Things have been popping…

 

…and it’s not just my joints. Although I did jam my thumb really hard about three times over the past couple weeks. The joint is swollen and looks like arthritic. I’m hoping it goes back down soon. But I digress. 

 

Over Labor Day weekend, I went up to NYC to visit Nerfy. The original plan was to swim a Pro-Am 1 miler on Saturday and watch the Pro 10k on Sunday. The plans were made, the tickets were bought…and then they cancelled the Pro-Am. Grr. 

 

Instead, I bumped my train ticket up to get into Manhattan earlier so I could train with Shaolin before meeting up with Nerfy. It was a good plan, except that the train broke down somewhere between DC and BWI and we ended up cruising into Penn Station about 45 minutes late. I got to Shaolin’s school in the middle of the technique part of class with a suitcase, laptop, and BJJ gear bag in tow. The guy at the front desk must have thought I was a complete idiot, but I paid my $35 mat fee (ouch! But I guess it is Manhattan) and joined the class. 

 

I didn’t do as well as I would have liked (you know, you always feel like you need to represent when you show up at another school) but being hungry and dehydrated didn’t help – my hands were shaking after just the second roll. I did, however, manage to pull off an oma plata on a largish blue belt with a setup we’d been working at Dalla’s that week… actually, I couldn’t finish because we rolled into the wall, but I think I would have gotten it.  On the other hand, a white belt was giving me such a hard time I was getting pretty discouraged – until I found out he was a wrestler. I don’t know why, but wrestlers always kick my ass.  

 

Training with Shaolin was fun – whenever he saw someone about to get a submission, he’d say “make my day! come on!” The guys who trained there were friendly, too – there was only one girl in that class, a white belt, but I didn’t get a chance to roll with her. So where are the pictures of you training at Shaolin’s, you ask? Fail. I’ll do better next time, I promise.

 

After the class, Nerfy retrieved me, and we commenced our long weekend of eating our way across the city. We started at the UN (drinks at the bar, raiding the cafeteria, and eating chocolate rice krispy treats in the seedy underbelly…er, basement. I hadn’t eaten since 10 AM, so I was slightly wasted on half a Jack and Coke), then followed up the next day with an almost all-day BBQ (thank you Carrie and Liz!), in which one of the guests was bizarrely fascinated with the concept of a triangle choke. I should know better than to try to talk about BJJ in polite company. I ended up sending him this via Nerfy:

 

I’m sure he’ll never talk to me again.

 

Sunday started with a visit to the Brazilian Day Festival. We had high hopes for the possibilty of grilled meat products, but we mostly just saw gyro and funnel cake type places. I think there were a few crepe stands and one Japanese stand. Actually, aside from training at Shaolin’s, the most Brazilian thing I saw that weekend was the Sushi-Samba place we passed on our way to the 10k Pro Swim. 

 

As for the 10k, it was freaking awesome. You know it’s a killer race when an Olympic medalist isn’t able to finish due to the rough conditions. Makes me want to start training for those kinds of races again…

 

Smoke and the Water (with apologies to Deep Purple…)

Lets start with the water. I spent last weekend out of town participating in a team triathlon – I did the swim, of course. I was the fastest woman, the seventh fastest overall, and I beat the second place relay swimmer out of the water by about five minutes. As a relay, we finished third out of 20 – sweet! Maybe I should learn to ride a bike with gears and try doing my own triathlon next time. Maybe. Can you do BJJ with a case of road rash? I’m just saying, land sports with wheels aren’t always my strong point.

 

Now for the smoke. I came home from the triathlon on Sunday and messed around on the computer for a while. Then I went down into the basement to get something and was assailed by the most awful shrieking noise. I realized the room was full of smoke and the dog was looking at me as if to say, “hey, um, something’s happening…” Since I couldn’t find the source of the noise, I threw the breaker to the basement outlets. That stopped the noise, but the smoke was still strong and it smelled like an electrical fire. 

 

Great, I thought, I suppose I have to call the fire department now, because who knows what’s burning in my walls. Well, I don’t want to say that it was a mistake, because I know it was the right thing to do, but holy crap did they drag out every last fire truck and ambulance and God knows what else. Of course, the neighbors, not having any lives of their own, all came out onto the street to watch the entertainment.

 

So there I was sitting outside with the dog, getting chewed to bits by our bumper crop of mosquitos, being stared at by neighbors with nothing better to do with their life, and watching men and women in full fire fighting gear clomping in and out of my house. Finally, one of them motioned me inside and told me that the source of the noise and smoke was…the television. It had decided to have a meltdown in a melodramatic fashion and was the source of both the noise and the smoke. There was no fire in the walls. Everything else was fine. So, after taking the TV out to the concrete pad to cool off (“We don’t want to throw it in the dumpster or you’ll have to call us back when the stuff in the dumpster catches on fire,” they said) the trucks and ambulances and fire marshall rolled out, and the neighbors went back to …well, who knows what the hell they do when someone isn’t having an emergency they can stare at.

 

My impressions of the day:

Firemen/women: awesome, if a bit overenthusiastic. 

Neighbors: Definitely not into BJJ, or they wouldn’t have been dragged away from their video of the 2009 Mundials or their Marcelo Garcia tutorial by a silly little fire truck or five.