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It’s funny, but no matter how much I do kung fu, I always seem to be finding new and creative ways to make all of my muscles hate me and constantly whine. You’d think by now they’d be used to it and just have gotten over the whole soreness thing. But maybe it’s a sign that I’m doing something right and continuing to compete with myself and constantly push.

I remember once upon a time, I went home when class officially ended. Lately I’ve been staying an extra 30-60 minutes since I’m trying to learn sword. Among other things. There’s always another thing to add on.

I was tempted to crap out and go home early tonight. I finished learning Tiger form, which involved learning two entire rows in one night. I thought my brain was going to melt trying to remember everything, and my muscles were all feeling melty as well. Since apparently a flying crescent kick is just the devil, and there’s two of them in that form. And I’m rotten at them so I keep doing it over, and over, and over.

But I kept going. Because I refused to let myself win. Or maybe let myself lose. Or both. It’s a weird thing, when you’re competing against only yourself. But I guess it works for me, since the only sport I was ever good at (weightlifting) has the same sort of self-competition.

I hope to practice Tiger more tomorrow. I also hope to do so without gathering a group of staring, creepy neighborhood children, which has been happening with distressing regularity now that school is out.

Parents, please, if there’s a strange lady out in the grassy common area doing spinny kicks, be kind and tell your children to just leave her alone. Because she’s probably mentally imbalanced anyway.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m trying to decide what my second Spec Tech post should be about. I’m kind of leaning toward writing about tuff formations (such as the Bandelier Tuff), since it’s an awesome example of how civilizations use local geology to their advantage. But if anyone’s got any cool ideas, throw them at me.

A little more good news on the research front – I got one of the grants that I applied for! $1000 will shortly be added to my research funds, thanks to the Gulf Coast Section of the SEPM.

For this grant, I’m going to have to send in regular (every six month) updates on my research. The first one is due at the end of July, so at least I’ll have something to report – drilling!

The money will either be going toward grain size analysis or thin sections… either way, it’s going to be super helpful. Yay!

I will not be melodramatic about this. I’m not going to claim that I’d rather go to the dentist and have a cavity filled than buy a car, because we all know that would be an enormous lie. But it’s a close thing.

I spent the last day and a half trapped in a car dealership, trying to buy a new car. I have noticed that, of all the major purchases I’ve made in my adult life, cars are by far the ones that take the longest and are the most painful. Buying a fricking house didn’t cause this much drama in my life.

I hadn’t actually expected to buy a new car this week. We were planning to start shopping today, actually, and just take our time with it. Our old car was starting to have some serious transmission problems, but I figured we could nurse it along for another couple of weeks without too much difficulty. However, my dad started looking around for cars in advance (I think he was way more excited about shopping for a car than I was, which… well, that’s not hard to do, really) and discovered that right now, trying to find a used Honda in the northern metro area is no easy task. According to the dealer, it’s apparently a combination of the gas prices and a lack of new Hondas coming in from Japan, so the used cars are getting snapped up almost as fast as they’re coming in. So my dad did find two used cars at Go Honda, and I went to look at them on Wednesday. They were both good, so I figured I might as well get Mike to try them out since getting a car earlier than expected wasn’t going to hurt anything.

The drama started when I decided that I wanted to have my mechanic look at the car we wanted before I was willing to throw down the money. Our actual salesman, a guy named Brandon, didn’t seem to have a problem with it, and even joked about putting the car in a remote corner of the lot so no one would see it until I picked it up the next morning. I think he believed me when I said that I’d made an appointment with my mechanic and would be back for sure. But his boss was not so convinced, and the hard sell started.

Seriously, I could just buy the car and then have my mechanic look at it and return it if something was wrong. And it was a Honda certified used car so it was insulting that I didn’t trust that. And they take the three day return policy very seriously. And you know that Hondas are hard to find right now, so someone might just buy it out from under us. And they only had four new Hondas left so what did I think would happen if those got bought – the used ones wouldn’t last long after. (Seriously dude, how many fucking cars do you sell on a Wednesday night?)

It felt like most of the pressure focused right on me, maybe because he sensed that Mike was an impenetrable wall of Britishness that wasn’t going to take any crap. It got to the point that I literally said, “You both have to go. I want to talk to my husband. Leave.” And then as soon as they left, we ran for it.

If I hadn’t really wanted that car, I wouldn’t have come back. It pissed me off that much. I have no idea why this is acceptable behavior to anyone… all I can guess is that it works sometimes. But no wonder buying a car is one of the most horrific purchasing experiences ever.

Anyway, I did go back the next day, and took the car to my mechanic. After having it for several hours, Dale called me back up and asked, “Is this car supposed to be Honda certified used? Because if so, there are some problems…” He found three things on the 150-point checklist that shouldn’t have been checked off – the battery, the brake pads, and the air filters. But he said that if those things got fixed, the car was very worth buying and would last us for years and years.

So, armed with a yellow piece of paper that said the dealership was trying to pull a fast one on us, I went to the dealer, with my dad to watch my back. I plunked the piece of paper down and said I’d love to buy the car, but these things had to be addressed first or no deal.

Our salesman scurried to the back room with the paper, and chaos ensued. Another salesman came out with him and seemed pretty ticked off – he made some pretty unkind comments about our mechanic, then dragged us downstairs so we could look at the car and see for ourselves that Dale was totally lying. I let my dad take the lead, since when it comes to cars, someone could point at a random part and inform me that it’s actually alien technology from Area 51 and I’d be able to do nothing but nod wisely in agreement.

So their mechanic pulled the front wheel off and pointed out the brake pad, saying that it looked fine. My dad asked for a ruler, since he wasn’t just going to take someone’s word for it. Which meant that they had to disassemble the brake and actually pull the pads out so they could measure them with a caliper… and the caliper said that the brake pads were only 4mm thick, which is quite a difference from the 7mm they claimed.

At this point, the sales guy that dragged us down there looked like he’d pooped in his drawers a little. Another mechanic tested the battery and said it was fine, but then I asked him to check the air filter since he was in the engine anyway. The filter was black, and his response was, “Yeah… that’s kind of dirty.”

Score one for my mechanic. Two, actually.

They shooed us back to the showroom then, and made a copy of the paper. The supervisor of the mechanics apparently wanted it so that he could go have a chat with his guys. Possibly with a sock full of pennies in hand, though that’s only speculation.

After that, it was just waiting and paperwork and more waiting and more waiting and then I pointed out they had to give me two master keys and a valet key, since that was required if the car was Honda certified too. And then more waiting while that got taken care of.

Despite the fact that I did little but sit in the showroom and feel intensely bored, I was stressed and exhausted by the end. It was like I put in eight hours of work at the damn dealership and then paid them a giant wad of cash at the end of it.

I hate shopping for cars. But look, it’s so shiny!

I think the moral of this story is, though, make sure your mechanic looks over a used car before you buy it. And don’t let them push you.

Photos of Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes

Words fail me. Tears don’t.

* * *

After a breather and several kleenex, I think I’ve got a few words in me. It’s scary as hell, how much of these things are ending up 60, 80, even close to 100 miles away from their point of origin. Which really shows the terrifying force that nature is capable of – as if we needed another reminder this year after the Sendai earthquake.

It’s scaring me that there have been this many tornadoes, and this strong, and this early in the year already. Makes me wonder what the rest of the summer has in store for us. Makes me wonder what hurricane season is going to bring. And makes me wonder if we may be lining up for more years like this, considering one of the predicted effects of the current climate shifts is storms of greater severity. You know, the climate change that a horrifying percentage of Congress isn’t even willing to admit exists.

We can’t fight nature. In the end, nature wins. Nature always wins; it has more time, more power. We’ve got each other, though, and that shouldn’t be downplayed. And I was crying because there’s something indescribably sad about pictures torn and cast into the world by a storm, when you don’t know what happened to the people in those pictures – you just know that the person, the moment, was important to someone. But I was also crying because humans are amazing, though I wish it didn’t require tragedy to remind us of that fact.

Red Cross

I haven’t heard much buzz about this from my fellow Colorado residents, so I’m guessing this is just not a well-known event. Bill Nye the Science Guy will be at CU’s Macky Auditorium on February 15th – which is a week from tomorrow. General admission tickets are $10, and tickets for CU students are $1 if you can wave your student ID at them.

According to the CU Distinguished Speaker’s Board, tickets are currently sold out. But if any of you out there in the Colorado portion of internet land would like to see Bill Nye, LET ME KNOW. I will haunt the CU Connection and see if I can scare up some more tickets so long as you promise to pay me back.

I survived my six month check up! Yay! Considering how much I hate going to the dentist¹, I feel like this is really an accomplishment.

Also, I’m finally on Mike’s insurance! Double yay! I was ridiculously excited to find this out, since it meant I could finally afford to have x-rays, and a consult with the dentist. And the fact that I was excited about both those things is probably the most clear signal to date that yes, I am now thirty years old.

The news was mostly good. No new cavities, the problem areas between a few of my teeth that seemed to be developing four years ago (the last time I could afford x-rays) have either not gotten worse or even cleared up entirely. So that’s happy.

However, the bad news is that my issue with clenching and grinding my teeth has gotten worse. Way, way, way worse. To the point that it’s apparently messing up my teeth so badly that it shows up on the x-rays, and has caused me to partially dislodge one of my old fillings. This apparently also explains the headaches I sometimes wake up with, and why my jaw sometimes locks. Awesome.

So Dr. Jason (the world’s tallest dentist) told me to get an over the counter mouth guard thingy to wear at night. Not every night, but just during periods of time when I’m feeling really stressed (HAHAHA) and seeing signs that I might be starting to grind or clench my teeth. He said that would either fix my problem entirely or make it way, way worse. In the latter case I would then need to get fitted for a custom mouth guard thingy that will run $300-$400, because Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas would not pay for piss if you were on fire, unless of course you had already reached your ludicrous deductible, and then maybe, well we guess, if we have to, grumble grumble.

And at the end of the month I get to look forward to having the filling I’ve destroyed replaced. Which supposedly is only going to take five minutes, but will still involve me getting poked in the gums with a needle.

I can feel my teeth clenching already.

1: If anyone ever tries to convince you to get your wisdom teeth done without being put under, tell them to shut the fuck up and just give you the drugs, because you’re carrying a hand grenade and have absolutely nothing to lose.

Well, I survived the long, long day of performances for kung fu. We hit the road around 0830 and finished up a little less than twelve hours later. The most brutal part was actually going to Colorado Springs and back. The drive was awful because it was snowing, and being stuck in a car for basically 3.5 hours straight with only a short kung fu break in the middle left everyone extremely stiff and sore. We did kung fu numbers three times, which meant I had to do basic skills with hitting the concrete-filled cylinder three times, and make it look good and energetic all three times. My arms are really banged up now, and toward the end I was actually getting burst veins on the surface of my skin, which is kind of unusual and very unpleasant. My hands and arms are really tired too, from just playing cymbals all day. But yay, we survived! And I got to have a ridiculous amount of amazing food at the end of it, which is always great.

At least I did all my driving around with four extremely awesome people. We had the party car, no mistake. The saga of Porknbuns will forever remain in my memory… it’s been a long time since I’ve laughed that hard about anything.

In bad news, we just found out that Mike’s mum is in the hospital with severe vertigo, and the cause could range anywhere from an ear infection to a stroke. Please think some good thoughts her way if you’re so inclined. I’m really, really, really hoping it’s just an ear infection. We’re both incredibly worried.

Bed. Very, very soon.

There are scary noises emanating from my downstairs closet, which must mean that a nice man named Wayne is installing my new furnace. I hope.

As you can see, Loki is hard at work helping.