Periodic eastside KoSho news happy fun time: we still have lots of extra kicking and striking pads to sell for anyone interested, and even some Very Large Mirrors. I'm working on some paralette bars to add to the gym at the back, and we finally (thanks to Wyatt and my dad) have a decent training pistol to practice CDT take-away's with. Our burdgeoning MMA program is still, well, burdgeoning, but hey - that's why we're the eastside pizza delivery people/enlisted Marine or AF or soldier/night-shift cop dojo where we can barely get any schedule settled. But hey, relatively near 24/7 variable amounts of martial arts is a good thing. Yes.
      As for our aiki-jujitsu class the new drills of the day are the Ball Drills (for lack of inventive names as of yet). One involves tossing a medicine ball in any way at all, so long as the catcher blends with the momentum of the ball and uses its energy to keep it going to the next person. Or falls over in doing so and takes a medicine ball in the face. The other involves a marshmallow ball being whipped around the mats, and various airborne or possibly faceplanting on a failed attempt rolls that work on catching or picking up said ball, blending with said ball, and blending with the ground. These drills walk that razor line between genius and stupidity that makes class that much funner.

      Tangentially, I ran into an odd dynamic during kickboxing; the person that walked in the door turned out to be the popular, attractive senior I had sat next to as a geeky freshman in band. She was now fleshier, had a sorority girl tattoo, and didn't know a thing about martial arts, so now all of a sudden (in terms of knowledge/position, I mean) there was almost a reversal from the last time we'd seen each other way back in in high school. Awk-ward, and i'm still not sure why.

Macaulay's "Minute on Indian Education" - okay so I'm just using it for a footnote in my thesis, but it's pretty interesting to even just skim through in terms of historical perspective

henna - Anybody up for it? The last I got at the street fair wasn't worth saving from the quick erasing-by-hospital-soap

Coin Manipulation - Hoo boy...this was probably the worst thing I could look up while doing homework (re: X's scolding), but I'm rationalizing it by claiming that the 'balance toss' is perfect for practicing multiple [Western boxing] jabs (coming soon to a dojo near you)