Busy week or so. Cubs are playing great ball all of a sudden, right in time. It's exciting. They're coming home for a big 9 game home stand, of which I work 5 games. With last weekends games that makes 3 weekends in a row of working, but oh well. Tuesday there was a minor league game at the ball park, which was pretty cool. It did show me that if I didn't like the team so much I wouldn't be working there though. It's a lot more of a job when you don't care what's going on on the field heh.

Some changes at the real job as well. Joe the other guy I work with was let go, so I'm back to answering phones as well as programing. For the time being anyway till they replace him. It isn't a huge deal, I was doing most of the actual work to fix problems anyway but yeah not optimal. I did get a fairly respectable raise as well though. I probably Could get more by going elsewhere, but not enough to give up the intangibles of working here (such as generally flexible schedule, lax dress code stuff like that), and put up with the hassle of looking for and changing jobs for the time being. It also means I'll definitely be moving when my lease is up to a place with a bedroom.. and probably parking. So that's a bonus. I've also been working on some pretty cool things, and fixing some problems we've had in the past so definitely is good in that respect.


I hadn't been to the gym in a week or so before last night, I took Monday off for various reasons mainly laziness and wanting to watch the Cubs Brewers game, and I wasn't feeling all that up to going last night either, but I did and I'm glad.

As a quick aside I have the Cubs game on the MLB audio feed and Wayne Messmer did the Anthem. I think he's probably my favorite Anthem singer ever.

Anyway I got to the gym early and Dino the head instructor was doing some rolling with one of the guys. It's just amazing to watch. Being from a wrestling back ground it's a lot different watching Jiu jitsu. Wrestling has a lot of force and effort and such. There is technique involved but if you have a guy with a significant size advantage, and similar skill the bigger guy wins nearly all of the time. Not so in Jitz. Good jiu jitsu guys are very smooth and calm and almost effortless. Watching it reminds me of a Bruce Lee quote, which thinking about it I looked up.

"Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend."

I watched for a bit as I stretched then one of the older (actually, I don't know his age it's not significantly different than me anyway, but for some reason I think of the more experienced guys as 'older' then again I assume most people are older than me for whatever reason) guys who is pretty much the same size as me and has been training for 3 or 4 years asked if I wanted to roll a bit to warm up since we still had fifteen minutes till class started. That by itself is pretty cool since most of the time the really experienced guys wouldn't go out of their way to roll with a completely new person, so I'm at least not completely terrible anymore. So we did, not going too hard but it was still rather productive and I worked really hard on taking my time and emulating Dino and the water. He submitted me a few times but I almost got him in an arm bar but I was a tad sloppy and he was able to get out of it. It was a good roll over all, even if I did start class tired already heh.

I've yet to be able to tap anyone with more experience than me. I had one of the guys who sometimes runs class when Dino's busy. I had a shoulder lock locked in and had started to crank it slowly not wanting to hurt him and the round ended before I got him to the point of tapping. I think he was almost as excited/disappointed for me as I was. Nearly all the guys in our gym are really cool like that. Then class started and I worked with a guy who doesn't train jitz as often so I was able to kind of help him through moves some.

I'm improving at any rate. I can hold my own if not completely beat people with less or similar amounts of experience. I still gas fairly early and need to get stronger but that's just a matter of time and effort. All in all really enjoy it. Of course after a good class yesterday I wanna go again and there aren't any classes I can make it too till Tuesday due to my Cubs schedule, go figure.