New Indiana Jones film: astonishingly, more contrived than the originals (which were fairly contrived), and while it falls short of being "good", exactly, I thoroughly enjoyed it on its own terms. Just set aside any expectations of it being like Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade; and if you haven't seen those two, good heavens, get thee to a video store and rent them first.

Weapons class yesterday went awesome, in fact. It seems like my anxiety about public speaking or teaching vaporizes under the weight of reality just like my other anxieties do: I wasn't really nervous at all, and I'd given some thought to what I'd teach and how, and it's all stuff I know fluently, so I could change and adapt as class went on. I had them do a couple of simple paired practices to warm up, and then went into the 31 jo kata, but starting with number 13: it happens pretty often that instructors will start in on the 31, but in a one-hour class there's only time to get to number 12, so for my first four years in aikido I only knew the first 12, and I always thought it was great when teachers would start at 13. I actually screwed up and demonstrated a wrong movement at some point, which only a couple people noticed, and gave me quizzical looks before I stopped and said "Let's try something different with this one..." by way of cover.

I think that may have been my first time teaching a class of anything, and it was frankly pretty awesome. And surreal, as we were doing the techniques together and I suddenly realized they were following what I did, and were waiting for me to do it so we were all doing it together. I think I did a good job of showing the techniques, tying them together, and making sure everyone had time to repeat them at their own speed and really learn them. (This was my judgement, but people in the class said as much also.) My friend Leslie, who's off the mat with a knee injury, came and watched, which was nice since I had someone to go chat with in between demonstrations while everyone was practicing. Good stuff all around, I think.

It's nearly summer, notwithstanding our 30-degree weather swings, and my greatest food vice is back: California red grapes. Once they hit the farmer's market in a month or so I'll be seriously doomed, but for now there's just the ones from Whole Foods. Mmmm, grapes.

Kat & I saw this amazing male+female moment from a pair of 14-year olds on sunday...they were walking toward where we were at the gas station as we were pulling up to the pump. The boy looked at the moving car, got his little manly "I can step in front of a moving car" thing, and walked across, necessitating a slightly quicker stop. His girlfriend went out of the way along the side of the car, smiled sheepishly and said "Sorry!".

Finally, I'm starting to gain muscle mass again, which is fine, but a little strange because I haven't been able to notice a pattern for when that happens. Usually I'm just wiry, and I'm not sure I'm doing anything different from a month ago that there should be a shift. But here we are.