I’m embarrassed by the missing entry from Thursday. My apologies for that, o readers.
It’s been a busy few weeks at school. The Design Lab is going through some major changes. I’ve been teaching and learning electronics-component-assembly by working through Nick And Tesla’s Super Cyborg Gadget Glove, which has been a lot of fun — on Thursday my students and I assembled the final components on the UV-light LED system for detecting invisible ink (itself made in the class from a yellow highlighter’s ink added to a small quantity of water — the less water, the more intense the fluorescent effect under UV light). My animation class has been interrupted by two days, but kids are slowly learning how the tools work, and are making some clever little movies. I’m gradually learning that it’s better to build up a library of completed shapes that can be edited and modified — resources, they’re called — than to try to make the movie frame-by-frame. Even so, we’re doing some creative work that I think is awesome. Our next big project is a mini-course on textiles, and another mini-course on metal-working. There’s a video by the King of Random going around about how to turn empty soda cans into ingots of pure aluminum, which can then be poured into moulds and formed… that’s going to be my spring project, I think. Heh.
None of that has to do with this morning’s tai chi practice, though. And I have to say, it wasn’t very impressive. I’ve been using fire cider to get rid of the lingering effects of my cold. But I’m still not at 100% health — lingering snot colonies in my high sinuses, if you’ll pardon the rather gross pseudo-imperialist expression — although I’m much closer.
The practice itself was limited in scope — good breathing, but not particularly rigorous to the precisions of the form. My knee hasn’t exhibited any of the tensions or stresses of a couple of weeks ago, but neither have I forced the issue to its limits. And while I’ve been careful about it, I’m also unnerved too. That said, I was reasonably true to the form, and I was able to breath through my nose, and I was able to maintain a reasonable speed and not go too quickly.
Robert Mitchell, in a recent comment, reminded me that I really should be doing other things besides tai chi. As a druidic practitioner, I make use of geomancy a good deal, and rather than throw dice, I’m tempted to make a chart that shows what particular form of exercise I should get in a given day based on which of the sixteen figures I throw. That might be fun.
