busy day: Saturday class, robots (w/ shame), Robo Rally, no peas

[eub]

First day of Saturday-morning kajukenbo. It's mixed in age and experience, and much larger than our little beginners' class. We were tight in the room, doing advances across and walking back to make space. Try to push your partner off the balance beam, where the balance beam is implemented as a seam in the floor. Also practiced some kicks we hadn't actually tried before. The experienced people were very good about helping to teach us on the fly.

We thought we had learned all of Monkey form, but it is not so. Now there's the mirror image. No, this is not trivial for me, since I have enough trouble with left and right when they're not cheek by jowl.

Class actually ran until 12:30, so I was a little but no too late meeting jinian and hattifattener for...

Robots! Shameful not-actually-robot robots! It was the Northwest regional of the FIRST robotics competition at UW. The shame dwells in their being radio-controlled, not autonomous or sensoriferous or anything, but I guess realistically this is high-school projects, not bleeding-edge research. And I should acknowledge that the first 15 seconds of each match was autonomous.

It was a tournament of competitions between two-robot teams. Each match began with crates stacked in the middle, and your team wanted to push them over into your scoring zone. You also want, for various scoring reasons, to knock over any towers in your opponents' zone, to protect any in yours, and to end the match in a special middle zone. It was fun to watch. As a sporting event, the seeding from the qualifiers was awfully accurate -- just one upset.

By this time we hungered, and went to a Mexican place on the Ave at 52nd. Very good chicken enchiladas. (One would have been enough, but nooooo.) Caravanned to return jinian's mom's pickup truck, and spent some time there with plants and things. Swung by the new house to dig out the box with Robo Rally.

thatmathchick threw a little games night, which turned out to be us four (not that this was a bad thing). Robo Rally (I won and dove unavertably into a pit, whee), the Mr. Bond game, Lord of the Fries, also much fun chitchat, instant DEATH. (Oh, and just because somebody scarfs down Iain Banks books like they're harmless doesn't mean she won't be traumatized by my hair-metal alter-ago.)

Got home late, read the day's mail and stuff. I was thinking of 10am bowling tomorrow, but with the DST shift on top of everything, I don't believe I'll make it.

Oh, and it was dark when I got home, but I didn't feel any pea shoots coming up.

Comments

[jeliza]

hair-metal alter-ego? Are there pictures?

[eub.livejournal.com]

Fortunately for all concerned, no.

_{"Oh right. Before I turned into Whitesnake, I was going to go get a bit of fudge."}

[thatmathchick.livejournal.com]

It wasn't so much the initial shock of seeing eub's hair out of a ponytail. (I had somehow decided that it didn't exist in a non-ponytail state.)

The visual cortex shut down right about at the pelvic thrust-y bits.


On the other hand, peanut butter fudge sounds pretty good right about now.