Rode my bike to school. Took the new route that Tom showed me, and it was much nicer. It took 5 minutes off my ride. I pondered this for a moment. Should I use this new route, and get LESS exercise? :) I think so!

On Tuesdays everything gets started at 8:45am instead of 9:00. We had our usual warm up with Kay. We played stick in the mud, and then did some stretches. One thing we did different today was she had us do some upper body strengthening exercise. The exercise we did for that was lay down on our stomachs with our elbows bent so that our forearms are flat on the floor, close to our chests. Then from there, we push up so that one end that is supporting us is our forearms flat on the floor, and the other end supporting the weight is the toes--back flat, we held that for 30 seconds. I almost died! I'm sure she will add more time to it next time.

After warm-up, it was time for me to go to my conditioning class. If you may recall, I have been "kicked" out of the Aerial class--at least until I am flexible enough and strong enough to try it again (though I have no desire to.) So now, any time I am "supposed" to be in Aerial, I am supposed to be doing my conditioning, or being in the weekly conditioning class on Tuesdays. So on Tuesdays, I have two conditioning classes, one after another. Lizz, the head of physical fitness at the school, is very nice, and encouraging. I believe she is going to be a lot of help in my getting into awesome shape. Her conditioning class today was an introduction to the methods she will be using. She told us she would be using the Polantes method (not sure if I spelled that right.) For me, I was pleased that we are using that method, because she said that it is the scientific approach to well being, as it deals with anatomy and the understanding of the body, and how it works, where something like Yoga is a little more "woo woo" based, dealing with things like chi etc. Polantes is focuses on creating, and maintaining a neutral alignment, and stabalizing the internal muscles. It is considered a mind/body exercise simply because you have to be constantly concious of your posture, positioning, breath, and movement. We started off with learning the neutral position. The neutral position is having your pelvis be perpendicular to the floor, and the rest of your body being aligned with that--ears over shoulders, shoulders over pelvis, pelvis over feet, a straight line. Next we learned how to breath. That may sound silly, but she wanted us to breath in, and expand our chest outward from the sides, and on the breath out, we have to tighten our stomachs, an suck them in. We have to breath like this all the time during the conditioning class, and be constantly in the neutral position. Once we got that down, she had us work on roll downs, using the same breathing technique, and keeping the pelvis in the neutral position as long as possible--and then rolling up, breathing the correct way. Next we worked on raising our arms without using any of the shoulder muscles around the neck (we will be taking anatomy classes every day, so I'm sure I will get better at naming things.) In other words, raising your arms keeping your shoulders down (give it a try.) We did that exercise with a partner. Your partner would put their hands on your neck/shoulder, and check to see if there was any movement while your arms raised and lowered. And of course, we had to keep that breathing pattern going while we did that. Next she had us lay down on mats. She put a couple of extra cushions under my head (and a few others in the class) because she needed us to have our spine shaped a certain way when doing this exercise. Laying down, we did different exercises, maintaining the neutral position, and the breathing technique. The first exercise was just raising your arms (that are to your side) up and over your head, and laying them on the ground above your head. The key to doing this was not moving your chest. Keeping it flat on the floor. Next we did some sit-ups in this position (which makes the sit-ups much harder--I have a tendency to push my stomach out when doing a sit-up. Now I have to suck it in tightening it.) And we also did some knee lifts. I was amazed at this one. You lay on your back in the neutral position, knees bent, your feet around 6-8 inches from your butt on the floor, arms flat on the floor next to you. Then, maintaining the correct breathing, and neutral position, raise on knee, then lowering it, then alternating to the other knee. This seeemed harder than it should be. Then she had us go to double lifts, where you lift one knee, leave it there, and then lift the other knee. I was blown away, I could NOT get my second knee to move. I assume it is because she is making us access muscles in our body that don't get used very often--the internal, stabalizing muscles. She told us that too many people focus on developing their outer layer of stomach muscles (their "six pack") and never develop the inner muscles. She told us a story about when she was training some body builder, who was covered in muscles. Apparently this muscle bound guy couldn't even do one sit-up in the Polantes method. Bizzare. Anyway, for the last exercise, we did a roll up off the floor. This is the only exercise she showed us today where we actually change the position of the pelvis. Again, I did this class twice. Lizz laughed at the begining of the first class, telling me she must sound like a broken record. It was good. Seeing it all twice, gave me a chance to work on my technique, plus I took notes the second time around as well.

After those two classes I had about an hour and a half break. It was almost noon, so I decided to go and eat my lunch upstairs in the student room. There were several others hanging out in the student room as well, and we watched part of Quidam (a Cirque du Soleil show.) My lunch always tastes better after a lot of hard work. I bit into my apple, and a little worm popped its head out of a hole in the apple. The girls in the room with me were quite grossed out by it. I wasn't bothered by it, and would have probably just sent the worm on its way so I could finish my apple, but I didn't want to gross the girls out any further, so I just put my apple to the side, and grabbed my orange. Well, I guess it's nice to know my apple wasn't covered in insecticide. :)

After I ate my lunch I went into the hallway, and discovered that the groups for the rest of the week had been posted. So now my schedule is all sorted for the next 4 weeks. After copying down my schedule information, I headed out to do some juggling on the lawn before our next class.

Our next class was with Lizz again. She basically wanted to go over her physical fitness manual/diary thing that she is having us do/fill out. I won't go into too much detail. Eventually, when the HSU webmaster gives me some more space for my web-page, I am going to scan all the hand-outs I have been given and put them on here for reading. The important information I got from this class was technique about each of the exercises in the book, and that we are required to do a conditioning class/session 3 times a week (which won't be a problem for me, since I am not doing Aerial,) we have to run the 20 minute circuit 2 times a week, and we have to stretch every day. As we go, and get in better shape, we will have to do the circuit 3 times a week. She said people eventually get to doing it even more than that, and doing it for 40 minutes. The circuit is basically running from station to station, and at each station doing a specific exercise (like jumping jacks, or sprints, or skipping--stuff like that.) Lizz also told us that we are not allowed to do any partner stretching because of the possibility of injury. She also told us that we need to drink a minimum of 2 litres of water a day. My mind is swiming with all this physcial fitness stuff. I believe I will be a changed person after a year of this. :)

After that class was over, we were supposed to have an Anatomy class. However, this week it seems they are trying to fit in all these extra classes that they need us to go through in the begining (like the CPR class.) So instead of Anatomy, we went to a Health and Safety class. This was taught by Tony, the technical director. When I say technical director, that means he is in charge of all the equipment, and all the rigging for the trapeze. He talked a lot about the trapeze, and how strict the laws are about safety. He said that every carabener (spell?), has a serial number on it, and has a history. He said that if one dropped from the ceiling, they would have to dispose of it (even though it is HIGHLY unlikely that it falling like that would do any damage to it. Tony basically went over some very basic rules about health and safety. Mostly he read to use some of the safety lists that are posted in the various different classrooms. It was mostly a common sense lecture. Don't do anything stupid, and you won't get hurt.

After that class we had ONE more class to go. The class is another one we will have once a week and it is called Body Awareness. Everyone, including myself was moaning at the idea of the class, because it sounded like another lecture class, and today felt like we spent the entire time sitting down and being lectured to. We were all wrong of course, it was not a lecture class. It was actually very nice, and relaxing. We did this exercise, very similar to one I have done in Jyl's class. You get a partner. You have your partner lay down on the floor and close their eyes. Then you pick up their arm by their fingertips and wiggle it side to side, and up and down, encouraging your partner to release all their muscles, and make their arm heavy. Once their arm is heavy, you start drawing little circles in the air with their arm pointed up to the ceiling. Making the circles bigger and bigger, making sure that your partner is relaxing, and not helping you move their arm at all. This is harder than it sounds. People seem to be hard-wired to want to help any movement their body is doing. Then after the circle gets as wide as it can, you reverse the direction and start moving back to smaller and smaller circles. Next, you grab the person's arm at two points--the wrist and the elbow, holding it firmly. Then you slowly push their shoulder up into their ear, and then slowly pull it back down, stretching their neck/shoulder--doing that five times. Next, you hold on to their arm with two hands, holding it at the wrist, you firmly give them a fast shaking. And after that you hold their arm again at the wrist and elbow and lean back into your own weight, pulling their shoulder off the ground just a little bit, and setting it back down (3 times.) After being done with the arm, you set it down, and move behind their head, cupping your hands under their head like a basket, and give their head a very soft tug, stretching it. After that, you move to the other arm and do the whole process again. The neck getting stretched again after the second arm is done. What impressed me about this exercise is what the person looked like before, during and after. Before I began on Denise, my partner, she looked normal. After I was done with her first arm, I was impressed with how flat it looked. It seemed to just sink into the floor, and it looked very relaxed. By time I was done, she looked like a puddle on the floor. I let Denise go first in this exercise, and in the class, of the first people to go, three people fell asleep. I am proud to say my partner was one of them. She loved it. Then it was my turn. I had the hardest time letting my arm relax when she was drawing the circles in the air with it. But eventually I managed to relax. It was a very enjoyable experience, and I almost fell asleep. What helps with the wanting to fall asleep is that the teacher is constantly talking throughout the exercise. Her voice can be very soothing.

After that class was over, I noticed that it was raining. So, yes, I got wet on my ride home. It wasn't too bad though. The nice thing though, was when I got home, Mandy told me that she was cooking some soup, and that I was welcome to join her for dinner. Her soup was delicious. After dinner, Mandy and I went out to see a friend of ours who is an amazing stand-up comedian at a pub in downtown. I had a good time, but was very sleepy and tired towards the end.

Its now 6:58am. It amazes me how long it takes me to write these entries.

I am off to go eat some breakfast, and bike it up the hill for day six. Today we are starting with a 20 minute circuit run at 8:30am! Should be a good day.

After our circuit, we went in to the gym for our daily morning warm-up. Instead of playing Stick in the Mud, this time we played a silly game where Kay, the girl who runs the warm-ups would call out various things related to being on a pirate ship, and we had to run around according to her instructions. For example, she would call out mop the floor, and we would have to drop to our knees and pretend to mop the floor (giving us a nice lower back stretch in the process.) There were others that involved running, getting down on the floor, climbing up the racks, etc. It is not my favorite game, and I hope she comes up with other ones. After that game, we did out basic warm-up that involves a lot of stretching. I seem to be stretching several times a day now. If I don't get more flexible over the next year, I won't know what to do with this old body of mine! :)

My first class of the day at 9:30am was Performance with Bim. His classes seem to be a mixture of theatre games/exercises, mixed with some improv. We started out with the Zip, Zap, Kaboom! game. I think Bim was a little more pleased with us today. We were definitely moving faster than we did last time. Instead of introducing new elements and slowly bringing the game to full speed, we just went into it with all the elements. After that first game, he had us separate into groups of 4 (thought my group had 5,) and we stood in a diamond shape, with one person facing forward, and the other three facing in the same direction. The person in the front (to who's back the other three are looking at) becomes the leader. The other three have to mimic what the person in the front it doing (and in our case, the person in the middle does as well--what became complicated for our group was the fact that if you were directly behind the leader, there was the person in the middle in your way, so you ended up following that person, and assuming that they were doing a good job of following the leader.) After a while, Bim instructed us to pass off leadership to each other by turning at least 90 degrees. Because at that point, you would be facing a different direction, and another person would suddenly become the leader. I have played this exact game in one of Jyl's classes. The next game we played involved having the people from the last groups all stand together in a clump--very close together, but not touching. The idea is that the collective group moves around--noone is the leader. Bim spoke of an invisible mind that floats in the middle of the group that makes the decisions. I quickly suggested we call him "Bob," which Bim seemed quite pleased to do, so for the rest of the exercise he kept saying things like, "Try to feel what direction Bob wants to go." On our first try, Bob wasn't being very active, and we hardly moved at all. But with a little practice, we finally got it down so that we were moving across the room. It was a neat experience to move like that, with noone being the leader. It made me think of how Ouija boards work. They work on the principal of the ideomotor effect. Next we separated into twos and did a neat little improv like game. We were instructed to take turns "having a conversation" with our partner using only our bodies. For example, my partner would make a gesture, or movement, and I would respond to him as though he had just said something verbally to me by offering him a gesture or movement. After we did that for a while, Bim had us ad sounds to our movement. This made it a lot more fun. And after that, he had us do it one more time, but we were allowed to use words along with our movement, but they were not to be relevant to anything. I must have been hungry because I started talking about food. :) The last thing we did in that class was a little bit of improv. Bim set up a set that involved four walls, and a doorway. One person was to be inside their home, miming a household activity while the other person would approach the house, knock at the door, and eventually attempt to borrow some tea. The exercise was similar to the birthday present game, where each player was supposed to offer a small amount of detail, and then let the other person add. So, slowly, little detail by little detail creating a more detailed and more detailed story. The first two people to do the improv in front of the class were Brita and Pascal. Their story unraveled into a bizzare little love story. Next I stood up and Jeremiah stood up. I took the position of being in the house, and Jeremiah took the position of coming over to borrow tea. It was a weird little story, and Jeremiah's character was rather intrusive. I opened the door, and he just walked in. I slowly closed the door saying something like, "Won't you come in?" That got a good laugh. Anyway, turns out between the two of us improving, that Jeremiah's character was a television repairman. When I told him about the problems I was having with my television, he told me he could fix it, and proceeded to start kicking the the television set. I kicked him out of my house after that. It wasn't the greatest improv, but what I wanted to make sure of was that it had a unmistakeable ending. The two other improv pieces never really ended, and the audience was at a loss as to when to clap. The final piece invoved Annette and Denise. Their improv piece was pretty surreal. It had something to do with a lost cat. Anyway, what I rememeber most was Bim telling them that they shouldn't have used their actuall names in the improv--which they did.

The next class I had was the Movement class at 11:30 with Hellen. Today's theme seemed to be Anatomical and Spacial Awareness. She had us start out by walking around the room. Hellen does a lot of talking during her class. It is mostly asking us questions about how we are feeling--questions we are to answer internally as we move about. As we walked around the room, she had us once again go over each of our body parts one at a time, asking us to observe and be aware of each pody part, how they move, and where they connect to other parts, how they feel, how long or short they are, etc. After that she had us all line up at one end of the room. And move across the floor, telling us to be aware of every part of our bodies moving. She had us move forward several times, walking the entire length of the room, and then the length of the room walking backwards, and then combinations of forward and backward. Then she had us move sideways from one end of the room to the other. Moving sideways was weird because you have to decide how you are going to move your feet. There are several possiblities. After we had explored moving across the floor in various methods, she had us pick a partner, and stand across the room from our partner and walk towards our partner (until you are nose to nose) and then walk backwards. Then she had us walk towards our partners, always trying to maintain eye contact, in as many combinations of forward/backward/sideways as we could come up with. Again, Hellen throughout these exercises is constantly asking us to think about what we are doing. She is asking questions like, how does one approach feel different from another, what kind of emotions does it create. It was interesting to view the different theatrical effects of walking towards, and away from a person in various methods. For the next part of the class, we explored levels. She had us first climb up the railing (thats the name I am giving the wooden thing against the wall that you can climb up, and almost touch the ceiling) and get as high as we could, and have a good look around, and then she had us climb back down and get as low on the floor as possible, and think about how that view was different, what feelings did we get. Then she had us move across the floor as low as possible, finding at least six different ways to move in a low position across the floor, and then we had to come back using another six different ways again. Then she had us go back up the railing, and get as high as we could, again, and then back down to the floor, where she had us go across the floor, trying to at as high of a level as possible, again choosing six different methods of moving across the floor, but in a high level this time. This was an interesting experience. It helped me realize the emotion behind being low, and being high. There is definitely something powerful about being high up, and something sluggish about being down low. I suspect the audience would sense those emotions too. Something Hellen pointed out was that for the audience to understand what we are feeling, we have to be clear about what we are experiencing, and project it to them. For the next part of the class, we got picked another partner, and started working on the space between yourself and another body. First she had us stand as close as possible to our partner without touching them. Then she had us move around our partner, trying to keep every body part as close to your partner as possible without actually touching them. Then Hellen had us begin to move apart, but continueing to do what we were doing, moving around each other, so to speak. It instantly became difficult. What I tried to do is look across at my partner, and try to project my body around her, and move as though I was right next to her, even though there were several feet between us. After we had moved apart as far as we could, Hellen had us come back together, still moving the whole time, so that when we got back together, we should have fit just like two puzzle pieces. Very neat experience. After that, we had a brief discussion about personal space. People talked about what it was like to have someone that close to you, and eventually the subject of the personal bubble came up. Of course, there are all kinds of social, and psychological definitions about personal space. Most people associate personal space with intimacy. But Hellen wanted us to put that all aside, and have one simple definition of personal space or the bubble, as the range your body can move about physically. So at this point she had us explore our personal bubble, moving about, stretching as far as we could, finding the limits of our personal space (of course, we were required to have at least one foot solid on the floor while we did this.) Next we explored a lot of mind roleplaying where we made our personal bubbles grow, giving them a texture that we could see, and making them grow so big that it filled the entire room. And then making the bubble shrink, until it was just about to touch your skin (causing people to not be able to move.) Then she had us move around the room, experiencing what it was like to interact with others, overlapping the bubbles, and examining the space between other people's bubbles and our own. Basically she was also trying to get us to see if we could sense how big other's bubbles were. Then for the final part, she had us get with another partner, and stand across the room from them, like before, and move towards them, but this time having our bubbles with us, and stopping when you believed that your bubble touched the surface of your partner's bubble. Then she had us move into each other's bubble, and then out of each other's bubble... it all got a little confusing at the end there, but it was an interesting experience never the less. After that, she gave us a written homework assignment where we have to write about our thoughts on anatomical, and posture/movement awareness, our thoughts on how levels change the emotion, and about the personal space bubble thing. The class ended as it usually does with Hellen, as she has us all sit down, and close our eyes, as she talks about what we did in the class today. I had to go up to Hellen after class and thank her for always ending the way she does. It really helps me to remember everything that has happened over the class period. She was grateful for the comment.

Next was lunch time. I had my usual ham and cheese sandwhiches, carrots, and apple, and lots of water. My back was really hurting at this point from whatever I did to it, so I asked Merlin if he would play hacky sack with me (he always has a hackysack on him.) I am the better hacky-sack player in the group, and people always seem alarmed when they see me make some nice long runs, or bust out a trick or two. Merlin said he was really surprised to see a guy my size be able to hack that well. The reason I wanted to play hacky sack was because it always helps me loosen up my back, if it is in pain. I knew that after lunch it would be my scheduled time to be in Aerial, which means that I needed to find a place to go and do my conditioning. I was also feeling like I needed help with my conditioning, so I found Kay and asked her if she could help me set up a program for myself. She said she would, but she couldn't come help me right away, but would be there within half an hour. So I went to the South Wing, and had the room mostly all to myself. There I did a quick warm-up (running and jumping jacks) and then started my stretching. I stretched for a good 45 minutes before Kay showed up. I am actually starting to notice a little bit of change in my flexibility. But its hard to say. A lot of it depends on the time of day, and how warm I am. When Kay showed up, she and I basically sat down and went over my fitness manual that we have, and she talked about different stretches with me while I took notes. She also let me know what the spelling for Pilates was. I think I misspelled it in my previous entry, which would explain why I couldn't find anything online about it. She was very encouraging. She even offered to join me early in the mornings to run with me. I may take her up on that. She is a student teacher there. She is only 22 years old--very friendly, kind of a silly girl, but she knows a lot about stretching and exercise. After that, she and I hung out in the student room and drank tea while we waited for the Acro class to start at 4:00.

Acro was better than I thought it would be. I immediately told Nikki the teacher that I didn't think I would be able to do anything in the class today because the way my back was feeling. She asked me to do the warm up at least (which would involve some stretching--which she thought might help.) So I agreed to participate in the class. The warm-up and stretching did help loosen up my back, and I was able to participate in MOST of the class. We started with learning a funny little hop jump, and also a kick thing.... to hard to describe, but they were fairly easy to learn. Next we worked on some tumbling. I of course shy away from the class at this point. But once the class was into doing their forward rolls, and backward rolls, Nikki pulled me to the side and talked to me about my forward rolls. I explained to her my paranoia about snapping my neck in two if I land on it, and she was very understanding. So, taking my suggestion, she had me go over to these two mats, both very thick, one thicker than the other. She wanted me to stand on the thicker one, and do a forward roll onto the thinner/lower one. I didn't do one right away, but after she left me there, I finally did ONE forward roll. Boy was it ugly. And I'm sure had it not been for the mat being big and soft, I would have hurt my neck. But at least I went through the action. The next part of the class was doing cartwheels. Again, I am a complete idiot when it comes to doing these. But I found myself a mat off to the side and worked on my cartwheels. I probably did about 5 of them, but I wouldn't call them carthwheels. It's just me, putting my hands on the floor, and hopping my feet over. Next we did some acro balance. This is something I enjoy a little more. We reviewed the ones we did in the first class. I got to fly on Elee (a guy) by standing on his thighs and locking arms with him while we each leaned out. It was hard because we both had sweaty hands. There is chalk to use in the room, but it goes away pretty quick--you have to keep using it. After that, we did one more acro move, that involved one person laying on the floor, and the other person flying above them, pelvis balanced on their feet (this is a very common acro balance move--seen on the plaza almost every saturday!) I stayed away from this one, since my back was still hurting. At the end of class, we had our basic cool down stretching, and then Nikki gave us our first homework assignement. We are to get into groups of 3-4 and choreograph a acro balance routine (using the material we have learned so far) over the next couple of practice sessions. It will be interesting to see what comes of it.

After the Acro class was over, we had a scheduled E&M circuit period of 1/2 an hour (from 5:45 to 6:15.) I decided that I would do mine for an hour. I made this my first official juggling circuit. I did my general 3-5 clubs juggling circuit. I have my circuits set up so that I do sets of numbers of throws for each trick. For example, with 4 club doubles, I have to do it for 10 minutes, and I have to juggle the four clubs for 50 throws and stop without dropping. Each time I do that, I put a tick in my notes. For some of my circuit the number of throws per set was to high, in some it was too low. For example, my four clubs doubles was a bit too low, and I was able to juggle 4 clubs for 50 throws 19 times in those 10 minutes. So I need to increase it to like 75 or something. I will probably set up a seperate page to monitor my juggling circuit progress.

The ride home was nice. It was dark. This was the first time I rode my bike home at night. Good thing I have lights on my bike. :) I did a quick stretch getting off my bike, and headed into the house. Wrote in my journal for a while, then realized how tired I was, and went to bed early. Got up this morning, and finished my journal. Now its time to get ready for my next day.

At 9:30, I was scheduled to go for Aerial, but of course, I went off on my own, instead to do my exercising. I started off by running the same circuit we ran yesterday morning, though this time I did it a bit slower, at my own pace, but still at a good enough pace that I got a good workout. The circuit is basically running for a while and stopping at specific areas or "stations" and doing things like jumping jacks, high skipping back and forth, etc. After I ran my circuit, I did about 20 minutes of stretching. Then I realized my body was getting cold, because I was outside in the shade on hard cement, trying to stretch. I complained later to Charlie about it, and he said anytime I am doing my own exercise in place of Aerial, that I can sneak into one of the classrooms and use a mat in one of the corners. Since I was cold, I decided to spend most of the rest of my time walking. It felt good to walk, but unfortunately, it aided in my thinking process. You know how when you are doing a monotoneous activity, and your brain has nothing left to do but think about what is going on? Well, such was the case for me, and my depression set in even more--it really made me have a bad day. Mental note: I need to learn to keep my personal, emotional stuff separated from my training. After my walk, I did another quick stretch, to get ready for my next class.

My next class was E&M. Today Rod gave us our assignment with our object. He started out by talking briefly about the project, and then he played the song for us. Its a fun song, and I can see how it will be great for a juggling piece. But I couldn't help but wonder if we will be tearing our hair out, especially on the day of the performance, when we get to sit and watch 30 people perform a piece to the SAME music! He talked a little about what our options were. He said we could just make this a movement piece, manipulating our object, or we could just use the 3 minutes of music to show off as many forms of maniplation as possible, or we could create a more theatrical piece, and perhaps tell some kind of story. I of course want to create a more theatrical piece. My object is a plastic, yellow watering can (I will put a picture of it up in the gallery later) and I want to do a piece about an old man who has gone out to water his plants. And when he thinks nobody is watching, he starts to play with his watering can. After a while, the manipulations get bigger, and wilder, and he seems to forget about the fact that he is old, and has back problems... then at the end of the music, he remembers his back problems, and goes back to being an old man, and wobbles off stage. We shall see how it turns out. We spent the entire class time just working with our object some more, and trying to come up with new ways of manipulating them. This reminds me of when Silas was in DelArte and he had to come up with "magic moments" with an object. One trick I came up with today started with me holding my object by it's long neck, and flipping it like a club, until the bottom of it lands flat on the back of the same hand that threw it. Then, I pull my hand out from under it, moving into position to grab it by the handle. Then holding it at the handle, I give it a nice flip again, and it lands balanced on its thin spout on my hand. This was the one that I demonstrated for the class at the end of the class. One thing I remember, Rod came up to me in the middle of class and asked me if I had worked with my object before. I told him that no, I had found it the day after he gave us the assignment. He was either impressed with the neat tricks I am coming up with so easily with this object, or he suspects that I have had this object among my list of props for a while. Hopefully he believed me.

After E&M class it was lunch time from 1:00-2:00pm. I had my usual, sandwhiches, carrots, an orange and an apple. I am eating much healthier right now. Tommorow I need to make myself something other than sandwhiches though. I might make some pasta and brocoli.

After lunch it was time for acro practice from 2:00-3:15. We went into the gym and pulled out the huge mats, rolling them out. They are very nice mats, nice and soft. Softer than the mats in the closet of Gist 102. And they roll up since they are very long. For some reason there was a screw-up in the scheduling and no student teacher showed up to supervise the acro practice session. But Pascal took some initiative, and started a warm up. After we got warmed up and stretched a bit, I went to work on my forward rolls. I managed to squeek out 3 decent looking forward rolls (that didn't hurt my neck.) But when I tried to do more, I just couldn't bring myself to do it anymore. Partly my knees were hurting, and I just needed to rest for a while. Being disapointed in myself, I decided to just go sit down and relax in the back of the room and watch everyone else. As I was walking to the back, I saw Brita doing some stretching on a mat. I sat down on a mat next to here, where I could rest with my back to the wall. I remember Brita saying earlier that day that she was miserable, and in pain because she had started her period. She didn't look too happy, so I offered her a massage. Which she eagerly accepted. I ended up spending the rest of the class time giving her a massage that covered her back, neck shoulders, arms, hands, legs, and feet. There are only a few things in my life that I know I am good at, and one of them is giving massages. She told me she realy enjoyed it, and it was exactly what she needed on such a bad day. I'm glad I was able to make her feel better.

After acro practice we headed over to Studio 2 for our Movement Technique class. This class is being taught by a young girl who's name is Tilly. She is actually a Circomedia graduate, who spent a couple of years performing, and is back to teach this class. She described her class as a specialty movement class for physical theatre based on teachings from the methods of Jacques Lecoq. Tilly talked briefly about the Lecoq method, and how it focuses on creating the physical shape on the outside to represnt the emotional state of the performer (or something like that) In other words, I think, that instead of feeling the emotion, and then trying to create a shape after feeling the emotion, the performer, understands what forms, and shapes represents what emotions and learns the skill of creating those shapes. I'm sure I don't completely understand what she meant by it, but I will probably learn more as I go. Her class seemed kinda short. She had us learn some movement. She described the movement like the movement of a kind of single celled organizm, or something like that. She basically taught us a couple of moves that involved a wave moving through the entire body, starting from the knees, and moving through to the head. Kinda like a snake, or some seaweed or something. Then she taught us some kind of flower opening and closing move. My knees were bothering me at this point, so it was being painful to work on these moves. I'm sure I will benefit from this class in the long run, but at the time, I just wanted to go home.

As soon as the class was over, I discovered that I was in luck. We were scheduled for one final class of "Devising" but aparently the "Devising" period is like an open time to work on projects that are presented on Friday. And since we don't have anything to prepare for Friday, I had the option to go home. Which I did.

Now I am just going to sit at home and relax! Tommorow should be a better day.

After warm-up it was time for Acro. There was some confusion about when we were supposed to perform our Acro routine that we were supposed to get together in groups and choreograph. Apparently we were supposed to be ready for that very class. Which for me was bad, because I hadn't even found a group yet. But as it turns out, it didn't really matter so much because I had an appointment in the morning to get my second Hepatitus B shot at 10:20am. So 10 minutes into the class, I had to leave anyhow. So in a way it all worked out. Had I actually been in a group, they wouldn't have been able to perform. Right as I was leaving Nikki was starting to teach people how to do handstands. Handstands fall into the forward roll/cartwheel category of things I have a real hard time with, so it kinda sucked that I was missing that lesson.

After I left Acro, I hopped on my bike and headed down the hill to where I live. Put the bike, and my bag in the apartment, and walked over to the clinic to get my shot (or as they call it here, "injection" or "jab.") I didn't have to wait too long in the waiting room. I must say, I am getting lucky. I haven't had to pay anything for the medical treatment I have gotten so far. England seems to have free medical treatment, and they seem to be treating me like a UK citizen. They even have issued me a NHS card with my own number on it. I understand with this card I can get some very inexpensive dental treatment. I may have to look into that next year when I get my next financial aid check. But for now, I am pretty broke. When I went into the treatment room to get my shot, the woman asked me a bunch of questions, and at one point I told her I wasn't terribly excited about needles. She then took a look at my arm and said, "You have a lovely arm--nice muscles." Which made me wonder. Does it hurt more if you have less muscles? Maybe it was just the compliment, and my ego getting all puffed up that made it not feel so bad. Actually, the feel of the needle going into my arm doesn't bother me so much as just the idea of getting stuck. Oh, well, it was over before I knew it. My next, and final shot will be in 5 months.

After that was over, I headed back to my place. I pulled out my schedule, and realized that technically I didn't have to be back to school until 2:00pm, because my class after Acro was Aerial (which means it is my time to exercise.) This meant that I could stay home and do my exercise during that period, and the period after it was lunchtime. Well, I am ashamed to say I didn't do much exercise while I stayed home. But I felt okay with it. I have gotten TONS of exercise in the last 3 days. So it was okay for me to hang out at home and relax a bit. Plus I knew I had another ride up that hill to get back to school.

I got back to the school around 1:45, and did a little club passing with Oscar. I told him that I was interested in putting together a passing routine with him over the next year. He said he would be into that as well. I suggested that we get started on it soon, and that we could probably make some money this summer busking once we had a good routine down. He was excited at the idea of that. I am hoping that I will be able to spend next summer doing a lot of busking around Europe, in order to make some spare cash and enough to buy my ticket home so that I can continue my MA program at HSU in the fall.

At 2:00 we all crowded into the gym for a 45 minute E&M circuit session. I started to notice that I was not the only one who was writing down the results of their circuit as they went along. I think it is a very good idea to do this. It helps monitor your progress. Today I did something a little different. I started marking down how many times I dropped as well. I am still working out how to document this all. Trying to keep it simple. I should learn to write with my toes, so I can have my notebook at my feet while I juggle! :)

***Quick note: I just recieved the extra webspace I requested from the school, so now I can post a lot scans from the handouts I am given. If you notice a word that is underlined, chances are it is a link to an image of a scanned document. Just click on it to have a look at what I am talking about, and then hit the BACK button on your browser to come back here. I may, if time permits, go back over my diary and input a few links here and there to other documents.

At 2:45 Bim came in and gave us our assignment for the Devising class. We got into groups of 4-5 people and started working on it. I was teamed up with Avita, Brita, Lauren, and Polly. First we agreed that it should be two people who are exploring the house. I suggested (thinking back to a project that Jyl has had us work on) that the characters should change over the process of the piece. I suggested that one character should be very brave and bold, and the other one is very scared and nervous, and that by the end of the piece the characters reverse roles. I think that this was the only suggestion of mine that actually stuck. It is difficult putting together a physical theatre piece with 5 people all wanting to use their ideas, and each person having different opinions about what makes good theatre. I am heavily influenced by Jyl, so I have a problem with having a piece that is mostly silent/mimed having some dialogue pop up in the middle of it, but Avita insisted that her character should talk in the towards the end of the piece. Overall I thought it went over well. Our story went like this. Myself and Avita were lovers walking around in a forest late at night, possibly on a date. I imagined it to be a red-neck date. I was taking my girlfriend out into the woods, and was drinking lots of cheap beer. When we got to the forest of trees, played by Polly, Lauren, and Brita, we stood there looking around. I was drinking my beer, while Avita was looking back at the trees and noticed that they were slowly moving towards us. She then taps me on the shoulder, and I turn to look at her, and she points to the trees. I see nothing, because they have stopped moving, so I go back to drinking my beer. She then sees the trees moving closer, and taps me on the shoulder, I seeming slightly annoyed, turn to see what she wants. She points to the trees, and I look, again not seeing anything because they have stopped moving. So I go back to drinking my beer. Avita notices the trees getting even closer, and runs away scared behind me (without my character noticing.) At this point, the middle tree taps me on the shoulder. Of course, my character thinks that this is his girlfriend, ONCE AGAIN tapping him on the shoulder, and her turns, annoyed, only to be surprised to see a tree in his face, and he runs off terrified. As both of us are running off terrified (behind the screen,) the trees turn into a house, Lauren becomes a door, Polly a coat rack, and Brita a chair. As Avita and I come running back around on stage, we encounter the house, and quickly open the door and enter. The moment we enter the door, our characters have switched roles. Avita is confident, and secure, and I am terrified. I move slowly over to the chair, test it out with my fingertips to test its strength and then go to sit down. The chair moves, and I fall on the floor. I get up, and run over to Avita, terrified, miming to her that the chair moved. At this point she speaks and says, "Its just a chair." and walks over and sits down on it. Me terrified, I move away from the chair backing up towards the coat rack. Suddenly the coat rack grabs me and I freeze, and the chair grabs Avita and she freezes. The coat rack comes alive, and stretches (as though it has been stuck like that for years) and then moves over to me and shapes me in the same shape as the coat rack. The chair does the same, shaping Avita into a chair. Then Polly and Brita see each other, excitedly giving each other a high five, and go running out of the house, excited. I thought it was a good piece, but we needed more time to work on it. Some of the other pieces were good, some were okay. Nothing bad. There was several instances in the other pieces where there was a split focus. One piece in particular was really good... very creepy. They did a good job with sound effects. We didn't use sound effects enough to our advantage.

After the performance was over, I was considering staying and practicing for a while, but was feeling tired, so I decided to go on home. I made plans with Oskar this Sunday to meet and begin working on a routine.

All I can say is thank goodness its Friday!

After the movie, I went looking for a stop watch. I want one for when I do my juggling circuits, and when I go on my fitness circuits as well. I had to go to 3 separate sporting goods stores before I found one. But when I did, I was pleased to discover it was only £7. After spending a good chunk of my day wandering about, which was good because I needed a little bit of exercise, I headed home and just relaxed for the rest of the evening. I also did a bit of work with my web-page. I am currently scanning a bunch of pages from handouts I have been given. Eventually I will get them all posted. Towards the end of the night Tarim and Richard came over (both local jugglers) and myself, Mandy, and her new boyfriend Andy all sat down to watch a movie. Richard had brought over his DVD player and a copy of Spy Kids. I started watching it with them, but got sleepy and went to bed. I wasn't missing anything since I had seen the film before.

Anyway, once I got back, there was only about 20 minutes before our group warm-up was to start, so I didn't really have time to run my circuit. So instead, I spent the time doing a nice long slow stretch. At 9:00, Dave started the group warm-up. Dave is one of the student teachers. He will be leading group warm-ups this week. Unlike Kay, he didn't play a game. We just ran around a bit to get warm, and then did a basic set of stretches. Something he did do different though, he did a short series of exercises with jogging in place between them. He seems like he will be a bit rougher as a warm-up leader than Kay was. But this is a good thing. One thing about his warm-up though, it ended about 10 minutes early, and he told us that if we had E&M next, to do our E&M warm-up, and if you had Permormance next, to do whatever warming up, or stretching you felt necessary. Since I had E&M next I did a quick warm-up of my hands.

E&M class started a little different than usual. Rod told us that from now on, we would be doing a group warm-up. So Rod brings out a red ball, about 7 inches in diameter, rubber, inflatable (though kinda squishy.) And he explains the warm up consists of keeping the ball in the air. This was very much like Jyl's warm up game, in that you only get to hit it once, but in this game we can use any body part to get the ball going. Also in Jyl's version you can get the "ball" after one bounce. In this version the moment the ball touches the floor, it is dead. I have to say I like Jyl's version of the game better, its much more challenging than this one. However, this warm-up is still fun. Our best run was about 65 hits I think. We should have easily hit 100. I'm sure we will hit a 100 next time. After the warm-up we got down to practicing with our objects for the presentation we have on Friday. I have been giving my piece some thought. I am using a watering can for my object, and I want to do a bit about an old man who comes out to water his plants, and when no water comes out, he starts to manipulate his watering can. I am still working out the details. Denise is supposed to make me a copy of the music so that I can work on it with the music. Which reminds me, I need to dig up my old portable tape player and see if the batteries in it are still good. Halfway into the class, Rod wanted to talk to us about the difference between doing a piece that does or does not break the 4th wall. I was surprised to discover that in a group of about 15 people, there were only about 4 of us who knew what he meant by breaking the 4th wall. It makes me wonder when I learned that concept. I have only been in theatre for a few years now, but it seems I knew what that meant before I got into theatre. Oh well. I am definitely going to do this piece without breaking the 4th wall. As far as juggling goes, I think the best time to break the fourth wall is if you are doing some kind of street show, and need audience participation.

After E&M class I went to my Performance class. We started off, as usual with Zip Zap Kaboom! Then we got into groups of 2 and played the hand slapping game. I am getting better at the handslapping game. We are supposed to maintain eye contact with the person who is trying to slap your hands. But I have figured out I can keep looking at the persons eye and still get a good look at their hands in my lower vision field. After those two games as a warm-up, Bim started talking about responding to something on stage. He used the example of hearing a knock at the door, and using your response to it to create different levels of importance of the knocking. Then he had us do this exercise. First he asked us to mime a task that uses our whole body. I chose digging with a shovel and tossing the shovel full of dirt behind my left shoulder. He had us do this over and over, and while we did our task, he brought out this little hand drum, and beat on it, having us respond differently each time he hit it. The first time he hit it, he wanted us to just barely hear it. The second time he hit the dum, he wanted us to notice the sound, but not feel that it is important. So for example, in this case, I would stop my digging for just a moment, acknowledge the sound, and then go back to digging. For the third time, he wanted us to notice the sound, and wonder what it was. For the fourth one, he wanted us to notice it, wonder what it is, and then realize what it is. For the fith one, he wanted us to hear it, but deny that it actually is happening. And for the last one, we were to know what it is, and be terrified of it. After the whole class had gone through this exercise a couple of times, he split the class into two so that while one half of the class did the exercise, the other half could watch and make comments. Then of course we switched. After that exercise was over, we finished off the class with an improv exercise. Bim set up the room again with chairs and other objects to create a room. Then he explained the nature of the improv exercise. We were to imagine that we had recieved a fancy invitation to some kind of party/meeting from the Cultural Center of Japan (or something like that) and when we got to the building and arrive at the reception, we are instructed to go up to this one room, and wait for Mr. Agasaki. And we would wander up to the room, and find that Mr. Agasaki was not there yet, but would find the room had many things to examine in it. On one end of the room there was a huge abstract painting, in the middle of the room there was this bizzare sculpture, hanging from the cieling was a huge chandalier (sp?) and on one end of the room there was a giant window overlooking a beautiful garden, and in the far corner, there was a small set-up with exotic looking food. The room has a very formal feel about it. So the way the improv works, each person arrives in the room, one at a time, each taking time to explore the room, and each other. But each person believes they are a candidate for some unknown job, and each of them is waiting for Mr. Agasaki to show up (which he never does.) So the basic exercise was to explore the level of tension bening built by all these characters showing up, one at a time in a room, who do not know why they are there, and are trying to pass the time while waiting for Mr. Agasaki with some small talk, and just looking around the room. Bim stopped the improv several times to point out aspects mostly of composition. It was also interesting to watch it and try to figure out when is the best time for another person to walk into the door. It was a bizzare little exercise to say the least.

After Performance, it was lunchtime. I ate my lunch on the grass. There was this very cool dog hanging out. The dog was kinda weird. It was a sheep hearding type dog, very skittish, one minute it was being friendly, the next minute it was trying to nip at you. Anyway, after I ate, I picked up my clubs and started to juggle. The dog went crazy. He kept trying to jump up in the air and grab one of my clubs, which was making me crack up. Everyone else was laughing too. And everytime I dropped a club, the dog would grab it in its mouth and toss it on the floor in front of me. It was obvious that the dog liked playing fetch, so noticing that he wasn't doing any damage to the clubs, I decided to play with him, and tossed my club far away. Sure enough the dog went after the club and brought it right back to me. We did this a few times, and then as an experiment, I wanted to see what the dog would do if I threw two clubs at the same time in opposite directions. The dog of course only went after one, never even saw the second club. The second club landed near Lyndle who picked it up. He obviously wanted to have a go at tossing a club for the dog too. But for some reason, he decided to try and fake the dog out by pretending to throw the club, but actually holding onto it and not letting go. Somehow he managed instead to toss the club right into the ground hard enough to break the wooden dowel inside the club. So now I am down one more club. I started out with 9 of these clubs. I lost two on the second day of our bicycle trip across England, and now this one is broken. :( The important thing is that I still have enough for myself (I doubt I will be doing more than 6 clubs alone.) But it sucks that I can do any numbers passing now with my clubs. The school has a whole box full of clubs we can use, but I don't really like their clubs. Lyndel felt really bad, and offered to replace it. Since the clubs are allready old, and I have dropped them hundreds of thousands of times on hard concrete, I told him that if I get a chance to order new clubs, he can pay for half of one of the clubs I order. After that, I had a chance to pass clubs with Oskar. I also played a little hackysack with Merlin.

After lunch, we all went into Studio 2 for Dip Notes. Usually Rod is there for Dip Notes, but for some reason nobody was showing up. So we were just lounging around. Oskar and I eventually started passing clubs, and then Annette jumped in with us and we did a couple of three person patterns. Eventually Bim showed up and explained that there was some kind of confusion about what was supposed to happen during this hour. He also told us that one of the reasons for this Dip Notes session was so that the individual instructors could come in and give a talk about careers in the certain fields of circus arts. So Mike, the Aerial instructor came in and gave a talk about what it was like to find work as an Aerialist. As I am not that interested in Aerial, I was not that interested in what he had to say. Though it was interesting hearing some of his stories about working for various jobs in the circus.

After that session was over, it was time for a scheduled hour of E&M circuits. I have for the past few days been working on a little system for my circuits, and so I was all ready to go for this hour session. I was going to work on clubs in sections of 10 minutes each. So when I got to the room, I went straight to work. Had my little stop watch there going, putting marks in my book after each run, etc. when suddenly the student teachers told us that we were going to have a group warm up and then the circuits session would be divided up into 3 15 minute session, and for each session we would do one of each prop (balls, clubs, rings.) This put a dent in my plans, and I was frustrated at first. I went ahead and did it their way, and didn't even bother recording any of my throws from that session. After giving it some thought, I realize I can still make my system work in times like that when they want to control the times, and the props used. I will also have plenty of time in the evenings to do serious circuits that I have designed.

After E&M circuits, it was time for an hour of Acro practice. There was no teacher, or teacher trainer in the room for the acro practice session, so it was a little disorganized. That was fine with me, though, because I was feeling tired. I spent most of my time doing some long slow stretches on a mat in the back of the room. Eventually I did some acro balance with Annette.

After the acro practice hour was over, it was the end of our day, and we could go home. Most people did go home. But I decided to stay for an extra hour and a half to work on my juggling circuit. Its amazing what these circuits can do for your juggling. I can already see a vast improvement in my throws.

The bike ride home was nice. It was dark again. At 7:30 at night, there doesn't seem to be much traffic on the road, which is nice. I got home and Mandy asked me if I wanted to go to the local juggling club meeting. I had to decline. I was exhausted.

First visit to the doctor: Perscribed desloratadine 5 mg pills. Instructed to take one a day. (No affect at all.)

Second visit to the doctor: Perscribed Flucloxacillin 500mg pills. Instructed to take two right away, and then 4 a day. (Results, skin drier, but rash getting larger)

Third visit to the doctor: Perscribed Penicillin VK 250mg pills and Deltacortril Enteric 5 mg pills. Instructed to take one, four times a day of the first, and six all at once, once a day of the second.

Money I have spent so far on drugs: about £31 (equal to about 3 weeks worth of groceries!)

*sigh*

I am going to take all my pills, wait an hour, have some lunch, and then head up to Circomedia, and if nothing else hang out and watch the presentations.

Kay came over around 2:30 and had picked up some ice-cream on the way over here. We had planned on going to the video store to get a video, but since it was raining we checked out Mandy's collection of videos, and ended up watching "Meet Joe Black." It was nice hanging out with Kay. We talked a lot about theatre, circus arts, and trying to figure out what a person should do when they "grow up." I learned a valuable lesson today. When an English person comes for a visit, you MUST have milk in the house for the tea!! :)

When I got to school, the gym opened up a little earlier than usual, so I went inside and did a bit of jogging around inside of it, then did some stretching. After that I did a quick session of juggling. I hadn't juggled in days. It felt good. I am also noticing that all my circuit time with working on my triples is paying off. I can now throw almost a perfect 3 club triple spin flash every time. Now I just need to work on my pirouhettes (sp?) so I can do one while those three clubs are up in the air.

The warm up was lead by Charolette the teacher trainer (TT.) We didn't play any games, she just had us run around inside the gym to warm up, and then she took us through some different stretches and exercises. It seemed like she hadn't really prepared for the warm-up. She seemed to pull these exercises out of her head, where Kay and David both had notes with them and followed a predetermined routine. Its not that Charolette did a bad job, but I think it helps to plan ahead.

My next class was E&M. We started with our usual warm-up of hitting the red ball around. The last time I was in E&M was last Monday, and the record we had hit was about 68 hits. And apparently they had hit it 89 times on Thursday when I wasn't there. On our first, and only attempt today we were going strong. At about 120 hits, Rod kicked me out of the game. Then shortly after that he kicked out Oskar, and then he kicked out Merlin. After that it started to loose control, and they dropped at 194. Not bad. Of course, I wasn't 100 percent content with that run because twice there was an incident within those 194 hits where someone hit the ball twice in a row. That is supposed to be a "no no." But it was let go. Today we worked with clubs. The focus of the lesson was "body throws." We started off with the under the leg throw. Now for a moment, I was wondering if it would be pointless for me to be at a lesson like this. I mean, after all, I can do under the leg throws, quite solid allready. But I soon realized that there is always something about any trick that you can add to it, to make it harder. Anyway, first he had us just do a basic under the leg throw. And then we talked about it. He gave us notes about keeping the back straight, and pointing the toe when you lift the foot. He also pointed out by example that Jodie lifted her leg straight out without bending her knee, while Oskay bent his knee when lifting his leg--and that both ways are acceptable. Since I prefere to bend my knee when I lift my leg for an under the leg toss, I decided to keep with my own style, and add the toe pointing that Rod suggested. Of course, it didn't take long for me to figure out how to point my toe while I toss a club under my leg. So I decided to go on to learning something that is much, much harder. Something Oskar can do. It is the most strenuous juggling trick. Tossing every club under a leg while you juggle. You basically have to be jumping from leg to leg while alternating each leg that your lift. It wears you out very quick. While Rod was talking about this trick, he brought up a very important thing that I have been thinking about a lot. Its something I am completely guilty of. He said that the biggest problem jugglers have is that when they encounter something that doesn't come easily (like this trick) they give it a go for a few minutes, and then decide they will come back to it later. Rod said that this is the wrong way to approach it. You HAVE to dedicate some time to it. That is why we do our circuits. So now I am determined to get this "ever club under a leg" trick by the end of this week. Next we worked on back crosses. Oh, how I have suffered over the years with backcrosses. It was nice to hear that Rod too had spent several years struggling with them. He said they are the most practiced tricks in juggling. I started working on mine and was making little progress as usual. Then David, one of the TTs came up to me and gave me some pointers, telling me that my tosses were too low. That seemed to help a little. Then eventually Rod came up to me and suggested that I work on double spins for a while. So I spent the rest of that section working on trying to do backcrosses with double spins. My best run was 3 throws. Next we worked on pirouettes. He suggested starting with just one club. I have briefly worked on pirouettes before, but always been lazy about working on them, and never making much progress. In the short time we worked on them I was able to make several successful ones with just one club, but never gave two clubs a try. Oskar was off over in the far end of the room working on three club pirouettes. Its amazing, and inspiring to watch him juggle. I'm so glad there is someone at this school better than me--pushing me. When Dave came up to me to help me with my pirouettes, he watched me for a while, then told me that my tosses were fine, but my pirouettes were crap. :) I had to laugh. I have never been graceful on my feet. He showed me his technique for doing a pirouette by crossing his right foot over his left, and then using a twisting motion to turn his body. I tried it, but got tangled up as I came out of it. I also still get dizzy. I will have to experiment with it some more and work on it. I know I can toss a beautiful 3 club triple flash right now, so if I could just get my pirouettes down, I feel like I could do what Oskar is doing! Next we worked on throwing clubs over our heads. I have worked a lot on overhead throws, so I didn't really learn anything new with that throw. When Rod came and watched me, he said I had them dow good, and he could tell because my wrists are relaxed when I make the tosses. At the end of class, Rod talked briefly about us adding these new throws into our circuits. He also mentioned that on Thursday and the next Monday we will have a visit from Haggis Mcleod (who was the guest performer at Lodi recently.) Haggis used to be the full time partner of Charlie Dancey, the guy who wrote two of the most famous juggling books ever written, "The Encyclopedia of Ball Tricks," and "The Club Juggling Compendium." Haggis will be working with us on unicycling, stilt walking, and walking on those big spheres. It sounds like fun.

The next class was Performance class with Bim. We started off with an interesting tag game that they learned last week while I was away. The way it works is one person is "it" and is trying to tag people. However, if you are about to be tagged, you can call out a person's name in the room, and if you manage to call that name out before the person physically touches you, then the person who's name was called out becomes "it." And they try to tag people. If you don't manage to call someone's name out, and get tagged, then you are "it." Also, if you get physically tagged and become "it" you loose a "life." If you loose a "life" twice, you are out of the game. The interesting part about this game is that you don't do much running, and also, it can be difficult because you are just standing there, listening, watching, and suddenly a name is called out, and it happens to be a person standing right next to, or behind you. You have to be quick--not physically (thought it helps) but mentally. Around when half the class was out of the game, he had the people who were out hold hands and make a line, and slowly begin to crown around the people in the room, making their playing feild smaller and smaller. After our warm-up game ended, Bim had us all sit down and he talked to us about what were were going to do next. The rest of the class period we would spend working with neutral masks. He asked if anyone in the room had worked with neutral masks. I was the only person to raise my hand. When he brought out the masks I noticed that they were all identical, but they each had lips, a nose, eyebrows, and eye holes. I thought this was strange, since Jyl's neutral masks have only one feature, and those are the eyeholes. To me it seemed that these masks were not neutral. Though they had no obvious expression on their face, just the fact that they had noses, and lips and eyebrows to me made them less of neutral masks than the one's Jyl uses. Anyhow, Bim had us go up to the front of the class in groups of three and put on the masks and just stand there. While the three people stood with the masks on, the class observed, making comments. Bim asked us questions about their posture. Questions like who looked the weakest, or the strongest, or the most neutral. Then Bim would give the three standing there some instructions for how to make themselves look more neutral. Next he had them walk around the room in their neutral state, and we made observations about them. It was interesting to see the various ways people walk. Some swing their arms. Some lead with their hips. Some lead with their chest. It was very interesting. I had originally asked to be excluded from this exercise because of not wanting to put a mask because of fear of my face reacting to it, but after hearing all the feedback he was giving everyone, I found myself wanting to get similar feedback, so I asked Bim if I could give it a try anyway, and fortunately he had a fourth mask that had not been used yet, and so it wasn't sweaty (usually I wouldn't care, but this thing with my face was horrible, and I didn't want to take any chances.) So after I had the chance to stand up there and go through the process, I grabbed my notebook and wrote down the feedback that Bim gave me. He said that I had a fantastic presence on the stage because of my size. He said that my arm hung a little further away from my body than the others, but there was nothing I could do about that because I have a large chest. He also said I had a little too wide of a stance, that I need to keep it at hip width. He also said that when I walked I undulated a bit, but it improved when he gave me the instruction to have somewhere to go--so I was more focuse in a direction. It was an interesting class. I expected us to do more character stuff, like in Jyl's class when we work with the neutral masks. But today all we did was stand, and walk in a neutral character.

Next was lunch. We had to rush over to the gym because Rod was giving a talk about pursuing juggling as a profession. He said that he has been making a living of being a juggler for ten years now. That must be awesome--if nothing else to be able to tell people when they ask you what you do for a living! He mentioned the benefits of juggling as opposed to trapeze. Juggling is very portable. All you need is a space, preferably where there is no wind, rain, etc. Nice high ceilings are a plus, but not always necessary. With trapeze, you have to be able to rig the equipment, and that is very limiting. He also mentioned that one of the plus sides to juggling is that there are so many possible jobs. With juggling you could work in a circus, work on a boat, work with a traveling troupe, you could teach, you could do clubs, you could do stand-up comedy (with juggling,) and many other options. Whereas with trapeze, you are again limited to either circus work, or teaching at a circus arts school. The downside to juggling is that in the circus, jugglers are on the low end of the totem pole. Trapeze artists are considered the highest, and everything else is built up around the trapeze act. The other downside to juggling, he said was that there is a lot of competition in the world of juggling. And also, he mentioned that of any of the circus arts, juggling requires the most amount of practice time.

The talk was short. These talks they are giving us are a way to help guide us in the direction of the two specialties that we choose in December. Its not like I needed any assistance deciding I want to pick juggling as one of my two specialties. Oh... I also found out that Rod is going to be my tutor. Which means I will have sessions where I sit down with him talk about my progress and where I want to go, etc. Also, after the talk he gave I went up to him and mentioned to him that Oskar and I want to work on a routine together, and we wanted to know if he would coach us. He said he would be glad to, and told me when he is usually around the help out. He also said that in time, there will be time set aside in class time where we can work on that routine.

After lunch it was time for the second session of First Aide. The instructor, who's name is escaping me at the moment, reviewed what we went over in the last class--the CPR stuff. Then he went on to talk about injuries, how to prevent them, and how to deal with them. Here are the notes I took:

Minor Injuries: Best way to treat an injury is prevention.

Best way to prevent injuries: be careful, stay focused, No alcohol or drugs during practice, be well rested, warm up physically and mentally before practice, spotting, check equipment, proper clothing, 3 or more people training together, moderation (listen to your body,) drink 2-3 litres of water a day, and keep warm.

Most common Injuries:

Strain: overworked muscle

Sprane: injury to a ligament

breaks: any sort of damage to bones

fracture: medical term for a break

Types of broken bones:

• Greenstick (happens to younger people up to 17 years old, bones bend on one side, break on the other side--fast healing time)

• Shear Snap: bones break smooth--no jagged edges... they either stay together or override each other.

• Comminuted Break: Nasty--shattering of the bones, several pieces... can puncture skin.

What to do about a break: Splint--use two sticks and cloth to stabalize joints on either side of the break. Take to the hospital.

R.I.C.E. Rest, Ice (10-15 minutes every hour), Compression, Elevation.

Proprioception: The perception of where your joints are.

Injuries cause you to loose proprioception.

Nose injuries

How to stop a nose bleed: Tip head forward, pinch nose at nostril for 10 minutes.

(end of notes)

After that class was over, we had a short break, and then it was time for an hour session of E&M circuits. I did a quick 10 minute warm-up with three club triples (and recorded them in my book.) Then I decided I would spend some time working on the double spin backcrosses I was only able to get three throws of earlier in class. I wanted to document this circuit in my book, but realized since I could only make about 3 throws, I would spend more time writing in the book then actually juggling. So I decided to document how much time I spent on it, and also document what my best run was. Eventually when I can get 30-50 throws, I will go back to the standard way of documenting it. I am pleased to say my best run of three club double spin backcrosses today was 7 throws. I think by the end of this week, I should be able to get up to 20 easily. For the last half of the circuit time I worked on 5 club double spin cascade. I did this for about 25 minutes, with varying success at a goal of 30 tosses. Then I decided to see if I could get a nice long run. Unfortunately my best run of 5 clubs today was only 60 throws. For fun, at the end, Oskar and I did a few rounds of five ball endurance. I won each of the rounds.

Next we had Acro practice. I wasn't able to stay for this class because I had to get back to town for my, hopefully, final doctor's appointment. Before I left, though, I met with my acro group and we made plans to practice the following day after school.

The doctor was pleased to see my face clearing up. She told me to keep taking the medicine until it either runs out, or I feel 100 percent sure that this alergic reaction is gone. I asked the doctor about something my mom had said to me about her hearing about some guy who had a similar reaction from entering a highly physically strenuous program. The doctor said that people do have responses like that, but because mine was only on my face, and not other parts of my body, she feels that it was caused by something else. It will remain a mystery. But I can't help but look around now, at the things I come in contact with and wonder.

Today is Tuesday, and on Tuesdays we start 15 minutes earlier than any of the other days. Which is no problem for me, considering I am usually at school anywhere from 1/2 an hour to an hour before school starts. However, Charolette, it seems, must have forgotten that because she arrived at 9:00AM and we only got about a 15 minute warm up this morning. Oh well. It didn't matter much for me, because the next two classes for me were the conditioning classes.

The conditioning classes were good. Its amazing how warmed up I got over those two classes. What amazes me most is how Lizz can make an exercise ten times harder by making sure that your body is in proper position. I am really starting to benefit from her class. I am seeing what I need to work on. Also, I feel like my flexibility is getting better. Its going to be a slow process, but I am up for it.

After my two sessions of the conditioning class, I have a very long break. Tuesdays are nice that way. I went upstairs to the student room and ate my lunch, because it was just too darn wet and cold outside. Jeremiah brought in some kung-fu video--very bizzare. After hanging out in the student room, and eating my lunch, I headed down to the covered area in front of the gym to work on my backcrosses until the Aerial class got out, so I could spend the rest of my break in there. Once the Aerial class got out, I went in and finished my break in there, working on my backcrosses some more, and then some 5 club cascade stuff.

At 2:00pm it was time for E&M practice for an hour. I had allready been juggling for an hour and a half, so I just kept at it. I am really starting to make progress on my 4 club triples. They are looking nice. At 3:00pm it was time to go to our second massage class.

The massage class was nice. Unfortunately for my massage partner, I had just spent 2.5 hours doing some serious juggling, so I was kinda sweaty. But he didn't seem to care that much, he just grabbed my t-shirt and wiped my back off. Heh! Anyway, in the class we reviewed what he had covered last time, and he showed us a couple of new techniques. He also talked about how to deal with an injury. The main thing he said about injury is that you should not massage an injured muscle for 48 hours. The massage class ran a little late so we didn't have much of a break between it, and the next class. Not that it mattered, however, because the next class was Body Awareness--and that class is always nice and relaxing.

In the Body Awareness class, unlike the last two times we had that class, where we manipulated the arms, shoulders and neck, this time we worked on the legs, knees, ankles, and feet. It was basically the same process as the other ones, where the person on the floor tries to make their body parts heavy, and not use their muscles at all. The only thing different we did with this one was Hellen had us do an experiment. The person on the floor was to, at one point, open their eyes and begin talking about what they would be doing later on that night. It was interesting to hear the different results of that experiment. Most who were doing the manipulating said that when the person started talking their muscles in their leg started to take over--such was the case with me. Others though were able to talk, and continue to be loose and limp. After we were done with that session, we sat around and Hellen asked us what we thought the purpose of this class was. So we got into a discussion about it. One of the points I brought up was that it was helpful to be able to sit back, and without being concerned about what your muscles were doing, just observe the range of motion possible. She said that we bring a lot of inner baggage (mental) about what our bodies can and cannot do, and that it is important to break through that baggage. One person pointed out that the result of the class is very relaxing. I couldn't agree with that person more. I always feel nice and rested after our Body Awareness class. Hellen warned us, though, that the class is going to get more intense.

After that class was over, I decided to hang out after school in the gym and do some more work on my backcrosses. They are still looking kinda ugly. But I am up to about 8 tosses now on a good run. I am determined to get these down by the end of our first break (which is coming up pretty soon.) I was supposed to work on our Acro routine with Fabian, Michel and Ellen, but Ellen didn't come to school today--a lot of people are getting the flu right now. So we decided we would work on it tommorow. I also spent some time working on my forward rolls. When Annette saw me roll out the long mat, and start working on them, she offered to help me. Then next thing I know, Ashling and Polly are helping me two, and between the three of them coaching me, I managed to do several sudo-forward rolls. But the way I am doing them right now is ugly. They still need a lot of work. Right before I got ready to leave, I decided to teach the girls that were still there in the gym how to play cups. A couple of the girls couldn't get it, but Asheling, Polly, and Denise were really into that game. They said they wanted to play it again tommorow.

The ride home was not too bad. It was dark, and the batteries in my headlight are getting low. Which is not a problem, because the street lights are plenty bright enough for me to see where I am going, what is important is for the cars pulling out in front of me to know where I am. Fortunately the rain had stopped, and I was able to get home fairly dry.

I got to school about 8:20am and was the only person there. Eventually more people showed up for our Wednesday circuit run. Because people were arriving at different times we didn't all start at the same time. I ended up running with Tina. She and I are at about the same pace, which was nice. I was surprised how well I did considering because I was out "sick" last week so much, I hadn't done any running in over a week. I had a conversation with Kay the other day, and it finally made sense why we are doing these circuits. The circuits are all about running for a while, then doing something physical like jumping jacks for a minute, and then running again. Kay explained to me that in circus you will find yourself running from one spot to another, doing something physical, and then moving on. I guess the main thing I will get out of these circuits is a quicker recovery time between each set.

At 9:00 we did our warm up with Charolette the TT. She did a good job of warming up, we did a lot of stretches, etc. At the end of the warm up she wanted to play a game. I thought it was strange playing a game at the end of the warm-up. Usually you play games in order to get warmed up enough to start stretching. Anyhow, I didn't really like her game. She basically told us to run around in the gym and when she clapped once, run to the first person we could find and hug them, and if she clapped twice, find two people to hug at once, and if she clapped three times, try and find three people to hug at once. I didn't like the game for three reasons. It seemed wrong playing the game at the end of the warm up, the game itself wasn't challenging--just silly, and finally, after my circuit run and that 25 minutes of warming up, I was quite sweaty, and didn't feel that comfortable with people hugging me. Don't get me wrong, I love a good hug. :)

At 9:30 I went to my first class, Performance. Bim told us that todays lesson would be about tension. He said we would go over the seven levels of tension. So as a warm up game, he had us get together with a partner and try to step on their toes. I thought this was a bit strange, but I guess it was his idea of getting the tension flowing! heh! After the toe stomping match, he had us play the hand slapping game--more tension. I am pleased with myself because I am getting good at the hand slapping game. I was playing with Britta, and I hit her all but one time, and she never hit me. After the warm up game, Bim had us walk around the room trying out the seven levels of tension. The first level was very very low tension. He wanted us to be all floppy droopy and loose. Almost like a drunk, or someone trying to wake up and get out of bed. The second level was just a casual, relaxed level--moving about greeting people, smiling, acting like everything was cool. The third level was neutral--much like the walking we did with the neutral masks. The fourth level was an alert level. He had us walking around, constantly looking about, wondering what was going on, checking things out, testing things. The fifth level was directional. Or better said, determined. We see where we want to go, and we go there, or we see what we want to do, and we go do it. The sixth level was a level of madness, jumping up and down, swinging arms around, screaming, excited, etc. The seventh level involved being so tense that you could not even move. While we moved around, exploring these different levels of tension as Bim called them out he would have us explore not only how we act in the different levels, but also how we interact with others and our environment throughout these different levels. Once we had the levels down, he had us line up on one end of the room and move across the room shifting from one to the other, starting at level one, and progressing to level seven by time we reached the other side of the room. Next he had half the class line up against one wall, and half of the class against the other wall, and had one group start at level one and go up, and had the other group start at level seven and go down as we moved across the room. It created a humorous moment at the center apparently, because Denise, who can't participate as much because of a twisted ankle, was laughing like crazy from the sidelines. Next Bim had us all lay down on the floor, and had us roleplay a scene with him as the narrator, taking us through a story that involved the seven levels of tension. The story starts in bed, trying to wake up--level one. Next you get out of bed, and are moving about the house, chatting with roommates, having tea--level two. Next you are on your way out the door to go to work--level three. Next you are suspicious about the time, you wonder if the time has changed to daylight savings time, and whether or not you are an hour late for work. You are looking around, trying to find clues to the time--level four. Suddenly you discover that you ARE an hour late, and you NEED to get to work as soon as possible, you are determined, and know exactly where you are going--level five. Next you arrive where the train, you are supposed to catch to go to work, is supposed to be, but you see a sign that it has been moved to another terminal, so you are going running, screaming, trying to get to the train--level six. When you finally arrive at the train terminal, not only is the train not there, but suddenly an explosion happens, and the floor is about to give out, and there is fire everywhere (some random terrorist attack) and your body freezes, becoming extremely tense--level seven. I should point out also that Bim talked about how the seven levels of tension can be either good tension or bad tension. For example, in level six, when you are running around screaming, you could either be very upset about something, or very excited about something. After all that, for the last 20 minutes of the class, Bim had us do two improv sessions. The improv was about an office space. He set up four chairs in a "room" and in a couple of groups of four, we went in to the office one at a time and improvised being office workers, exploring the different levels of tension. The character I played was usually down at level one or two, unless he went a while without smoking and his tension level would raise. The fun thing about the scene was that any time I smoked in the office, it would raise the tension level for the other employees. My group went first, and the second group went next. It was fun to watch their improv, but the only thing that frustrated me about it was that they couldn't find a way to "end" it. Bim hasn't really talked yet about this. I wonder if he will. Anyway, at the end of that class, we had a half hour break before our Movement class.

Hellen's Movement class was a continuation of spacial awareness, and awareness of the body. We started up by getting together with a partner and standing back to back with your partner. Then she had us press our backs into each other, and move about, trying to touch as much of the space of our backs, shoulders, and neck to the other person as possible, in an effort to become aware of our different body parts. Next she had us do the same thing against the wall, but using all of our body parts--pressing them into the wall to help us become more aware of the different parts of our body. Next she had us do the same, but on the floor. I found this interesting. It is true, you can go a whole day without thinking about the skin on the back of your ear. But that doesn't stop it from being there. We often are aware of our butts because we sit on them, and our hands, because we constantly use them, but there are so many body parts that almost don't exist in our thoughts. Next we moved on to some spacial awareness exercises. We did a quick exercise of working with a partner where one person holds the other person's hand, who's eyes are closed, and they lead the blind person around the room in different directions, speeds, and levels. The person with their eyes closed, focusing on trying to get an idea of where they are in the room by their non visual spacial awareness. Next with the same partner, she had us stand across from each other with oh, maybe 5 meters between us. Then she had us close our eyes, and each try to walk towards the halfway point between you and your partner. If done well, you would open your eyes and see your partner's face just inches from yours--once Britta and I just plain bumped into each other. :) Then she had us try it several times again, from further and further distances. Next she had us do an exercise that I have done in Jyl's classes, where you stand across the room from your partner and then each of your run fast towards each other, and stop JUST before your run into the person. Then she had us do it in groups of four, all running towards a center point between the four. Then she had us do it in groups of six, and then eventually she had the entire class do this exercise, so that we run towards a center and end up all a bloob in the center. From there she had us close our eyes and do some visualizing of our positions in relation to the center (obviously we all couldn't be at the center,) and then she had us try to move away from the center in varying degrees in relation to body parts--first a fingernail's distance, then the width of an hand, then the length of an arm, and then the length of a body. Next she had us open our eyes. Then she had us lick our fingers to get them wet and make a mark on the floor at our feet. And then she had us step away from that mark in what we thought was the length of our body on the floor, and then lay down and see how close our head came to the mark on the floor we had made. I thought that was interesting. I was about 4 inches too short on my prediction. I imagine an injury could happen in an event I underestimate the length of my body. Next she had us lay down on the floor with a partner, with a meter or more space between us, and then experiment with rolling towards our partner, getting an idea of how much we move from rolling, and what parts of the body we use, etc. Then it was back up on our feet and walking around. She had us walk around, being very focused and direct, our eyesight trained on where we were going, and then she had us shift to a more indirect, flexible walk, where your vision allows in the peripheral vision as well as what is directly in front of you. She asked us to mentally make observations of how that was different. Next she had us grab a coat, or any garment and put on and take off the garment in those two methods--direct/focused, and indirect/relaxed. Each time, asking us to make observations about how they are different. Next she had us experimenting with offering our garment to a partner, exploring the differnt direct/indirect approaches, and also exploring how we use space when making the offer. Then she had us spread out, and use our garments to invade the space around our personal space--by basically waving our garment around like mad, trying to invade every inch of our personal space with it. And then she had us let go of our garments, and invade that same space with our bodies. Then she had us continue, and move about invading other people's space. Then she shifted the exercise to the extreme opposite, and we had to NOT invade space, but still move. For this she set up a scenario. We were all bank robbers and there were lazer activated alarms all throughout the bank, and she wanted us to try to get move to a wall without setting off any of the alarms. She walked around the room, watching us, letting people know if they had set off an alarm or not. I set off several alarms. Then in the same scenario, she had us encounter a small wall that we had to step over--making it even harder. After that exercise, she had us go to another similar exercise with a partner. In this scenario, one person was a cat, and the other person was a mouse. The mouse wants the cheese, and the cat is watching over the cheese. The idea of this exercise, was that the mouse tries to get close to the cheese, without invading space to a degree that will upset the cat. So in other words, if you are going to move your hand, it has to be so slow that it is hardly recognizeable as movement. Very difficult. It reminds me of when I lived with my parents. There was a public swimming pool in the neighborhood there, and sometimes I would go swim there at night. The pool had a motion activated flood light hanging from the building next to the pool, and my friends and I used to play a game where we tried to move into the path of the motion detector without setting it off. It was fun. For the final exercise of the class, Hellen had us move about, greeting people with different kinds of hugs, exploring hugs that invaded space to various degrees. After that, we all sat down, had a brief discussion of the various things we covered, and Hellen ended the class as she always does by having us close our eyes as she briefly goes over everything that we covered. If it seemed from this that we did a lot in this class today, it is because we did. I had a heck of a hard time remembering everything, and getting it down on paper.

Next it was lunchtime from 1:00pm until 2:00pm. At 1:30 during our lunch, Bim gave a brief talk about Physical Theatre as a career. First he talked about what PT would be covering over the year. He said that for the first term we are going to do some laval mask work (not sure about that word laval--I'm sure it's not spelled right), some character mask work, and we will briefly touch on commedia. In the second term we are going to cover clown in the first half, and bafoonery in the second half. And for the final term we will be covering some mellowdrama and character PT stuff. Bim also talked about doing a maskmaking workshop on some weekend at somepoint in this term. After his talk I went up to him and told him I have a lot of experience with maskmaking, and would gladly help him out with the workshop.

After Bim's talk, it was my scheduled time for Aerial practice, which means that I go off by myself and do my conditioning. I went over to the South Wing and did about a 30 minute conditioning workout. After that, since I still had about an hour left to my time, I decided to start working on my forward rolls again. I got out the biggest, fluffiest matt I could find, and started working on them. With the big fluffy matt, I was able to put aside my main fear of snapping my neck, and was able to do several forward rolls. Suddenly Kay appeared, and she chatted with me for a bit, and I showed her the progress I was making. She gave me a couple of pointers that seemed to help out. After a few minutes of hanging out with me she left, and I suddenly got brave, and put away the big fluffy matt and started doing it on the much thinner matts. Mostly my forward rolls were ugly, and crooked, but I WAS doing them! :) I did several in that time. Pleased with myself, I decided to spend the rest of my time in that room working on some juggling--as a reward for being so brave. heh! So I turned on some music, and started working on my double spin 3 club backcrosses. I immediately started noticing that my backcrosses were much better today than they were yesterday. In fact, I was on a couple of occassions able to get up to 10 throws of my backcrosses. Not bad, considering only 2 days ago, I couldn't do more than 3. As I was working on my juggling, Kay showed up again, and we chatted a bit. She told me that she wanted someone to work with her on her club passing. She says she is determined to get club passing down good. I told her I would gladly help her--since after all, she has helped me plenty of times. So I spent most of the rest of my time in there working with her on her club passing, taking her through some exercises I have devised that help make people better club passers. Kay is going out of town for a week, but when she gets back, she and I are supposed to go out and shoot pictures. She was excited to discover that I have a background in photography because she just got a new camera, and is having trouble with it, and wants me to help her with it. It will be fun, since I haven't done any serious photography in years.

My next class, at 4:00pm was Acro. I have missed the last two Acro classes: one because I had to go get my second hepatitus B shot, and two because I was sick with that crazy facial rash thing. So I went up to Nikki and explained to her that I am way behind. She said I should just give everything a try. The first thing we did in the class was a quick warm-up to get ready for what we would be doing. Then she had us get into partners and work on head stands. I worked with Oskar, and he showed me how it was done. I gave it an honest try, but was not able to get up on my head. The closest I came put a lot of pressure on my head. Not something I necessarily liked. Next we worked on handstands. Again, something I am incapable of doing. But I gave it a try, and understand how it works. So it is somethign I can work on a little bit at a time. After that Nikki set up a circuit where everyone runs around the room. On one end of the room down a row of matts she had us doing different kinds of rolls, and cartwheels, and then running over to a (oh, I can't remember the name of the springy jumpy thing) and jumping off of it. I did the springy jumpy thing once, and managed to do about 4 forward rolls down the matt. It was plenty for me. When it came time to doing cartwheels, I tried a few, but didn't manage much more than putting my hands on the floor and hopping them over. After the circuit time was over, we went into learning how to stand on people's shoulders. Finally, something I have experience with!! First she had us do it with the base kneeling down on one knee, and having a person standing in front of the kneeling person to offer support for both the base and the flyer. After each of us had a go at it (of course I didn't do the flying part--just the base) Nikki went on to teach the full standing version. Nikki asked the class if anyone had experience doing this, and Annette and I both told Nikki that we she had stood on my shoulders before. So I got to demonstrate the technique of having someone stand on your shoulders for the class. That was kinda exciting... I mean, after being such a clutz throughout that entire class, I finally get a moment, where I have some skill. It may not be much more than just being a solid rock for someone to climb up, but it was something. :) After that class was over, it was time for a 30 minute E&M circuit session.

The E&M circuit session was nice. I worked on my backcrosses some more, and then I worked on 5 rings (getting my best run of 5 rings ever--18 throws) and I did some work with 5 balls, and worked with three balls in one hand--mostly on my left side.

After the E&M circuit session was over, I had planned on staying and juggling for a bit longer. I decided to take a short break, and sat down to chat with a couple of people. Then I saw Merlin playing hackysack, and got up and played with him for about 10 minutes. Then after that I decided to pick up my clubs and get back to juggling. I grabbed all five clubs, and headed down to the end of the gym. I started juggling, and suddenly realized that I was exhausted! Realizing it would do me little good to juggle in that state, I decided to pack it up and go home. Right before I was able to get out the door, Asheling asked me to play cups with her (its cute--she is very excited, almost obsessed with the game) so I stayed for another 30 minutes or so and played cups with Polly, Asheling, and Jeremiah.

The ride home was uneventful. No rain. It was dark and cold, however.

After the warm-up was over, it was time for Aerial, which of course means it is time for me to go do my conditioning. On my way out the door of the gym I ran into Rod and Haggis McCleod. Haggis is our guest E&M instructor for the next two weeks. He is an incredible juggler and well known in the world of juggling. As I stepped out the door, Haggis looked at me and said, "Ah, there he is." As though Rod and he had been talking about me. "You sure are famous." Haggis, said. I would have thought this strange if it weren't for the fact that I knew that he had just come back from the Lodi Juggling Festival in California, where I know for a fact there were around 30 people from Arcata in attendance. Haggis told me that my friends hung out with him and that he thought they were all very nice and friendly and that they took good care of him. I thought that was cool. Anyway, I chatted briefly with Haggis and Rod, and then headed over to Studio 2 to do my conditioning. I did my conditioning while watching the Aerial class. Its cool to see how much they are progressing. Part of me wishes I could be doing it, but then I look at some of the moves they are doing, and I know they are painful. I am not into pain. Much of Aerial is about pain.

I finished up about half an hour earlier than the class period, so I decided to go wait outside the gym for my E&M class. Since I had half an hour to hang out, I pulled out my clubs and continued working on my backcrosses. After 1/2 an hour of working on my backcrosses, the first E&M class started coming out of the gym. When Haggis came out, and saw me working on my juggling he came up to talk to me. I told him I was a little obsessed with getting my backcrosses perfect. Haggis immediately turned into teacher mode, and asked me to show him my pattern, and then he spent the next 10 or so minutes helping me improve my throws. He mostly told me I was throwing the clubs too far forward, and that I need to lean back a little and bend my knees. He also told me that my throws were a bit overspun, and I was having to catch them up too high. All things I need to work on. Haggis said, "I'll have you doing 100 backcrosses by December."

Once it was time for E&M class to start, we all piled inside the gym and Rod introduced us to Haggis, and between the two of them they gave brief demonstrations and instructions of the use of the stilts, the rola-bola, the unicycle, and the rolling globe. Of those, the only ones I couldn't allready do were the rola-bola and the rolling globe. I got on a pair of stilts to start off with. They were strange though. Not like the stilts I have built in the past. I felt like they were too small for me. They didn't come all the way up to my knee, so I felt like I had less support, and also the pole is more towards the back of the foot, where my stilts had the pole more towards the center. I was able to walk around on them with realative ease, but they didn't feel comfortable for me. After getting off the stilts, I walked over to the rola-bola's and was surprised at how easily I was picking it up. I had several moments where I was in comeplete control of the rola-bola. I found this surprising--and I was generally pleased about it too. There were rola-bolas of two heights. The tall ones were hard to get on, but once you got on them, they actually moved a lot slower, and were easier to control. Next I wandered over to the rolling globe, and asked Jeremiah and Oskar to help me get on the thing. I got up on it, but was not able to let go of my assistants. I am going to have to work on that one for a bit more. Next I went over to the unicycles, and rode a unicycle around a bit. Then Haggis came up and asked me if I had started to learn how to stay in one place on the unicycle, and I told him I hadn't. So he took me over to the railing and started to show me how he learned. He showed me that he learned by riding three strokes forward, and then three strokes back, and then reducing the stroke to two strokes forward, two backwards, and then down to one forward, and one backward, and then finally just half strokes forward and backward. He also pointed out that I need to turn into the direction I am falling, so it is not a straight line. All stuff I will work on later. After that I went back and tried on another pair of stilts, some taller ones. I got up on them, and then did a quick feed with Oskar and Dave. But again, the stilts were not all that comfortable, so I got out of the quickly.

At the end of E&M class it was time for lunch. I stepped outside of the gym and quickly ate my lunch, because I wanted to go back into the gym and practice my backcrosses some more. I spent about 45 minutes on my backcrosses. My progress feels like it has gone down since yesterday, but I think that is mostly because I am trying to make concious changes to my pattern in following Haggis' suggestions. Its better that I start slowly, and do it properly. I had a conversation with Dave later in the afternoon, where I was telling him that originally when I though of working on my juggling here at Circomedia, I imagined learning tons of new tricks. Now I am realizing what is important is that I spend my time working on my technique, and getting my basics down very solid. Tricks are something I can learn at festivals or when just having fun with others. If I have my basics very very solid, then learning tricks will be very easy. Most tricks are just combinations of different basic throws. Dave told me that was a very good attitude. He said that he knew a juggler last year who came to Circomedia, and wanted to spend all his time learning new tricks, and he actually didn't progress that much as a juggler.

After lunch it was time for my Acro practice session. We met in the gym, and unfortunately several people were about 5 minutes late getting to class. I was on time, as I always am. I hate being late for things. It bugs me when others are late too. And it apparently was bugging Dave the TT too, because he sat everyone down and gave us a lecture about being late. After the lecture was over, he handed the warm-up over to Annette--who did an excellent job. Dave later told us that we should be ready to lead a warm-up at any time, because he might call on us. After we were nice and warmed up, I got together with my Acro group, Ellen, Fabian, and Michel, and we started working on our for our presentation next week. First they showed me what they had put together so far (while I was away sick last week.) And they showed me where they wanted me to fit in into their routine. We worked on it a while, and explored some new ideas. Unfortunately Fabian Michel and I were working on something, and Fabian slipped off me, and fell onto the matt. He started complaining later in the day that his neck was hurting. I'm sure he is okay, but it just sucks that he fell. I feel partially guilty, even though all I was doing was acting as an object on which to be climbed. Our routine still needs a lot of work, but I think it will turn out fine.

After Acro practice, it was time for our Movement Technique class. Tilly started the class off with a quick warm-up and then she had the class do a quick review of what they did last week--which obviously I missed. So after she got the class going, she helped me by showing me what she was talking about. She taught me the "nine attitudes." Later after the class was over, she gave us two hand outs: this one, and this one. After I learned the nine positions, and memorized the sequence, Annette and I worked together watching each other go threw the sequence, and helping with each other's positions and posture. After that, Tilly taught us a paper scissors stone version of the positions, where using three of the main nine positions, you stand across from your parnter and on the count of three you assume one of the three positions. I had a hard time remembering what beat what because there is no logical system like paper scissors stone. And on top of that, I ran into a funny little cultural barrier with Annette, who is German, because apparently she plays paper scissors well (the kind from which you draw water.) Anyway, after that we moved on to another exercise. I don't remember what Tilly called this next one, but she had us stand next to our partner, both with their bodies facing the same direction, legs spread open, knees bent, heads, and shoulders turned in towards each other, putting more weigh on the inside knee so that they are leaning into each other (but not touching.) Then one person turns first their head, then they turn their shoulders, and then they lean away from the person. Then they reverse that moving back to their original position. Once in that original position, the other person "reacts" by doing the same--moving first the head, then the shoulders, then leaning away. Then of course they come back in the same manner. Once we had that down, we experimented with using differing speeds, and varying which part of our body we move first. For example, if you are turning to look at someone, you could turn your shoulders very slowly at first, and then quickly whip your head around. It creates some interesting dramatic moments. Next we started working on some mime stuff. Tilly is not that experienced with mime, as she self confessed, but she said it was part of the program, and she wanted us to work on it. First we worked on placing our hands on an imaginary wall, and bending our knees, but keeping our hands on the wall. To make this work, you have to raise your arms at the same speed you lower your body, so that your hands stay in the same place. We worked with partners on this. One person would hold their hands at the level where the wall "is" and the other person would move down, getting a feel for what they have to do with their body to make it work. Then the assistant would take their hands away, and let the person try it without the guide, while their assitant watched and gave notes about how well they did. The next exercise we did was very similar to one I have done with Jyl, where you manipulate a pipe in mid air, turning it around, gripping it from different angles, etc. In Jyl's class we did a lot more with the pipe. In this class we just turned it a couple of times. Next we did an exercise that involved seeing one pipe in the room, grabbing it, swinging it to the side like a sword, seeing another pipe, grabbing on to the new pipe, looking back at the old pipe, letting go of it, and then stepping up to the new pipe that is allready in your hand. After that exercise was over we did a couple of cool-down exercises from the first MT class where we learned how to open and closer like a flower, and did it as a wave. That ended the class. Tilly gave us some handouts at the end of class. I hung around for a bit, and then headed over to the gym where I was to meet Michel so that we could work on our flying angle acro balance.

The flying angle is basically, I lay down on the floor, and put my feet on Michel's hips. He then leans forward, and I straighten my legs out, balancing him by his hips on my feet. I have difficulty with this move because of my flexibility. It is hard for me to lay on the floor and make my legs go perpendicular to the floor, and be straight. I managed to do it a couple of times, and with some practice, we will be able to do it for the performance with not too much difficulty.

I decided to go home right after school, because I have no food in the house, and the grocery store near my house closes at 7:00pm. On the ride home, I was about 8-9 blocks from the school, and I noticed this woman walking along. She suddenly gestured for me to stop, which I did. And she asked if I knew where Circomedia was. I told her I did. She laughed, saying I looked like someone who would. I guess the clubs sticking out of my backpack gave me away. I pulled over and gave her directions. She is apparently taking a acro workshop that Nikki teaches in the evenings on Thursday.

The rest of the ride home was uneventful. I bought some groceries, got home, cooked some food, and rested.

For those of your reading along, you may have noticed I went back to a smaller font. I seem to be running into a problem with the html software I am using. It only lets me create a page of a certain length. Ironically it is not about how many characters, but about how many lines I use. So if I use a large font, I cannot fit the entire month of October into the page. I will have to fiddle with it this weekend and see what my options are.

After group warm-up it was time for Acro class. Nikki explained to us that we could spend the class time working on our presentations. Unfortunately Ellen was not in class today, so we were not able to work on our presentation. However, Michel, Fabian and I did learn a couple of new acro balance patterns. The first one was the Chinese Wagon. The way we did this was having me in the middle acting as the base. Fabian sat on my shoulders. Michel stood in front of me, hooking Fabian's feet under his arm-pits. Then while I am holding onto Michel's hips, he jumps up, sending his feet back, wrapping his legs around my waist. At that point, Michel is connected at my hips by his legs, and is balanced out onto Fabian's feet which are hooked into his arm-pits. Fabian leans back a little to compensate for Michel's weight, and I just stand there, being strong, balancing all their weight and mine. The next acro balance thing we learned was a variation of that same Chinese Wagon (or is it Chinese Wheel?--Not sure.) In this pattern, the setup is the same, but instead of facing away from me, Michel faces towards me, still with Fabian's feet tucked under his arm-pits. At this point I start rotating the whole pattern, turning around and around. Michel has to walk along in the circles I am creating until I get enough speed going, and Fabian leans back, to the point where Michel's feet lift off the ground. At that point, I am just spinning around in circles, with Michel flying out in front of me, his feet about 3 feet off the ground. Then I slow it down, and bring the pattern to a stop as Michel regains his stand. Pretty nifty. For the rest of the acro class I worked for a short while on my forward rolls and my cartwheels, and then decided to just do a lot of stretching. I noticed today that I am getting much more flexible. I was probably more flexible today than I have been in at least the past 10 years. It felt nice. But I still have a long way to go.

After Acro class it was time for a scheduled hour and a half of Aerial Practice. Studio 2 was open, so I went in there, and cranked up some music, and spent the entire time juggling. I worked on my back-crosses some more (and made 13 throws at one point--not bad, considering 3 days ago, I couldn't do more than 3 throws.) I also worked on my four club double and triple patterns. I was supposed to be doing my conditioning at this point, but considering the ammount of stretching, and also the circuit that I had run earlier, I didn't mind treating myself to a nice long, serious session of working on some juggling. By time that hour was up, I was starting to notice my right knee was a little swollen. From what I learned in the First Aid class, it was what you would call a strain. I had just overworked the poor guy, and now he was sore, and swollen. So I went up to the student room, and hung out in there for about an hour, eating my lunch, chatting with other students, and icing down my knee. The ice pack did wonders for it.

After lunch we all huddled into the gym for a 45 minute E&M practice session. I noticed that the E&M session was running over the 45 minutes and I asked someone if we were going ot have a devising period like it said on the schedule. Apparently there was some kind of screw up in the schedule. We were supposed to have an Acro presentation today, but because that didn't work, and it was rescheduled for next week, there apparently was no alternate plan for the rest of the afternoon, so that meant we just had free time. It was great. Everyone just kept juggling, and riding unicycles, playing with the rola-bolas, and the stilts, etc. Javier, the juggler, TT from Spain was in charge, and he seemed to really enjoy himself. He is super friendly, and loves to help people. I asked him if he could help me learn how to ride the six foot tall unicycle. He of course was eager and excited to teach me. I got up on it, and he let me use his fist as support as I ventured out from the wall. He gave me a few quick pointers, and by the fourth time I ventured out, I was letting go. On the fifth time, he offered me his fist again, but I turned it down, and rode out away from the wall on my own. He was quite pleased. :) I was too. I can now say that I can ride a six foot unicycle. I didn't practice that much with it, because I couldn't go to far, because I was not feeling confident enough with my turning skills to navigate around all the people juggling, stiltwalking, globe-rolling, etc. I will have to give it another try. Another thing that I did that was a fun, and exciting acomplishement was that I juggled 5 balls while balancing on a rola-bola. (I should explain what a rola-bola is to anyone reading this who doesn't know what it is. A rola-bola is basicaly a plank of wood balanced on a small piece of pipe that has a diameter anywhere from 8 inches to 14 inches. The person stands on the board and it balances on top of the pipe, rolling back and forth.)

After a while, since there was nothing else going on, people started going home. I was feeling quite tired from a long week, so I decided it would be nice to go home early. I got home around 4:30pm, and was ready for a nice, relaxing weekend.

Our group warm-ups this week are being led by Javier, the TT juggler from Spain with the thick accent. I really like this guy. He is super friendly, always smiling, always happy to help people out. Its sometimes hard to understand him during the warm-ups because of his accent, and because of the crazy echo going on in the gym. Anyway, he had us play a couple of games in his warm-up. One was a version of musical chairs, but instead of people being "out" because there was no chair on which to sit, you do whatever you can to somehow at least get your feet off the floor--this involved a lot of piling up of bodies. Quite humorous. The other game we played is where he has us walking briskly, using up as much space in the room as possible, and when he claps, you have to quickly find someone to either hold in your arms, or jump up in their arms. I'm still trying to figure out why nobody has offered to let me jump up into their arms! ;)

First class of the day was E&M. Haggis was here again. After today he will go away for a while, and then I believe he will be with us for half a term at the begining of next year. I could be wrong about that, but I know he will be coming back, and teaching for a much longer block of space. The class was broken up into two 45 minute sessions. The first 45 minutes we spent working on unicycling, stiltwalking, etc. I had been talking to Rod at the beginning of the class, and told him that I had had some success at mounting the tall unicycle. Haggis who was listening in on the conversation stepped in and told me that I should really learn to "hover" or idle on the smaller unicycle before I take it any further on the tall one. He had a good point. One of the main purposes for the tall unicycles is hovering, so that you can do club passing. So I spent a good portion of my session working on the smaller unicycle. I mostly worked on trying to go backwards. One thing that Haggis did, that helped a lot, is he would stand out in the middle of the gym, holding his two fists out in front of him, and he would have me ride forward until I reached him, grabbing onto his fists with my hands. At this point, he would help guide me backwards. This helped a lot. The problems he pointed out when I was working on it was that I was leaning too far forward. When I leaned back more, and put more weight on my seat, it went a lot smoother. It felt like I was gliding... very strange. Next he showed me a way I can work on going backwards on my own. He had me ride towards the racks against the wall, grab them, and then push off and try to go backwards. It will be a while before I get this, but I know I want to get a lot better at unicycling. I think I may make it one of the things I specialize in. After playing around with the unicycle for a while, I decided to go work with one of the larger rola-bolas. The larger ones are tricky to get on. Because they are so tall, you can't just lean the board against it at an angle, and then place one foot on the lower end, and place most of your weight on the higher end to lift the lower end up and onto it. No, with the taller ones, you have to hold the board in place, balanced flat on the rola-bola, and JUMP up onto it, hoping that your feet land nice and flat, with a nice bit of space between them. So anyway, I was trying to learn how to make this jump. I decided I would have Dave, a TT, hold the board down for me, and jump up on it, using his shoulders if necessary to balance myself. I don't know what went wrong, but suddenly I fell flat on my back. Needless to say I was sore the rest of the day from that. After that spill, I decided to take the rola-bola back to the racks against the wall, and work on it some more under the crutch of holding onto the wall rack as I mount it. Next I went over to the smaller rola-bola--which is much easier to get on. From there, I did a bit of juggling. In fact, I did a feed, feeding Dave and Philip. I am getting better at juggling on the rola-bola... assuming I can get on the thing! For the next 45 minutes of the class, we put away the unicycles and stuff, and just worked on clubs. We basically just spread out and started working on things that we are working on while Rod, Haggis and the two TT (Javier & Dave) walked around helping people out. I started working on my five club pattern. Rod came up to me and told me I looked very relaxed doing it. He also talked to me about training technique. He said that instead of just trying to get as many throws as possible every time I try it, I should aim for an average, and then stop. For example. I have gotten as many as 150 throws with 5 clubs before. But instead of trying for 150 each time and dropping at random various stages between 0 and 150, I should, say, try to get 20 catches, and then finish without a drop. And when I can get 20 catches 10 times in a row, then maybe add another 10 catches to my runs. Rod talked about how in a performance, 20 catches without a drop will look a lot better than 150 catches with a drop. He also said that the part of the pattern where you are most likely to drop is at the very begining and at the very end. These are all things I believed, and understood anyway, but it was nice to hear it confirmed by a professional juggling instructor. Next I worked on my backcrosses. They are getting better and better. I have on several occasions gotten up to 13 good tosses. I am averaging around 7 right now. Haggis never got over to help me during the class, but after the class was over, he was talking to Oskar, and I asked him to take a look at my five club pattern. He basically told me what I have been told several times before, that my pattern is too wide, and I need to push the clubs up higher. Otherwise, he said it looks good. Before the next class, we had a 1/2 hour break, which I spent in the gym working on my backcrosses.

At 11:00 it was time for the Performance class. Bim started the class off with the "Name Tag" game. Phillip was being silly and decided he wanted to be called Alice. And I, trying to be funny too asked to be called Rebecca. But instead, after some quick discussion, the class decided that for this game I should be called Bella. Heh! Anyway, the game went quick, and I was one of the first people out. It can get confusing quick. After that, Bim had us get into groups of 3-4 people, and move around the room with "Bob" the invisible as the leader. Our group seemed to be doing fairly well. Its hard to say that the group is making a collective concious decision as to where to go and at what speed. I think what happens is that one person may start to move, and doesn't realize they have basically taken control for a moment. Once we get moving, however, it becomes more like "Bob" is in control. Next he had us do a similar exercise, but instead of moving as a group, our group of four all stood facing in towards each other, and tried to make sounds together, changing them, but again without any single person leading what the sounds would be like. Next, he had us add movement to the sound. I rather enjoyed this exercise, though we ended up looking quite silly towards the end. So silly, in fact, that the rest of the class decided to stop doing what they were doing and watch us. Philip, who was in my group, made some comment about feeling like an "Umpa Lumpa." :) Next Bim had us review standing seperately in the "neutral" position. Then he had us, from the neutral position pretend to look around, as if looking at the horizon of an ocean at a beach. Next we reviewed walking in space from place to place in the neutral position. Then after that, Bim had us work with going from standing to seated with "as little possible effort." And then he had us get up, with as little possible effort. Then he had us sit down again, and then from the seated position he had us lay down in a sleeping position. Then he had us go from the sleeping position, past the seated position straight to the standing position with as little possible effort. Bim made several comments about how people in our class did not have crisp endings to their movement. He pointed out that, for example, they would sit down, and then, spend a couple of moments perhaps scratching an itch, or adjusting their clothing, or something. He talked to us about making the movement clear, and precise, with a crisp ending--not a lingering one. Next we took turns in groups of 4 putting on the neutral masks and going through a few exercises we covered in the class. First he had us put on the masks, with our backs to the class, and turn around. Then he had us scan the horizon, as if checking out the ocean. Then he had us move around the room, going from place to place. Then he had us face the class. Then he had us sit down. Then he had us lay down. After that, he had us take off our masks and he gave us notes. He told us all that we are getting better. He said my movement is much better. But he said that when I sat down, I did it too quickly. He said because I am a larger person, I need to slow down a bit, and take my time moving down to the floor. After I had gone with the first group, I was able to sit back and watch the others from the rest of the class give it a go. Once everyone had a chance at it, the class was over. And it was time for lunch.

Lunch seemed very short. I didn't have a chance to pack a lunch today, so I went and got a sandwhich from the little red sandwhich truck that comes flying into the Kingswood foundation every day, honking its horn like mad. Once I finished my lunch, I went inside the gym and worked on my juggling a bit. Oskar eventually joined me and we did a bit of passing. Its always fun passing with him.

At 2:00pm, it was time for Diploma Notes. I was just a couple of minutes late getting to Studio 2, but when I got there, almost everyone was there allready. Apparently, Nikki the Acro instructor was giving a short presentation on Acrobatics as a career. I'm not sure when she started, but I obviously got there in the middle of it. It didn't matter for me, anyhow, because I am not that interested in Acro. But it was fun looking at the pictures she was handing out. Shortly after that, Rod came in for the actual Dip Notes session. He was very animated, and was acting like a over dramatic evangalist. I guess he was trying to smooth us over with comedy so that he could spring a test on us. Well it wasn't actually a test. It is a serries of six Knowledge Questionaires that we will be filling out over the year. Today's questionaire was on Performance. These were the questions it asked: 1. How & why is it important to maintain concentration and focus? 2. How do venue characteristics vary - sound projection needed? 3. What sorts of constingencies can arise and how do you deal with them? 4. How do you maintain balance between contributions within different sorts & sizes of groups? 5. How do you interact effectively within a group performance and respond sympathetically to variations introduced by others? 6. How can you use circus to convey feelings or emotions? Rod had us work in groups answering the questions. Then after we all had a chance to answer the questions, writing them down. The class as a whole went over the questions, giving the responses they came up with--it became a bit of a discussion group thing.

After Dip Notes we had a short break (15 min) and then it was time for an hour session of E&M practice. I decided to go straight into the E&M practice, and skipped my break, getting an hour and 15 minutes of practice in instead. During that session I worked on my five club pattern, and I worked on my backcrosses (getting another nice, solid 13 throw run--at an attempt at 15 throws for Oskar.) Next I worked on some 4 clubs stuff. I have been trying to get this sequence of throws, where I throw 8 throws as doubles, and then go into triples for 8 throws, and then come back down to doubles again. Dropping down from triples to doubles is difficult, but it has a very neat feel to it. Like you are catching a falling object, but trying to keep from breaking it. I would love to see what it is like to go from triples down to singles, but I need to work a little harder at my singles. Next I went over to the rola-bola, and worked on juggling 5 balls while balanced on it. I got a couple of nice runs. I also tried balancing a club on my nose, while balancing on the rola-bola. That was incredibly difficult. But I had a couple of short runs.

After the E&M practice session, it was time for an hour long Acro Practice session. Natalie lead the warm-up today. She did a fine job. I was surprised to see again how limber I was. I tend to be the most limber towards the end of the day. I was actually able to touch my toes while seated with my legs flat on the floor in front of me. I was very excited about this. Fortunately, for only the second time since we have been given the assignment, we had together all the people in our Acro group. We spent a lot of time working on our routine, and we made a lot of progress. I learned a new Acro balance trick with Ellen. In this trick, I lay down on the floor, and place my hands palm up, on the floor on either side of my face. At this point, she steps onto my hands. I then lift my legs up, perpendicular to the floor. She grabs ahold of my feet, and then she makes a jumping motion upward. When she does this, I extend my arms, locking them. At this point, she is resting her weight on my hands, using my feet to balance. Then she slowly lets go of my feet, and straightens her back out, so that she is standing on my hands as I balance her above me. Pretty nifty trick. After the Acro Practice session was over, I decided to make it an early night, and headed home. Fortunately it wasn't raining on my way home.

When I got home, Mandy asked me if I wanted to go out to the local juggling club meeting. I declined, feeling that I had done plenty of juggling for the day, and knew that I wanted to get to bed early.

My first class was the conditioning class. Lizz got us started right away, explaining that she was going to have us run through the full conditioning program the way SHE would do it. Apparently people had been telling her that it was taking them an hour and a half to do their conditioning, and she believed it could be done in less than an hour. Anyway, I didn't write down the sequence we went through because she was going to print out copies of it for us to have. I will post it online when I get it. The sequence had a nice flow to it. My t-shirt was literally soaked by the end of it. And yes, like every Tuesday I get to do that class two times in a row. I remember the students who had just finished the sequence with me in the first class looked at my like I was crazy when they realized I was going to go through it again. Lizz told me that I didn't have to do it all over again. I ended up doing about 95 percent of it over again (though I lacked the strength to do all the pushups again.) Lizz was impressed with my ability to go through it twice--she called me a madman. heh! She said I wouldn't be able to walk tommorow. But it actually wasn't that bad. Mostly I was feeling a little sore in my lower back from the spill I had taken off the rola-bola yesterday.

After that it was time for my nice long lunch break that I get on Tuesdays that goes from 11:30 to 2:00pm. I spent the first chunck of it hanging out in the student room eating my lunch, and chatting with Charolette, the student. Then Phil showed up and popped in a video. He put in "Life of Brian." I have seen bits and pieces of that movie several times, but for some reason it seemed so much more hilarious watching it now. Perhaps being in a room full of British people helped me enjoy it more! But I could not stop cracking up. Around 12:40 Oskar suggested we go to the gym and juggle for the rest of our break. Pulling myself away from the TV, I went down to the gym and juggled. I did some more work on my backcrosses, and on my four club patterns. Then Oskar and I did some passing. Again, its fun to pass with someone of his skill level. We need to start getting serious. Its fun to play, but I want him and I to put together a routine.

At 2:00pm it was time for a hour session of E&M practice. I started my session out with working on rings. I worked on my four ring fountain pattern for about 15 minutes, and then switched over to 5 rings. I am starting to like rings more. Its nice to have an indoor space where you can juggle them. I have never enjoyed rings simply because of the wind factor. The slightest amount of wind makes ring juggling next to impossible. Next I decided to put on a pair of the taller stilts. I got them on with Shani's help, and walked around the room several times. I am feeling more comfortable with these stilts, but I would still like to build myself my own pair. After that I went back to juggling clubs, working on my backcrosses some more. Then I picked up some balls and started working on my six ball pattern. I made some progress today with my six ball pattern. It is starting to come together. I think I had several runs of up to 15 throws.

At the end of the E&M practice session, it was time to head over to Studio 2 for our first Anatomoy class (we will be studying Anatomy for four weeks.) Here are the notes I took from that class:

This class will cover Anatomoy and Physiology. Anatomy = parts of the body, Physiology = how they work

The body structure from smallest to largest. 1. Body starts with chemical reactions (Sugar and Oxegen converted into Energy (ATP) with Water and Carbon dioxide as wastes. 2. Cells: cellular reaction, 3. Tissue: Cells unite together to create Tissue. 4. Organs: Tissue unite together to creat organs. 5. Systems: Organs work together to create systems.

The different systems in our bodies: 1. Respiratory: lungs, breathing 2. Nervous: spine, brain 3. Cardiovascular: heart & blood 4. Skeletal: bones 5. Muscular: muscles 6. Lymphatic: glands 7. Digestive: stomach, intestines 8. Reproductive: sexual organs 9. Skin (has other name?): skin, sweat glands 10. Metabolic: all reactions that go on in body. 11. Urinary: kydney, blatter 12. Endocrine: Hormones

All these systems are kept in check with the brain. Homeostasis: the balance your body is in.

Muskuloskeletal System: Control your shape.

3 Basic tissues: Bones, muscle, connective tissue (cartilage)

Connective Tissues: holds organs together - holds everything together.

Cartilage holds muscles and bones together, is very strong, flexible, tough

Two Types: 1. Fibocartilage: (not as flexible) found between bones (invertable disc) provides shock absorbtion, found in knees too. 2. Hyaline Cartilage: smooth, flexible, allows us to move, very smooth, lines with mobile joints, bones

Bone: structure, support, protect organs, movement, marrow in bone produces blood, storage of calcium & fat (nutrients)

Structure of bone: Periosteum: Outer layer, brittle, most calcium stored. Compact bone: layer between Periosteum and Cartilage, strongest part of bone. Marrow: inner layer of bone, produces blood, helps with fast healing.

Bones in chest appear to be flexible because where they connect at the Sternim there are pieces of cartilage fibre that give range of movement. The chest is made up of ribs that connect to the sternim, ribs that connect to the ribs that connect to the sternim, and floating ribs.

Bones not attatched to other bones: kneecap or sesamoid, one in the wrist, one in your toe, and the Hyoid bone in the neck. Hyoid bone is surrounded by muscles.

Coccyx bone: one of the bones not needed in the body (tail bone) very painful if injured.

Muscle: produce heat, give structure, strength, movement, stability

Three types of muscle: 1. skeletal muscle 2. cardiac muscle, smooth muscle

Skeletal muscle:

Fasiculus is made up of a collection of fibres. Fibres are made of a collection of Myofibers. Myofibers are made up of a collection of Myofilaments. Myofilaments are the essence of the muscle, what does the contractions.

After the Anatomy class was over, we headed over to the gym for our final class of the day, Body Awareness. All of our Body Awareness classes up to this point had been about laying on the floor, and letting other people manipulate our bodies. Today's class would be a little different. First Hellen had us lay down on mats on the floor, on our backs, close our eyes and listen to her talk. As she spoke, she went over our bodies, asking us to be aware of each part, and how it felt against the floor, etc. I started to fall asleep with this. It took me a little longer than usual to get up once she was done with this. Next she had us stand up, and close our eyes. The she had us "imagine" that we were lifting our arms out in front of us. First only 12 centemeters out, then 90 degrees out, then up above our heads. Each time we imagined moving our arms, we were also to imagine what muscles in our backs would be working to make this possible. Next she had us open our eyes and get with a partner and discuss what muscles we believed would actually be used by touching, and showing our partner on their own back which muscles. Then she had us take turns, having one person do the actual movement, and the other person using their hands on the other person's back, as "eyes" so that between the two we could explore what muscles were actually being used. Next we did that whole process again, imagining, discussing, actually doing, discovering, with raising our arms out to the side. Then after that, she divided the class in half. One half of the class was asigned juggling 3 balls, and the other half was assigned hanging on a trapeze. Then she had us go through the same process of closing our eyes, and imagining the process of doing these acts, and what muscles they would use. Then after that, we opened our eyes, and discussed with our partner which muscles we believed were being used, and then after that we did the actual act of juggling or hanging from a trapeze and felt each other's backs to see what muscles we were using. After that, she switched the groups over, so we each had a chance to do this with each skill. I was surprised how many muscles are working to keep a three ball pattern going. After that we got new partners, and did another exercise. One person was to lay on their stomach, forehead flat on the mat. Then while the other person is on their knees directly in front of the person, the person on their stomach tries to raise both of their hands 12 cm. off the matt (obviously without being able to see them.) After they do this 4 times, they come up from laying down, and the other person descirbes to them how it was. The goal is to raise both hands at the exact same time, raise them to the exact same height, and lower them at the exact same time. This proved to be very difficult. But it was interesting. At the end of this class, Hellen talked briefly about what we had done and asked us what we thought would be the benefit of knowing what muscles are being used for a particular skill. I told her that it was good to know what parts of the body needed warming up. Someone else mentioned that it is good to know what parts of the body need stretching. Hellen then told us that it is important to know in relation to good technique. Our homework for that class is to go out, and discover what is the proper technique (I assume she means posture) for those skills. For example, I would say that the proper technique of juggling three balls is having your head centered, your shoulders down, your elbows as close to your body as possible, so that the movement is isolated at just the forearms and wrists. Anyway, I will talk to Rod about this, and see if he agrees with me. Hellen wants us coming back doing both of those skills with the proper technique. Though I am not sure if I am supposed to worry about the Aerial one, since I am not doing it.

After class was over everyone seemed to be concerned about staying and practicing their Aerial routines. Since I don't have one, I didn't have to worry about this. And this was good, because my body was a little tired, plus I had made plans to go see a movie with Helen, so I hopped on my bike and headed down the hill.

After the warm-up it was time to go to Performace class. Today Bim was out, and Tilly, the young girl who teaches Movement Technique was covering for him. Today's lesson was about the four elements. We started off with a warm-up that involved focusing on your center while moving. To do this we each got a partner to place their hands on the front of the pelvis, and the lower back, and then that person had to keep their hands there, and move with the person who then moves about at different speeds, levels, directions. After each person had a go at it, we went on to the first of the four elements. First Tilly had us do a quick little exercise to warm up to the idea of water. With partners, one person held their partner at their center, like before, and the person being held just relaxed their legs, knees, and ankles, and let the other person move them around. The idea is that you move their hips forwards backwards and from side to side, either in straight lines, or circular motion, and each of you imagines the center of the person's body being a bowl of water, and that you are sloshing the water back and forth in the bowl. After each person had a go at that, Tilly had us each find a space on the floor, and standing she had us begin to imagine and act out the following sequence. First you are standing at the edge of some water (like a pond, or a lake.) Then you step into the water, feeling it just covering your feet, feeling how that affects your movement. Then we step further into the water, so you are deeper in the water, imagining what it is like, and how it affetcs your movement. Then we procede deeper and deeper into the water until it is up to our hips, imagining, and acting out how all that water would affect our movement. Next, taking it even further, we suddenly imagine that we are made of water, and we move about the room, acting as if we are made of water. The qualities of water, in movment seem to be heavy, but flowy. Then Tilly asked us to humanize the movement, in other words, take elements from the abstract idea of being water, and apply them to human movement. Then she had us as we are walking around the room, being the human equivalent to water flowing, greet people as we walked past them both physically and verbally. Then she proposed a question to us, and asked us to work it out in our watery humanized character through physical and verbal interaction with the other watery people. The question was "Do you want to go to the cinema, or the zoo?" Next we went on to our next element, Earth. For the warm-up of this element, she had us get back with a partner, and we took turns helping each other feel solid, rooted to the ground like a tree by pushing down on your partner's hips, encouraging them to be solid. And then once the person was nice and solid, you test them by pushing against them. Tilly made references to Aikido masters who have an understanding of being grounded, and can not be knocked over very easily. It sounded a little mystical to me. I will have to look into it. Once we were done with that warm-up, we went to the imagining/acting stage like we did with water. For this element we imagined a giant wall of clay in front of us. She had us dig into the wall of clay, pulling out progresively larger and larger balls of clay, playing with them, feeling their weight, and noticing how they respond when they hit the floor (noticing how it falls flat, with no bounce--solid.) Once we had pulled out as large a ball of clay as we could, we went onto the next step, and actually climbed into the wall of clay, experiencing what it was like to move around inside clay. Obviously this would be impossible, but it deffinitely changed from the movement we were doing in water. Next, like the previous exercises with water, she had us become the clay, moving about as clay. Then she had us humanize it, and then she had us greet each other physically and verbally, and then she proposed to our new characters the question of the cinema or the zoo. The next element was Fire. For the warm-up for fire, we got back again with a partner, and took turns rubbing each other with our hands on the pelvis and lower back, using friction to heat up the body as much as possible (this felt nice!) Then once we each were warmed up, Tilly had us move to our own space again, and imagine a small lump of coal glowing red in our center. And with each breath of air, the lump of coal would get brighter, and get bigger. Tilly had us make our breathing very choppy, mimicking the fire that was starting. We kept getting bigger and bigger, with choppy movements, quick changes, etc. Once the fire had consumed us, and we had become the fire, we moved about the room, burning things down, exploring the space as fire. Then, as with the previous exercises, she had us humanize the fire, and move about greeting the other people in the room verbally and physically, and then we once again pondered and discussed the thought, "cinema or zoo?" The final element, of cours, was Wind. For the Wind warm-up, we got back together with partners and helped each other feel weightless by giving your partner a bit of a lift from their center as they go up on their toes, and maintaining that way for about 30 seconds. Then once we each had a go at it, we seperated to our own space, where Tilly had us imagine that we were at the top of a mountain. With each breath we took in, we became lighter and lighter. Until the point where we were made completely of air, and lifted off the mountain. As we moved about the room as air, Tilly asked us to respond to the other wind. For this, whenever I moved past another person, or "wind," I would spin around as if they had caused me to spin. I can only imagine what some random person happening to walk into that room would have thought about each of these exercises. Anyway, as with the other exercises, we then humanized the wind, and moved about greeting people, and then went on to the cinema/zoo question. After those four exercises were done, Tilly realized that she was almost out of time, but she still wanted to squeeze in one improv session. I was feeling a little tired and was feeling some pain in my neck, so I decided not to hop up as a volunteer for this one. The improv was the office scene again, like we did with the levels of tension. This time however there were 4 people in the office, each one representing one of the four elements. It was pretty clear who was which element. And I found it interesting that fire was able to go through different emotions (nervous, happy) and maintain very similar physical movements. Water and air were a little hard to distinguish, both were flowy, but what helped was that the water character seemed heavier than the air. The earth character was a little vague. I felt he could have been a little more assertive and strong. The improv as a whole was not one of the stronger ones I have seen us do. But it did have some funny ELEMENTS to it (pun intended!)

My next class was Movement with Helen. We started off the class by standing in a circle and closing our eyes. Then she had us sway forward and back to the center, and then backwards, and back to the center several times. Then she had us do the same swaying side to side. It seemed to be a centering warm-up technique. Next we did a neat little game/exercise, that when I asked Helen about it later, she told me she got it from someone called Spolia. I will have to check into who that person is. The exercise went like this. Helen created some boundries, so that we were only using about 60 percent of the gym. Then she told us to find a place somewhere in that space to stand, and look around at where we were in relation to things on the wall, and things on the ceiling and markings on the floor. She wanted us to be able to locate that exact same spot very easily. Then she went on and had us find 5 more spots around the room like that, one at a time, numbering the spots in our head 1 through 6. Then she had us stand at our first spot and move to our second spot, watching to see who we walked past as everyone else is moving to their second spot. Then she had us move to the next spot and the next spot, watching to see who we were near as the whole class moved to their spots. This became difficult because sometimes people would walk in front of the path you take to get to your spot, so you may have to alter your path a little bit. Next Helen had us do it again, but quicker. Each time we went through the sequence we had to go faster each time to the point where we were running as fast as we can from spot to spot. Each time there was a near colision that made someone stop, or hesitate, or slow down, Helen stopped us and made us start over. It had a very neat feel to it. I would have loved to watch it from above--I bet it looked like a big machine. After that exercise/game was over, we went on to another exercise that involved moving about the room in curved lines, leaning our bodies into the curve to exaggerate the move, making sure that we never made a straight line on the floor, and also avoiding hitting other people. Then Helen had us switch to straight lines on the floor, with very sharp turns, making sure to never have any kind of curve in our lines. After doing that exercise, Helen had us spread out across the gym in our own personal space, she had us draw either curvy or straight lines with our different body parts (eg. left toe, right bum, left elbow, etc.) Then once we had a go at the ones that she had us do, Helen asked us to create a sequence of movements like that, using the space around us to create curvy and straight lines with various body parts. She wanted us to start off the first one using our whole body, and then add four other body parts to it. Once we had learned our "routine" We had to get together with a partner, and take turns teaching each other our routines. Helen asked us to be VERY STRICT when teaching and make sure that they did the routine exactly they way you did it. In later discussion, Helen talked to us about how that the person teaching the routine is learning more in this exercise because they have to understand what they need to do to be clear about THEIR actions. I have always known that the teacher learns just as much as the student. In this case we discovered that the teacher learns more than the student. Next Helen had us make a random shape with our bodies. And then she had us relax. Next she had us assume that same position again, and then relax again, and then go back to the same position. Next she asked people if they believed they were able to get back into that EXACT same position as before. She also asked what about it they were able to confirm made it as close to the original shape. To this people answered that they had similar balance, their awareness of the distance of their arms, using their field of vision of their body, examinging their focus, etc. For the final part of the class, Helen had us choose either juggling, Aerial, or Acrobatics. I chose juggling, of course. Then she asked us to perform the same sequence of moves we had come up with earlier (that we were teaching our partner) and involve juggling in it. She did the same with the Aerial, and Acro people as well. Then for my group, she asked us to perform the routine as fast as possible, with as crisp and clear movement as possible. We were given about 10 minues to work on it, and then the class performed their "routines." It was interesting. I saw some very nice looking moves come out of such a simple exercise. I kept my routine very simple, and thus didn't do any drops. Helen said I did a very good job. :) At the end of class, Helen handed out some handouts. The first one was a schedule for the first 11 weeks of the Movement class, and it has a Dance Therapy chart on the back of it. Then the others were the following handouts: Application of Movement studies to Theatre, Application of Movement studies to choreography, Application of movement studies to E&M page 1 & page 2, Application of movement studies to Aerial page 1 & page 2, and Application of movement work to Acrobatics page 1 & page 2.

After that class was over it was lunch time, and I headed up to the student room to eat my pasta. We got into an interesting discussion about the differences between Enlglish English, and American English. I also went and picked up a copy of Liz's Conditioning workout program from the office.

After lunch was over I headed over to the South Wing to do some stretching during the Aerial practice session. My flexibility is getting better and better by the day. I can now reach my toes, with some difficulty, while sitting down with my legs out in front of me. The pain in my neck had moved to my shoulder which put a damper on my plans to do a bit of juggling during that session too. Faye was in the South Wing with me working on her journal entries, and we chatted for a bit while I stretched. I told her I had a sore neck/back/shoulders, and she offered me a massage. I hesitated at first. I always feel guilty getting a massage. I am used to being the one giving them. However, she insisted and I took her up on the offer. It felt nice. I of course gave her one in return. Eventually Polly, Natalie, and Tom came into the South Wing so they could work on their Aerial routine that they have to perform tommorow. It was fun watching them work. They have made a lot of progress. I'm still glad I am not doing it, however. It looks painful. I'm not into pain.

At 4:00pm, I headed over to the gym for my Acro class. At this point my shoulder was hurting even worse. I told Nikki about it, and she told me to do what I could, but to take it easy. For the first half of the class Nikki let us work on our group acro routine that we will be presenting on Friday. It was nice to have that time, though I didn't work on a couple of the moves because of the way my shoulder was feelign. Nikki watched us do a quick run through, and was very complimentary of it, and gave us suggestions as to how to make it better. After we worked on that for a while, the class went on to learn forward hand springs. I remember these because Silas worked on them so much. And if it took Silas a while to learn them, I figured with my shoulder feeling the way it did, I should probably sit this one out. So I did. But I did help do some spotting, and coaching for those who were working on it.

After Acro class it was time for a 45 minute E&M practice session. My shoulder was really bothering me at this point. I overworked it yesterday during the conditioning class, doing those dips. So I told Javier about it, and he said not to push it. So I decided to go home a little early. The bike ride home was cold!

After warm-up it was time for my Aerial class. Again, since I don't do Aerial, its a time I am supposed to spend working on my conditioning. I decided, though, instead to work on my "object" piece that I had to present at the end of E&M class. I spent about an hour working on it, then decided I should spend the rest of my time doing some stretching. I knew that both the South Wing and Studio 2 were having Aerial classes, and that I could sneak into one of them and do my stretching. I decided I would go to the South Wing. As I approached, I looked through the windows, and realized that the Aerial groups that I am supposed to be in were all in there, doing their Aerial presentations. I don't know why, but I thought the presentations were going to be later in the afternoon. I wanted to see them, but felt it would be rude to walk into the South Wing in the middle of someone's presentation. So I decided to go to Studio 2, which I now realized would be empty. I got there and did a fair amount of stretching. Every day my flexibility increases just a little bit. Its awesome.

Next I headed over to E&M in the gym. We started the class off with the red ball game. Our last high score was 194. Rod wanted us to beat that score. We didn't. I think our best run was around 130 or something. Oh well. Next Rod told us to each grab 3 clubs. Rod then said that we were going to do a quick warm-up with clubs. He said there are a few ways we could do the warm-up. He said we could just each go off in a corner and juggle three clubs for a while, or we could play Gladiators (what I call Combat.) Needless to say there were several of us very excited at that thought. So we played a few (I think about 5) rounds of Gladiators. It was fun. I won the last match. It was a classic scene. It was down to myself and Fabian. I crouched down low, moving around him, doing a step over technique with my feet, to give me that extra sneaky, aggressive look, I gave him nice snarl, and then went towards him, doing some very aggressive chops. I was going for the intimidation angle. He droped his clubs immediately, jumping back. It was classic, and got a good laugh. :) After that fun warm-up we spent about 5 minutes reviewing on our own the other tricks we have worked on up until then (under the leg, behind the back, over the head, and pirouettes.) Next Rod had us begin to work on some new three club tricks. We spent a good chunk of the time working on the three club shower. Now I can do a three club shower, both left and right handed for dozens of throws. I have it down quite solid in both doubles and triples. However, what I don't have down are the shower throws where the club goes at an agle parralel to your body--mine are more like a standard throw (my way is apparently the easy way.) So I had plenty to work with on that one, which is good. I was able to do about 6-8 throws in the triple spin 3 club shower with the clubs over the top moving parrallel to my body. Next Rod introduced two more tricks. He showed us the "Trebla," which is making a throw between your legs from behind without lifting either of your feet--a very difficult trick to get solid. And he showed us the 3 club flash start. I could allready do the 3 club flash that he was teaching the class (where one club does a triple and the other two do a double,) but Oskar showed me a neat version were one club does a single, one does a double, and one does a triple. It looks near because they all do it in a line one under the other. I wasn't able to get it yet, but I was close. As far as the Treblas (which, in case you didn't know it, is the opposite trick and opposite spelling of Alberts, a trick named after Albert Lucas--even though he wasn't the one who invented them, he is just really good at them.) I need countless hours of practice before I begin to get them solid. Around 12:40 we ended the class early so that the four of us who hadn't given our presentations could. Mine wen't okay. I had one drop, which put a dent in part of my choreography, which caused me to do a bit of improving. Everyone really enjoyed it though. Javier said I had very good facial expressions. Rod said that the four presentations today were the best he has seen. In later conversation with Rod later that evening during my tutorial with him, Rod said the main problem with my piece is that there was enough of character development that he was begining to wonder if there was some kind of story that he wasn't seeing. I knew exactly what he meant. I felt it was like that too. It was an experiment. Again, I was okay with it, but it could have been better, clearer.

After that, it was lunch-time. It was sunny outside, and we got to sit on the grass and eat our lunch--something we haven't done in several days because of the weather. Because I was late this morning I didn't have time to pack a lunch. Oskar was heading out on his bicycle to go to the sandwhich shop, so I gave him some money and he picked up a sandwhich for me. After we ate, Oskar suggested we go inside and do some passing. We did. It seemed a very short session however.

At 2:00pm it was time for Acro practice. Elee ran the warm-up, and Charolette was the TT for this practice session. Elee did a fine job, though he didn't have us do any lower body stretching. I got together with my group and we ended up running through our piece several times with the music that Ellen had chosen. Charolette watched it, and said it was very good. There are just a few timing things that need working on before tommorow, but it should be okay. The cool thing about this routine is that I am doing a forward roll in it. Something I set out to learn, and thought it is still a little ugly, I AM doing a forward roll now. Jessi would be proud of me. I will be working on my "Shows" page on this website, and will use it to describe in as much detail as possible the presentations I have done and will do in the future. So I will use that space to describe our Acro presentation in detail.

My first class of the day was Acro. This turned out to be an eventful class. We started the class off by doing solo work, working on cartwheels, forward rolls, etc. each person deciding what they needed to work on. I asked Nikki to help me with my forward rolls. My forward rolls tend to go crooked. This is mostly because the only roll I have ever learned was an Aikido roll. Anyway, Nikki gave me some good advice, and my rolls were starting to straighten out. Next Nikki had us all gather around the springboard thing (still don't remember the name of it.) There, she taught us how to use the spring board to jump off of, and do a forward roll. So once she had taught us that, she set up a circuit of jumping in a forward roll off the springboard onto the crash mats, and then doing either cartwheels, forward rolls, ect. back down the other long strip of mats until you got back in line with the springboard. I think I jumped off the springboard into a forward roll about 4 times, but Nikki wouldn't let me run towards it yet. On my times of coming back down the mats to get back to the springboard, I was doing my forward rolls. With Nikki's earlier advice, they were starting to get smoother, and straighter. I also worked on my cartwheels (which still look horrible.) When I had finished my last springboard forward roll onto the crash mat, I looked back, just in time, to see Natalie do her jump, but for some reason, she landed all wrong, and her neck twisted a little bit as she came down onto the crash mat. I should explain, these crash mats are very thick, and soft, so wen I saw her land, I didn't figure it looked too bad, but she was obviously in pain. Nikki immediately jumped to take care of Natalie, and she made her stay there on the mat. Actually, Natalie was half on, and half off the mat. Natalie was obviously in pain. We didn't want to move her because we weren't sure about her neck. I had a feeling that she was okay, but in cases dealing with the neck, it makes sense to not take any chances. Nikki sent Fabian to get an ice pack right away, and eventually, we got one of the benches and moved it over next to the mat, putting a thin mat on it, so we could lift her feet up on it to make her more comfortable. Helen, came over and assessed the situation, and then went away (and I presume to call an ambulance.) Once Natalie was covered with several coats to keep her warm, and she was comfortable, as possible, Nikki went back to teaching the class while Fay and Rachel took care of Natalie. Nikki went on to teach front hand-springs to the rest of the class. Nikki had told me she didn't think I should work on these yet, so I was free to do a little stretching, and help out with Natalie where I was needed. When the Ambulance came they slowly, and cautiously put a neck brace on her, and then slowly and cautiously got her up onto a stretcher and they took her away. Fay went with them to provide company for Natalie. Nikki ended the class by having everyone sit down and she explained that she didn't think it was that bad, but they were just being precautious since it was her neck. We found out later that afternoon that Natalie was okay, and that it was just some bad whiplash. The good thing about this is that we have all next week off for our half term break, so that will give Natalie lots of time to recover before she comes back.

The next class session was Aerial, so I checked the schedule and noticed that Studio 2 was empty, and headed over there with my juggling clubs. I had plans to juggle for the entire session. Shortly after I got there, Rachel, one of the TT, showed up with some clubs, and asked if I cared if she joined me. Of course I didn't. I started practicing my backcrosses, and then moved on to juggling 4 clubs, working on my going from double spins to triple spins and then back down. Rachel asked me a couple of questions about backcrosses, and so I stopped and showed her some techniques. Then she asked me if I liked to pass clubs (silly question.) So we agreed to pass clubs at some point. I went back to juggling for a while, then decided I was ready to pass clubs. I went over to the E&M storage to get my sixth club, so we could pass with mine. I spent the rest of my time in there, working with Rachel, teaching her how to do some tricks with passing, and then I worked for a while with her on her 2 count pattern, teaching her how to pick up in a two count. I found it amusing that she is the second TT that has come to me asking for help with her passing. I don't mind helping at all. I eventually, down the road, plan to be a teacher of this stuff, so it helps me to be able to teach. I learn so much more from teaching others how to do something than I think I realize. Rachel and I also worked on passing 7 clubs with doubles, and then finished our session with passing with 7 singles. It was fun. She kept asking me. "Are you bored with this? Do you want to juggle by yourself again?" I kept telling her, "No, I plan on being a teacher. This is good practice for me." I should comment that because two TT have come to me for advice/help on their juggling patterns does not indicate that the TT are lacking in skill to be good TT, its just that some TTs are jugglers, some TTs are Aerialists, and some are Acrobats.

After that session, I decided to go eat my lunch. I went into the office to pick out a video to pop in from the collection they have, and I noticed they have a nice collection of Charlie Chaplin videos. I checked one out and sat down in the student room to watch it and eat my lunch. The student room was empty when I got there, but within minutes, it was full of people, and they all wanted to watch their Aerial presentations that had been recorded on video. I of course said, they could turn Charlie Chaplin off, and watch their videos. But for some reason, Charlie (from the office) was having trouble connecting the video camera to the television (since they had not transfered the video to regular size VHS yet.) Anyway, I finished my lunch, and then headed over to the gym to do a little passing with Oskar.

After lunch time was over it was time for a juggling circuit session from 2:00-2:45pm. I spent a fair amount of that time, working with Oskar. We came up with a neat pattern with four clubs, where one person starts with the four clubs, and feeds them out on a right handed two count. The person recieving the clubs goes into a four club fountain for 4 throws, and then feeds them back out on a 2 count. And this goes back and forth. We tried to do it with 5, but were having problems with the timing.

After the juggling circuit was over, it was time for the Acro presentations. They were all very fun to watch. My group went fifth. (I will describe the routine in as much detail as possible when I set up the SHOWS page on this website. After each presentation, the class took a moment to respond to it with either compliments, or constructive criticism. Each of the discussions always ended with Helen giving some constructive criticism. Our routine didn't go as smoothly as we wanted it to. We had done it earlier in rehearsal, and it had gone through flawlessly. The ironic part of it, was that, everyone in my group but me made a mistake at some point in the routine. The irony of course is that I am the worst, Acrobatically, of my group. But everyone seemed to like our routine. Of course, what I was eager to hear was Helen's feedback. She basically said that she was pleased with the improvements that we have made technically, that she saw we were very focused on the specific tricks, but that she felt that the transitions from trick to trick needed some work. She used a great phrase when describing the transitions which was very valuable, and is something I will look for in the next projects I work on. She said we were "physically mumbling" in our transitions. She was right. We were.

Unfortunately, once again, I am having problems with this HTML editing program I am using. It doesn't want to let me make a page this big. I may have to redesign my webpage so that I am doing a page per day, instead of a page per month. That would mean a lot of work. Anyway, the quick solution for now was to just make the first four days of this page a smaller font.

After the presentations were over, I hung out a bit and did some juggling. Brita and I made plans to meet tommorow and exchange massages. I ended up working with Denise a bit too. She has been having trouble deciding what her specializations will be. She decided against doing E&M as one of her specialties, but still wants to work on it. So she came to me and asked me if I would teach her on the side. I of course agreed, and we started by working on her three club flash start. I must have done a good job helping her, because after giving her all sorts of advice about angle of throw, how to hold the clubs, how much force to throw them, etc, she started to get them.

It started to get dark, so I hopped on my bike to ride home. It was raining a little bit when I headed out from the school, and by time I was about 5 minutes away from the school, I was trapped in the worst rain I have ever been in in my life. The wind was blowing like crazy, and blowing the rain directly into my face. My glasses were making it impossible to see, and all I could see was car headlights coming towards me. I eventually had to just stop, and stand there in the rain for a bit, until it let off a little. I got soaked, and the wind was horrible! It was my worst bicycle ride yet. It was good to get home, and get warm and dry!