Boxing Life

Had a great boxing class tonight. I had to wade through two months worth of classes and snag a yellow belt before Coach Fernando appeared to take me seriously, but hey... Coach made a point of partnering me with a great mitt partner tonight, Ray*, who's one of the two great female boxers I'd been watching jealously for the past two months. She's good, got great form, and snappy power.

Spent time getting my uppercuts and hooks down properly, and learning how to seguay between them. I've been having a shitload of trouble with these two moves, and snapping them together (right uppercut, right hook) was proving to be a problem of footwork (as most boxing trouble for me appears to be). I also worked on my doublejab.

Ray was a great partner. I got to the point where I felt comfortable enough with the forms at the end that I went ahead and started throwing with power - and hot damn, that's the best part of boxing. I get a kick out of it every damn time. Brutal women, indeed.

Ray confirmed what I'd suspected, "You've got the power," she said, "you just need to perfect the technique. You're really built for this."

Ah, yes.

I'm the boxer. Not the dancer.

And you know, I really like it this way. It's like I spent my whole life trying to be something I wasn't, and I'm starting to find the places I fit.

Really cool experience.

WTF?

I was randomly trolling through blogs on blogger (there's not much to do at work today) and found this.

In another of the posts, these two buddies share food thoughts.

Why is it I'm still so amazed when I discover other people who are as paranoid about food as I am? This is America, people.

My New Sign Off Quote

Oh. I love this.

"Anyway, back to work. I have characters to kill and deadlines to beat."
-- John Rickards (crime novelist)

Yea. It's official. This guy is now on my list of "read every day" blogs... Thank you, Matt Cheney.

Alaska Burning

I've been so caught up in Chicago life, gory Iraq headlines, and the media circus of elections and doublespeak, that it came as a surprise to hear from my buddy Jeff in Fairbanks that Alaska has apparently been burning all summer: As of August 6, a total of 5,566,358 acres have burned in the United States in 2004. Of these, 1,345,764 acres are in Alaska. The only good news appears to be that summer is more pleasant than usual when the smoke clears, because most of the mosquitoes are dead, or can't smell anything because of the smoke, meaning sitting on the cabin porch in July and August would actually be bearable.