Gymnastics!!!!! ... I just like it is all ....

Frodo Baggins Sado Island, South Korea

Korean Word: 토요일 (Saturday - appropriate, right?)
Spanish Word: ¡Qué chiquitita! (How adorable/cute/precious!)

What I should be doing right now is completing a unit plan for literacy, a math interview analysis for math, and a chapter of Nikki's novel to send her as a surpreeze tonight. Instead, I am posting my gymnastics videos!

To begin at the beginning: I began going back to the gym when I discovered that there were gyms for gymnasts in Boston and that one of them was actually a place for gymnasts of all ages! There are several misconceptions about gymnastics that I and my videos would just like to clear up before I continue:

• Myth: Gymnasts must be 90 lbs and 5' 0"
• Reality: Gymnasts come in all shapes and sizes. The key is not size but strength. I'm a hefty 170 lbs and 5' 9" so I must be able to support my own weight/bear my own weight. As long as I can do that (and you will see below that I can), there's no earthly reason I can't call myself a gymnast.
• Myth: Once you are older than fifteen or sixteen, you can't do gymnastics
• Reality: I attend a gym where the oldest gymnast is forty-two and still doing every event. He does tucks and layouts with twists, he does giants on the single high bar, and he's probably the strongest dude in the gym. The thirty-four year-old female gymnast is the best of the female gymnasts and is likewise flipping, twisting, and swinging her way through competitions.

To continue ... today my friend Julie and I met up at the gym for the first time and spent two hours hanging out and blissing out on gymnastics. We're both going to be sore and exhausted tomorrow, I have no doubt, but it was so much fun! The added bonus for me was that someone was finally at the gym with me whom I felt comfortable asking to film me doing a couple of my favorite things. These feel like benchmarks: Tess at the beginning of her adult training. I'd love to post new videos a year from now and see how much I've progressed.

The first video is of my back handspring, which is the move that brought me to and kept me going with gymnastics from the time I was a wee lassy. The second video is of a short tumbling pass called a round-off back tuck.

Enjoy!

 

Thunder and Lightning!

La Chocolatta Punta Arenas, Chile

Korean Word: 천재 (genius)
Spanish: Hablaba (teeheehee - I mean, it's I talked or she/he/it talked in the past tense)

Just yesterday, Massachusetts was in the news, owing to the random tornadoes setting down west of Boston in Springfield. Scary stuff! At least three people were killed and Springfield was damaged pretty badly. Relative to the Mississippi flooding and tornadoes ripping through the southeast, MA's natural disasters are small, but they had a huge impact on the people of the state, who haven't experienced tornadoes this intense in years.

I know it seems strange that anything cool could come out of large and destructive storms but those of us lucky enough to be in safe places during the massive thunder and lightning storm that tore through Boston got a thrilling show! I caught some on camera and I thought I'd share the video. I couldn't upload the one with actual forks of lightning because either my computer is a hunk of tin (thanks, Han Solo!) or BlogSpot has it in for me. Anyway, please enjoy what I CAN post, which will give you an idea of what the storm was like and has hilarious audio of me and my room mates.