Okay, bear with me on this one – a few weeks ago, I convinced my Dad it would be an awesome idea to come over and help me do some gardening. I wasn’t talking about your run of the mill weeding/potting gardening – I had more destructive things in mind 🙂

I didn’t know chainsaws could cut concrete – thanks Wikipedia!

Chainsawing stuff is awesome fun – Dad brought over his light-duty chainsaw, his crazy hedge trimmer and some other gardening toys and the two of us proceeded to do some boring stuff (weeding) and awesome stuff (chopped down several trees and bushes). To my credit, I didn’t even mangle myself, despite Wifey being in a panic the whole day, worried I was going to give myself a stupid injury 😉

Anywho, to bring things back to being an amputee and a martial artist – I found a lot of things helped get through the day because of my training. Strong stances meant I could get down low to rip up tree trunks without falling face-first into the dirt (which would be funny, just not terribly productive!), breathing and body conditioning meant I could carry heavy weights around the garden and plonk stuff into the trailer without causing any pain or strain on my back whatsoever, and through the training that has helped me be more nimble on my feet, I didn’t stumble or fall once, regardless of where I might have been standing or my footing.

So it’s a bit arbitrary, but there’s definitely a connection there – good martial arts training lends itself to plenty of other applications in life, and as an amputee, by extension it helps you keep up with the rest of the able-bodied community 😀

Bloginated Tuesday, 18th August 2009 / General training
Tag-isms: Balance | gardening | Technique

I was just thinking that I’ve been pretty slack with catching up on my usual round of martial arts bloggers on my side panel, and wanted to quickly post up a “I still think you’re all awesome :D” comment on my blog acknowledging that 🙂 I blame it on a busy work schedule and my almost-obsessive fussing over my arcade cabinet. I might break down and post some nerd images in a few weeks as I’ve tracked down a couple of ace fighting games, which in my mind is still remotely connected to the martial arts side of this blog. I don’t think the vast majority of my readership will care (though you’re welcome to surprise me!), but I don’t mind shouting into the void every now and again 😀

Bloginated Tuesday, 18th August 2009 / Blogs/websites
Tag-isms: Blogs | Video games

Observe the awesomeness that is my latest injury!

… well, rather, don’t observe because I don’t have any impressive images 🙂 Didn’t go to training last week as I was unable to even remotely form a fist with my right hand, which makes it hard to do all sorts of stuff, and I was afraid of further damage during any grappling or kumite exercises. It’s almost better now, but I’m hesitant to go back to training tomorrow night in case it accidentally re-opens the wound…. hmmmm…

As for what I did? Was really stupid – I was picking something up off the floor in the bathroom, and the knuckle on my thumb knocked into one of the stainless steel containers in the bathroom. Figured all I’d done was a light paper cut, but it turned out that I almost took the top of my knuckle off – hanging by a flap was all this awesome exposed flesh and muscle, looked really gross and stung a bit as I soaked it in crazy Dettol:

For the first week I was changing the dressing daily and working hard to keep it from getting wet – there was a Dettol + Betadine combo on the wound and under the skin flap, couple of band-aids, then thick sports tape holding the thumb straight to try and stop me bending my thumb. It’s now a week and a half later, and I’m down to only having a single band-aid over it and can almost bend it back like normal without it feeling like it’s going to split right open again. I figure by the weekend, it should be back to normal so I can start with some weight training during the week and then back to training.

Considering how it looked and the fact I didn’t get it infected, I will also take this moment to observe I was tapping into my crazy Wolverine healing powers 😀

Stupid thumb 😛

Bloginated Tuesday, 18th August 2009 / Injuries
Tag-isms: Hooray for Dettol | stupid injuries | thumb | Wolverine healing powers

Just wanted to post a quick notice – I’m going to be doing some system admin stuff this afternoon, so apologies for any wierdness in the interim!

Update: Looks like everything went smoothly, will update with some fresh content next week!

Have a great weekend!

Bloginated Saturday, 15th August 2009 / Wordpress/system stuff
No tag-isms applied to this post due to unruly laziness :P

Training this week was a little bit different – Sensei wasn’t able to make it, so we had training with Dai-Sensei (the Big Sensei), who is actually my usual Sensei’s father (and who I trained under during 2007-2008… which reminds me, I really should add a couple of posts to fill in the blank spaces between the old Gisoku no Jutsu and the new Gisoku Budo blogs).

Anywho, training was different, as it sometimes is when Dai-Sensei takes our class. This time, we focused on bunkai from some of the lower kata, which was good as I’ll be required to demonstrate it in my future gradings. Now, this is all well and good, but Dai-Sensei brought in some goodies to accompany training – kobudo weapons 😀 We had a few options to work with, including jo, hanbo, sai, nunchaku, tonfa, katana, wakizashi and kama. What Dai-Sensei was trying to demonstrate was the relationship/connection between open-handed forms and kobudo forms, showing how one complements the other and that your open-handed karate kata has forms the work well with weapons. More importantly, it demonstrated that the principles of attack/defense/counter in kata can be re-enforced by applying the same principles in kobudo.

But the best part of the evening was playing with these:

Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons, original image by chris ?

Sai are awesome, and that’s probably because I watched too much TMNT as a kid 😀 Was great fun using them in class, and while I didn’t learn much that was all the useful due to the short period of time using them (though I learned a basic method for how to trap a Bo!), it was still so much fun 😀

It also brought to the fore my interest in kobudo, and that I’d really like to get into it down the line. Though I can imagine the look Wifey would give me if I came home with more stuff to complement some of the staffs I have around the place from when I started doing mixed-style stick fighting last year 😉

Bloginated Friday, 7th August 2009 / Karate, Kobudo
Tag-isms: Karate | kata | Kobudo | sai | TMNT