Random Scribblings in the Margin

A week after getting them, all four chickens are alive and as well as can be expected, and I've had loads of eggs. bokbokosaurus* for lengthy updates. When I checked on them at bedtime tonight, they were lined up in the nestboxes making soft trilling noises.

* Please don't mention this account if you're commenting on that one; I'd like to keep the two separate.

That means that the senseis think my performance of enpi kata is adequate to grade on. (You have to get three tips on your belt, for combinations, kata and semi-freestyle sparring, before you can grade.) I wasn't even going for any tips. I just did the course because it was compulsory for brown and black belts. At the start of the course, I didn't know all of enpi and I couldn't do the jump.

This course really brought home how much fitter and stronger I need to be, as a brown belt. Afterwards I was just exhausted. I sat on the floor, drank Lucozade and ate cake for twenty minutes until I had the energy to get up and get changed. (Much like after the Halesowen Aquathlon, where I spent twenty minutes sitting on the changing room floor, eating cake, rubbing moisturiser into my chapped belly, and staring into space.) In a year or less, I'm going to have to do that, plus a four-to-six hour grading afterwards. Oh god.

OKAY! Now I'm off to the gym.

If there's anybody who reads my LJ who doesn't have some kind of mental or chronic illness, it's probably not clear what all the fuss is about. But for me, this is one of the best days I've had in a long time, and I've done a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to get around to. There's still stuff that needs doing - I didn't get around to picking up my prescription, for instance - but still, this was a damn good day. Recently, if I'd managed one of these things, I was calling it a success.

( Stuff I did! YAY! Go team me! )

Phew! Now I think I'm going to bed.

* Bad thing: discovering the raspberry bush you want to save is thoroughly tangled up with couch grass you want to fatally kill very hard to death until it dies of it and isn't alive any more.

Worse thing: starting the uprooting and untangling process with your bare hands, and finding the large and thriving nest of red** ants in there.


** Since I didn't get stung, I'm thinking they were actually yellow ants, which are less aggressive. Still startled the hell out of me.