Morning, Monkeys.

I’m home, waiting for my friend from my hometown to arrive with his wife. They’ll get here around 1p and then we’ll go to check in for the CBGB festival. It’s a four day music festival, hundreds of bands across 120 venues around NYC. I’m really psyched that his band was booked for this, should be good exposure. We’ll go to check in at an office on Bowery and get our free passes (yay!) that will get us into any show for the next four days for free.

Then we’re free for the rest of the day until he has sound check at 7, and they play at 9p. Depending on how things go, we’ll either stay out really late or head back here and just crash. They leave tomorrow morning, and I took both days (today and tomorrow) off from work, and I’m looking forward to sitting here at my desk with big coffees and writing most of the day tomorrow.

It’s really amazing to see him play here in NYC because it reminds me of when we used to jam in his small, single story house outside my hometown so many year ago. I’m proud of him for making it work. For years he was relegated to a Cambodian wedding band, and now he’s in an alternative rock band that’s producing CDs and getting a fan base. It’s a great reminder of what’s possible if you stick with things.

Last night took all my shoes and boots out and polished them all. Black for the Limmers, and brown for the Limmer lights and a pair of very light boot/shoe things I got maybe three years ago with a girlfriend and her best friend. They were very light and thin, pretty comfortable usually. After adding polish they darkened up and the toes came to life and now they look better than new. Here’s the work table:

More coffee.

Back.

The new iPhone is great. I needed to upgrade my old one as its battery was checking out slowly, and I had badly damaged the screen, and it was slow and had limited memory capacity. The new one, a 5s, is a huge jump from the 4, so it’s been pretty fun getting stuff done faster. It has virtually no loading time, and as you can see it takes pretty good low light pictures. I haven’t tried most of its other features yet, but seems pretty good so far. You might see many more pictures and videos from me soon.

I have a big talk coming up that’s in the back of my mind. I should have started preparing a couple weeks ago, but that just wasn’t possible, so we’ll see how it goes. Stakes are slightly high because in the audience will be a few members of a group I’m newly affiliated with, and I’m eager to have them know of my capabilities. Whatever the fuck that means.

Training after class last night was rough. I decided ahead of time I would go in no matter what, because sometimes that’s what it takes. So even after heading out for some beers with a couple faculty and grad students, I went back to the office, changed up, and went in. Training with alcohol in your blood sucks. I burned out much faster than I should have. But it was still good to get pumped up. I’ll head in again tomorrow, no doubt with more booze in my blood from what is sure to happen tonight. Training heavy squats.

Vascularity isn’t a constant thing, you really have to work super heavy and force the muscles to grow to support what you’re requiring of them. There is a danger that if you go ultra heavy you’ll grow too much. What you want for fighting or anything truly athletic is super strength and density, rather than size, because otherwise you’ll slow way down. I’m probably getting a little too inflated lately, but it’s a quick fix: add miles to your runs and reduce your calories.

So that’s all for now. I’ll post some pictures of the show up tomorrow, I bet.

Enjoy Thor’s Day.