Saturday, December 29, 2007

The mouths of babes....

My blog posts have been on hiatus of late because I'm currently spending an extended vacation with the family in GA. What with it being the holiday season and there being lots of cookies around and me having the willpower of jello, not as much training has been happening as I would have hoped. There have been lots of bike rides and runs and walks in the woods and splitting wood for the fire and various other activities keeping me fit. But my kung fu training sessions have been few and generally lacking intensity.

Early on in my stay when I was practicing, my little sister, who is 6, came out to join me and soon revealed that she was capable of doing a head flip. She has mixed success getting up out of it, but watching her barrel forwards and a full run and fling herself into it was alternately impressive and frustrating. Ah youth.

So this afternoon when I was outside working on jumps and she again joined me, we started doing headflips together. After a few back landings that knocked the wind out of me, I started to get it. And even though I still can't get up out of it, I was pretty satisfied. The next think I knew I was helping her and one of my other sisters, who is ten, work on cartwheels. I was whipping out my right and left-handed indiscriminately and then started relentlessly trying them one handed. This was a less successful experiment, but I think having their youthful and fearless energy around me gave me the gumption to try it without worrying about breaking my neck.

When I get back on Monday I don't think I will have nailed anything new. And in fact will be a little pudgier than when I left. (Lots of Christmas baking around here....) But I will try to retain my new fearless spirit of tumbling. What's the worse that could happen? Well, I could twist my ankle like one of my other sisters just did...

I hope everyone had a happy holiday and I can't wait to see you all at temple!

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Water Bottle Can Kill Ya

Did anybody see this article about people started worrying about health risk from hard plastic water bottle? Basically, it said that these bottles contain polycarbonate which can leak into water and MAY cause a whole bunch of terrible illnesses as manifested in lab animals.... breast cancer, prostate cancer, obesity, hyperactivity, miscarriages, reproductive failure, etc.


The main target is bottles from the company above which are supposedly indestructible, light, do not stain or cause odor..... Sounds good, I might get myself one of those. My water bottle that I got for free from my company's healthday smells like plastic and leaves yellow stain at the bottom after each use. I don't know how many diseases that will also cause me later in life...