Fragmented Friday - Yes, the Bug Was Eventually Vanquished

When we made our trip to the OKC Zoo, one of Li'l Random's friends from Arkansas met up with us. It was my first time to meet her face to face, although we've had plenty of online conversations since her comment on my comment on Li'l Random's MySpace page revealed that she shares a similar dark and twisty, MST3K mindset when it comes to movies. After I blogged about the zoo trip, she expressed her disappointment that I neglected to mention a comment she made comparing the Tawny Frogmouth to Tawny Kitaen and wondering if the bird had ever danced on the hood of a Whitesnake car. I explained that I somehow missed that comment, and promised that I would relate another one she made that I had actually meant to include the first time around. When we passed by a pen which proclaimed to hold both Chilean and American flamingos, she quipped that it was easy to tell which ones were which, as the Americans were obviously the pale, fat ones.

When I was first signing up for my judo class, one of the instructors (who's in his 60s) walked into the office, took one look at me, and started shaking his head and telling the lady at the desk that I couldn't join because they already had too many Caucasians. He then told me I could stay, but that I wasn't allowed to speak English. And, as I was walking past him on my way to the bathroom to change into my newly purchased judo gi*, he started elbowing the instructor next to him, pointing at me, and making various bone snapping and throat slitting gestures. Naturally, he's my favorite instructor so far; last night he cracked that he has to send out memos saying "I'm about to be serious," since he's goofing around so much.

Found out a few weeks ago that The Lovable PigPen is planning on moving out in the next couple of months. He and Cap'n Peanut had been talking about finding a place together after our lease runs out since Peanut's been wanting to move closer to Denton, but the timetable has gotten bumped up due to the fact that Peanut's landlords have asked him to move out so that their newly married son can live there, and PigPen's job is about to move its offices to Plano, a commute that is pretty painful financially in these "nearly $4.00 a gallon of gas" times. So now they're apartment hunting in Lewisville. I really need to get off my butt and start doing the same, but the procrastination is strong within me.

Judo basically consists of two components; the stand-up game of trying to throw your opponent to the ground, and the ground game of trying to pin your opponent or get them to submit through chokes or arm-bars and the like. I'm much more comfortable with the ground game, thanks to PigPen, and don't feel totally lost when we work on that stuff. But when it comes to throws, there's still a disconnect between my brain and my body when it comes to correctly positioning my feet, hips, arms, center of gravity, etc., as well as a difficulty of fully committing to the move. I'm hoping that stepping up my classes from once a week to twice a week will give me the extra practice to move past that barrier. But while throwing isn't easy for me, I'm getting lots of practice at being thrown . . .

You may have heard of the fringe hategroup known as Westboro Baptist Church** who spend their time thanking God for killing soldiers and sending earthquakes and tornadoes to kill off sinners, even going so far as to picket funerals for these victims, holding up signs that say "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" or "God Hates [insert victim category here]." Well, this group of stomach-turning hate-mongers recently set their sites on Picher, OK, declaring that the tornado damage and resultant deaths were a sure sign of God's wrath. Cap'n Shack-Fu was accosted by one while doing damage assessments; the WBC member went up to Shack and started exclaiming "You're with FEMA? FEMA's evil! FEMA is part of the Devil Government! Begone, FEMA, begone!" all the time waggling his fingers in Shack-Fu's face. How Shack managed to get away from the kook without either busting up laughing or punching the guy in the face, I don't know; a testament to his professionalism, I suppose. Still, the thought that these people are out there, tormenting the families who've lost so much, spreading a message of hate and intolerance that flies in the face of everything that a Christian should stand for . . . well, let's just say that I've been having to pray extra hard for a spirit of forgiveness towards their miserable, misguided cult recently.

Yesterday work at our office came to a standstill briefly after a rather large cockroach was sighted. Following its appearance, people were unable to work because they were either (a) so freaked out by the thought of the bug that they couldn't return to their cubicle until it was dead (b) dutifully hunting down the offending creature to put their coworkers' minds at ease, or (c) laughing too hard at the whole situation to do anything other than hold their aching sides. Three guesses which of the categories I fell into . . .

I had briefly toyed with the idea of driving up to Miamuh for the three-day weekend, but the fact that it's probably going to be storming all the way from here to there from Saturday through Wednesday put the kibosh on that idea; as much as I'd like to see mis padres (not to mention drop in on Miamuh-deployed Shack-Fu), an 11 hour round trip in the rain is not how I'd like to spend my birthday weekend. Okay, so technically my birthday isn't until Tuesday, but still! And no, I have no idea how I'll be celebrating my birthday, outside of my first Tuesday night judo class which is supposed to be much more intensive than Thursday night. So, yeah, my biggest gift on my birthday will probably be a lot more bumps and bruises. Happy birthday to me!


*Which is much heavier than my karate gi. Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch heavier. As in "literally sweated off two pounds in class" heavy.
**Which, may I quickly point out has absolutely no connection to the Baptist faith.