I passed my test. They said I got a 92, but I can't quite figure out how that happened.

I was lucky with knowledge and they asked me things I mostly knew. I was a bit long winded when explaining some things. I will say I was shakier on my speech than I expected too, so I was clearly nervous. I think my writing test went well (I think I over heard him say 100%)

The foot definitely gave me trouble. In my basic motion I made a lot of mistakes with my hand open or not. Not something I've ever done before and had nothing to do with my injury. The foot REALLY hurt when I tried to catch myself for front falling. I made a noise and collapsed from plank (the technique requires you stay on your toes, in kind of a wide legged plank.) There were a few other times when there was a lot of pain, but mostly it was just aching. It restricted my movement and power some, but not enough that I couldn't get through it.

My 4 direction kick went better than I would have guessed, but I wobbled a few times. Taekbaek was ok, though again I lost my balance when supporting myself on the bad foot. Kumgang went WAY better than I feared it would, since it's all balance. Koryo went fairly well, with a few strained facial expressions.

My creative gumbup (sword) was not impacted by the foot. It went ok, but I forgot to slide my foot when sheathing the sword.

Sparring was very difficult, because I was moving slowly and deliberately, it was hard to react. Sadly my partner slightly hurt her ankle. I hope it's ok.

The creative poomsae were really good this year. One student did a Wednesday Addams routine, complete with playing the cello. People liked my "magic" appearing sword. I missed the timing a little on my creative poomsae, but given I had not practiced it with full kicks because of the foot, not bad.

We had choice for our demo breaking. I hope I picked hard enough ones. I wanted a really high tuning round house, but I didn't adjust the board up far enough and ended up breaking it with my shin (not that it hurt, just bad distance.)

Power breaking I felt like I had done well enough on the rest of the test to risk trying for 7 boards as a personal challenge. (5 is required, you get a bonus point per extra board, but if you don't break them, you are scored with 5-the number you didn't break. So if you claim 7, and break only 2, that's 0 points.) I went through them very cleanly and impressed a few of the students.

I really started to relax as the test went on, even with the foot.

I really hope the foot heals soon. I'm very tired of being limited by it, but the big worry is over. I was able to pass. I will try to be kind to it at CrossFit. The dojang is closed for the week, so I don't even have to think about if I should attend or not.

But hey, did it before 50!

Last minute two friends invited me to their campsite at the Lake Dennison Recreation Area in Winchendon. I had a lovely fresh water swim, some games, and a cookout over a small wood fire. It was a really lovely day.

It's a drive up campsite with bathrooms and a shower within walking distance. The sites are close enough together that you can see the people around you clearly, but not so close that you feel crowded in. They are only $17 a night and other than the pine sap anywhere, and they were a bit tight about guests (I had to be registered to the camp site to come see them,) it was a really lovely place.

The "grill" over the fire wasn't completely ideal for cooking, so it might be a good idea to bring metal cooking vessels, like my friends had. Wood was $7 a bundle and had to be purchased on site.

They also have a public beach, but I didn't check it out.

I'd love to go again sometime, if people were so inclined.

I've past 200 hours in baldur's gate 3 and i'm still really enjoying it. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a video game this much.

( lots of babbling about bg3 )

There is a speed I can jog for 20 minutes at. It's only just barely over walking. The treadmill told me it was a 18m/mi pace, but I got to run a bench mark today outside, and it was a 13:39 pace for 18 minutes.

I'm guessing the next step is to do the intervals, but as medium/slow intervals instead of jog/walk.

My tendon was not as happy with me. I don't know if it was the outdoor running or if it was the change of shoes. I've been using the treadmill with my crossfit shoes, but I used my running (hoka) shoes today.

I would love to know what pace I should be aiming for on the treadmill, since it's so off from reality, but at least now I know about where I am.

Because of the large snow that was followed by huge amounts of rain that melted all the snow, our basement flooded to about 2-3". I ran out, got a utility pump for $100 that could pump to 1/8" (but needed 2 3/8" to prime, but I got around that.) I ordered it for pick up to make sure they actually had it in stock. The Wilmington Ace was super fast doing this and amazingly friendly in general.

While trying to plug it in, we discovered that the GFCI had done their job and blown when not one, but two extension cords were underwater. I didn't even think about there being a shock risk, so I'm very grateful for modern safety measures.

We got the pump pumping out a window and waited for the water to go down. Apparently my basement had multiple low spots, so I had to pump out different place. My exercise rooms eva mats were floating.
We started doing damage control on getting wet boxes out of it. Most of the stuff in my basement is raised up on plastic shelves. I think I need to make sure everything is from now on.

I couldn't find the wet filter for my shop vac and most stores had closed, so I went and got one that might or might not work, but it worked well enough. We shop vac'd and sponged up the remaining puddles.

I think I have most of the puddles pulled up, though there's part of the weight room floor that is pinned under the weight rack, so there might be some water under there.

We started the dehumidifier (it said 88%!) and are now waiting for things to dry out.

The damage seems minimal, the water was clean, we got to bed at a reasonable time. As disasters go, not too bad.

As always, G was a perfect partner.

There are reasons that a sump is not an ideal solution. Especially since our basement has multiple low points and also since I think the level of the pond greatly effects if we have water in our basement.

We're hoping this was an aberration, knowing that climate change does make such weird circumstances more likely, so we aren't going to do anything unless this happens a second time. We will make sure that we raise up anything off the floor from now on.

I might also have not discovered some of the damage. For example, will my squat rack rust? Somethings will just have to wait for time to tell.

I haven't been posting to my IG a lot lately (but I do have some post ideas I would like to implement, but I decided to rebrand it to "movethisbody," partly because too many people I knew followed it. The straw was my taekwondo studio got an IG I wanted to follow. I think also that there are much better plus size activists out there and soon it won't just be that I'm fat but also that I'll be 50, so it seemed like something a little more generic would be better.

I don't think I'm going to rebrand the youtube channel yet.

Not that it really matters. Both really only reach a very small audience.

I decided this was the year to finally get a 3d printer. I decided that I wouldn't go super cheap this time, so after hearing people's recommendations, I ordered a Bambu P1S with AMS. It is not here yet, but hopefully will arrive soon.

I decided I didn't have to wait to start learning a 3d modeling software, expecially since my last attempt with blender was pretty disastrous. After many amazing recommendations again, I decided to try fusion 360. Their "free non-commercial" licence is limited to 3 years (maybe,) but I decided that was a problem for future-me.

There has been some learning, but the curve was nice and easy for me. I'm still yelling at it and fighting with it, but I think that's because I'm asking it to do things it's not really designed for.

I learned quickly that if you want to do complicated sketches, especially with curves, it was better to use inkscape to edit those first and then import them.

Very quickly I got my design for the charger box done. Then I started my ambitious sword parts, which has taken me this long to finish. Also in there I decided to make a CrossFit Ares ornament as a gift for my coaches and a great way to play with the multi-color printing without making too much printer poop.

I had a lot of fun, even when it was frustrating. Some people have been impressed with what I did so quickly. It's been really nice to not have a huge learning curve, though I may find out the hard way that I messed something WAY up. Hopefully I won't have to re-start from scratch.

We'll just have to see when I start printing the test pieces.

I'm super excited how this will change my costume making. One of the things I want to try is printing scale mail on tulle.

( renders of my designs under the cut. )

Odaiko New England sent out it's newsletter and attached was a history of Odaiko New England. Apparently I was never staff and it was Kate who single handedly held ONE together until Juni returned. (Don't get me wrong, she worked very hard at the time, just not alone.) This erases me and Jenny. This makes me so so MAD.

The exact quote: "For a time we felt rudderless. But then Kate Jurow, a long-time performing and board member stepped up to the plate. In spite of limited capacity and no staff, she found a way to keep Odaiko New England teaching and performing."

I have a legacy pay-as-you go plan that requires a minimum of $10 a year but any text or phone calls you make use up your balance. A big draw back is there is no way to get data on this plan. I've had it for years and it's served me quite well. Lately however, I've been in a bunch of group texts (which is a good thing. I've been feeling very isolated, so I'm very happy to be included) but it means that I've put about $100 into my phone this year, which is nearing some of the most basic $15/month plans in cost and data on my phone would be a huge win now that the new car has android auto and I could voice respond to messages.

Mint Mobile has a $2 7-day trial that I picked up at a brick and mortar. I got my old broken phone out and put the sim in there. There is a new number for the trial, but I'm not really caring about testing texts or calls, since Mint uses T-mobile, which is where my account is right now. In the next 7 days, I do have to test if I want to take the plunge because once I move my number from the legacy plan, I cannot have the plan back. I'll be carrying around both phones for the 7-days of the trial.

If you have any suggestions on tests I should run, let me know. The trial only has 250MB, so I can't go completely ham* on data testing.

* Today I learned that "going ham" is an acronym that includes swearing.