bujinkan and Bleach ramblings

Before training tonight I had a premonition that I was going to be training the newbie teenage girl, and decided I would be okay with this rather than resentful as I sometimes am. This was good since I did end up training her. She's actually not that bad if not yet hitting with intent or force so it wasn't too unbearable. I was able to get in a little training at least. Jack hung around us for the first 2/3rds of the class, and was paying a lot of attention to my teaching since he a) gave me lots of happy looks when she got something right, and b) he was in the middle of teaching the class at one point about not grabbing the person's attacking hand but just using your arm and hand to guide it and he glanced over at me and said that he'd just heard me say the same thing to my training partner. *blushes* We started off the evening with fighting from the indian style position, this time being attacked first by a kick (which you struck on the ankle to deflect it at the last possible second, and then with a short sword. Variations were about getting to the sword before the attacker swung it, using the saya (sheath) as a backwards lever to drop them to the ground, coming up onto your knees to take the sword up straight then standing up while applying pressure on the blade to cause them to bend backwards and a bunch of other things.

The last half hour was standing variations on what we'd done before switching to a kick followed by the person drawing a gun. Sometimes Jack teaches something that would be dangerous in the wrong hands and therefore asks us to not pass it on, hence why I can't actually tell you what we did with guns this evening, but it was interesting. It led to the comment from Jack that guns were just swords with mile long blades (meaning that all weapons have similarities and with small adjustments can often be substituted and defended against in similar ways). My mind immediately went to Gin from Bleach and I realized it was true that the same principle for fighting his infinitely long sword was that of a gun - namely, never let its' tip point towards your body. Thinking of Gin's zanpakutou as a gun makes it a lot less scary actually because he'd fighting with a fairly long gun and using it as a sword - if you know what you're doing, it's not impossible to keep a sword's tip from pointing at you. And now I'm picturing Gin as a gunfighter in the Old West...

life, life, life

I get to see ashfae and randomchris on Thursday! This is unexpected but good news. I will just have to avoid using the turnpike to get to the airport though cause the drivers on there have been crazier than usual. Case in point, I was driving my mother to the airport with my dad sitting in the back. I was in the middle lane going about 65 mph. Without really thinking about it, I realized that despite having no brake lights on, the car in front of me was going at a significantly slower speed than me since my car was approaching at a scary rate. I hit the brake on instinct and ended up standing on it to slow it down to 10mph and avoid not hitting the car in front of me. My dad had been watching from the back and said the driver and passenger were fighting and I'll bet he/she just took their foot off the gas, hence the lack of brake lights. I honked then and they accelerated again while I tried to come down from the adrenaline rush and got as far away from that car as possible. You don't do that on the turnpike! And if I'd hit them, it would have been my fault according to the law. Gah.

I have to take a bunch of online quizzes on various topics for my next day of training for my Rutgers comp. lab job. Some, like the ones on windows and troubleshooting were easy, but I had to go into the labs today to experiment with the Macintosh section since I haven't used a mac since I was in high school. It's weird cause I grew up using a Macintosh II, but they've changed so much since then, it's hard to recognize anything. I've got every quiz done now except the Unix one cause just doing the 50 pages of reading they give you on it is giving me headaches.

In other news, since I have a 4.0 at Rutgers, I was offered the chance to apply for a scholarship for next year which is great, but will also have to take the time to write the two required essays and update my resume before the end of the month. Right now it just feels like one more thing. *sigh* They also gave me a chance to apply for the honours society, but I don't think it's worth it. (And you can tell I did all my uni. stuff in Britain cause I was all confused. "You're rewarding me for getting good grades? I thought I was supposed to get those anyway?")

I have grass fed steaks marinating in Jack Daniel's sauce atm. I'm going to cook them up with some stir fried baby bella mushrooms and a sweet potato on the side. Should be delicious. Since Kirk didn't want steaks while he was here on Sun-Weds, I worked Thurs-Sun this week, and had training on Monday, this is the first chance I've had to cook the steaks since I bought them last Sunday. My poor, abandoned steaks.