Saturday and Sunday afternoons I took a first aid/CPR class at the dojo, that my friend Bob set up for us. It was really excellent training, with lots of drills and repetition; apparently most first aid training is mostly lectures, which, having now done things like used a bag valve mask (those breather bags you saw on M.A.S.H.), seems completely insane. Under pressure we don't rise to the level of our skills, we descend to the level of our training. I can't see how you could successfully do all this stuff without hands-on practice.

Apparently the guy, a paramedic who does a lot of this training for companies and groups, often gets a lot of hostility about the repetition (because it's boring): he said "Oh yeah, I've had people walk out of the class and not come back. I've had very short relationships with some companies." I think it was a bit of a relief to teach a group that intimately understands the need for sometimes-boring repetition in order to learn stuff at a level that might be useful under pressure. I had fun, at any rate, so feel free to wait until I'm around to have a heart attack or start spurting blood.

Saturday night was the Houseness cocktail party. I had a lovely time, and Tinny got a couple of good pictures of me:

The downside to the evening was that the nice girl--okay, "nice" is a stretch, but she's interesting--I was hitting on turned out to have a boyfriend. This has been a recurring theme over the years especially recently, and I have about a 90% hit rate in blind tests, meaning women I just meet somewhere, with no overt indication that they're taken. My new project is to figure out what it about the unavailable women that I'm drawn to, and I guess avoid it. Which is sort of funny since I think what I'm seeing is a sense of inner stability and calm, but hey, we do what we can.