top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Rules: Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

k8 added another rule, wherein she added an asterisk for books she read on her own and then later read for school. We’ll see how often I actually need that one. I’ll probably end up with more combinations of underlined and italicized books that I was supposed to read for school and never actually did beyond the first page.

Find the list below the fold, if you’re coming from the front page, since I’m not sure everyone will be quite as interested in the full list of 100+ as I am.

Firsts

Saturday night was our first night sleeping in the house.

Monday night was our first time ordering a pizza delivered to the house.

Tuesday marked the arrival of our first piece of junk mail at the house, in the mailbox Mark erected on Monday.

Last night was also our first time to actually entertain guests in the house, because now we have places to sit and everything. It was bizarrely interrupted by people coming to install a new alarm system for free. Will & Maggie were very gracious and suffered through the weirdness with us. Great to see you guys!

Hopefully, this weekend will involve the first load of laundry done in our own washer and dryer, set to be delivered this coming Saturday.

Moving Anxiety

Please excuse the lack of promised updates about the wedding, and lack of updates in general. First of all, we got back from the wedding a day later than expected, because the first leg of our flight back was the same one to Chicago that Matt & Heather were on. Why would their presence mean a day’s delay? Because they had apparently been afflicted with some very bad travel juju for this trip, and managed to have a delayed or, in this case, broken plane for every single leg of their trip both getting to MN and going home. And because the airlines have been cutting back on their flights for cost efficiency, it meant that when they finally got around to officially canceling the flight, there was nothing going back to NC until Monday. We didn’t get home until after 5pm. Bye-bye little vacation day.

Ever since we got back, I have also been experiencing increasing moving anxiety. The idea to move stuff gradually was a good one, in principle, but the effect now is that I feel like we’re not making any real progress, and how are we going to get everything moved this weekend?! I know it will all get done, but it’s  been giving me progressively worse insomnia every night this week. I think I got 5 hours of sleep last night. Hence my lack of creative writing ability and this incredibly boring update.

Fortunately, I think Mark has recruited some people from his office to help move heavy stuff. Given that he says some of the furniture was heavy even to him and Kevin, who is the biggest and strongest person we know, when he moved in, if it was up to just me and Mark to do it, those things just wouldn’t go anywhere. Anybody else out there want to help?

Travel Notice: The Twin Cities, MN

Not that this excuses me from not blogging all the rest of this week, but this here is a warning notice that I will not be blogging until next week sometime. You will have to seek fine, quality entertainment elsewhere. I feel confident you will manage.

However, upon my return, I plan to regale you with tales of Ann and Erik’s wedding, which I will be attending way up north in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. These nuptials will herald the formation of a divided household, since the bride is from St. Paul and the groom is from Minneapolis. I have listened to many a bitter battle over which city is better, and clearly it is good that there is a river there to separate them, otherwise there would doubtless be unbridled mayhem in the streets. I think, though, that I’m going to take Ann’s side in any of these arguments that may start up during the festivities, since she was my mostest bestest roommate for two whole years way back in our halcyon Grinnell days.

(Why no, I am not procrastinating deciding what to wear by writing this. Not at all. Why would you say such a thing? …Stupid new dress not getting here on time.)

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.)