Weapons Rack Installed!

I spent about 1&1/2 hours this afternoon installing the jo & bokken rack. It is near the center of the house & visible when you enter the front door. Now I need to find my jo bag; I thought I put it in the box with the weapons but it was not in there. 

Outermost pieces of blue tape mark doorway limits.

Top blue tape marks height of rack, other blue tape is width of rack.

I was too impatient to wait until rack was hung to see what it would look like.

All pau!

It kinda got my endorphins going to see the weapons up on the rack. It has been a while since I trained; I think watching these Chinese TV series with weapons & martial arts is making me want to return to training. Well, I don't "think"; I "know". But I also feel like I would be unfaithful to my senseis if I trained under another sensei; so I have chosen to only train in my mind. 

I hope training in my mind will be OK for me; I've done it temporarily before when I had a work injury, but I've never done it fully in place of physical training. When I was physically training, during the last 2 weeks or so before I was testing I would have a heightened sense of awareness, faster reflexes, & automatic movements. 

I think it was when I was in the last week before my ikkyu test (1st level brown belt) that my co-worker Liz was rear-ended as we were running an errand for a work retirement party. The guy that rear-ended her motioned for us to pull over in to the parking lot of the convenience store that was right there. I gathered what little information I could from him; he said he forgot his license, registration, & insurance info, so I just got his name & home address. Then I went to Liz (who had whiplash & was sitting in her car) & asked her to call the police because I knew it was a false address! (I sent a lot of stuff out for work & knew the zip code he gave me for the particular city he gave as his address was way wrong.) 

While Liz went in & called, I stood behind his car taking down the license plate number, make, model, & color as well as writing down a description of him; I was sure he had given me a fake name, too. While I was still standing behind his car, he started it up & slowly began to back up! I beat on the glass of his hatchback & was doing my best to cave it in! (I was still on the adrenaline high from the accident.) It startled him but he continued to slowly back up until he was clear enough to pull forward. As he shifted in to drive, I ran to the passenger door to get in, but he saw me & reached over to lock the door. (If I had gotten in & he left he could have been charged with kidnapping.) The brief moment he stopped to reach for the door allowed me to race to the front of the car & begin beating on the hood, again with the intention of caving in the hood. I forced him to back up in to the parking spot next to Liz & he came out of the car. I went up to him, got in his face, & told him he needed to stay & take responsibility for the accident because Liz was hurt; he said he needed to leave because he had to go to work. When I would not back down, he stepped back then turned & walked away & went behind a building on the adjacent property & disappeared. When the police officer arrived I gave him all the information I got, we told him what happened, & they towed the guy's car away. FYI It turns out both the name & address given were false (they got the real info from the car) & he was also charged with hit-&-run since he left the site. His insurance had to pay for Liz's whiplash & a muscle I tweaked in my shoulder. (My doctor was unsure if it was from the accident or beating on the car. 🙄)

According to Liz, both she & the cashier at the convenience store were amazed that I started pounding on the car & went up to confront the guy when he stepped out of the car. The thought never entered my mind that he might try to do something, I was in a different state & would have automatically neutralized him if he took a swing due to the level of training I was at for the couple of weeks leading up to that day. I normally trained 5 days a week, but when I was preparing for a test I trained 7 days a week & did a lot of solo work at home. FYI I passed my ikkyu test with flying colors! (This is also when I was at 100 pounds with 12% body fat. I was at my strongest at this weight & conditioning.)

Here is a You Tube video a little over 8 minutes long that shows practitioners of Aikido (the martial art I studied) sparring with karate & MMA fighters. The best parts are at about 3:30 where a karate fighter challenges an Aikido sensei at his dojo & also Tissier sparring with Pinna at about 5:10. There is a short section at the end that explains more about Aikido philosophy & techniques. The part of Aikido that resonates the most with me is blending with the attacker's energy & redirecting it; brute strength is not a part of being a practitioner so Aikido is a good martial art for me. I had many occasions where larger, stronger, beginner male practice partners would attack too fast or too strongly & end up hitting the mat really hard; they basically threw themselves, I just redirected their energy to the mat in as safe a manner as I could. More experienced students know to only attack as fast as you want to be thrown. Most of these happened after I had advanced to shodan & was assisting the sensei at our school's dojo near a naval air station where egos seemed to be a little larger. (The video is apparently dubbed via AI so the pronunciation of the non-English words are sometimes really bad.)

Today I also had to repair the cat door. Not sure exactly what happened but when I walked in to the cat room this morning the door was totally off its hinges. Fortunately all I needed to do was bend it slightly & pop the pegs back in to the holes in the frame to get it back in place.

Broken door lying inside house.

From the outside.

Door back in place. But still "broken". 

I also squeezed the oranges I picked the other day. They made about 1&1/2 quarts of orange juice. There are a lot more oranges ripening on the tree; I will have Kai help with picking & juicing when he arrives next week. 

My ears appear to have become more accustomed to hearing the Mandarin sounds! My pronunciation is getting better! (See the 2nd post for 07/04 called Canto to Mando for a really cool video I found that I think will help me a lot with learning Mandarin!)

I have also recognized that "ma" at end denotes a question.

The window for Episode 51 of the eruption of Kīlauea has narrowed slightly to be somewhere between the 9th & the 14th.

Hauʻoli lā Hānau e Rebecca! A me ka Hauʻoli lā Hoʻomanaʻo makahiki 28 e Laurel & Bill!