It was surprisingly good. I didn't feel very good tonight - slight headache, slight tingle in the throat. I wasn't going to stay for my class, just help teach and then go home, get tea, get sleep.. But <!–more–>only two other adults showed up and sensei was upstairs, so I started the class and took it easy on the calisthenics and the stretches. Those two adults are the two with the most issues of muscle contractions (as in, they have no idea what relaxing means).

So tonight, I went to train 35 minutes away from home, at the dojo where my sensei's sensei teaches. Warmups / stretches, kicking drills, calisthenics, sparring, then fighting drills. Sensei's sensei has a son who is now 48. Now – I am fast by normal people's standards. This guy is really fast by my standards. He also has a really positive energy - very friendly eyes, a great disposition.. And he can dislocate your jaw before you can blink or think "oh sh.

I had a good time in the dojo tonight. Managed to bring a kid back from the verge of tears to feeling good and performing kata with solid focus and intent.. And then good sparring. Kid's 6, by the way. My class wasn't that good, though I got a compliment on my push-ups from sensei. Went through my kicks.. Then sparred.. I fleetingly get a grasp of efficient body movement, and then it disappears, and then I have to train a lot more to make it happen again, and then more again, etc etc, until I can make it happen effortlessly.

If you've done any kind of table display in Rails, you've probably discovered the useful 'cycle' method: <tr class="<%= cycle("even", "odd") %>"> This works after you've set two CSS classes between which you want to alternate - in my example, even and odd, because I have such amazing imagination. Come to think of it, to make my code more readable, it should be 'lightbg' and 'darkbg', or something similar.

I live on an island. It only took me until last week (10 years and change) to take my dad's advice to go to the beach when I felt like it. So I did that, last week and today, and went swimming. Good for the muscles, good all-around body work. Great stretching. Different way of using the muscles. Besides the fact that I could really only swim for 10-15 minutes before I was tired and a part of my arms started to ache (indicating, clearly, that I'd been ignoring it), I noticed on my way home that even just 30 minutes at the beach drained me of energy.