Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Training and painting






Here are a few pictures capturing the many hours that I've spent in the past week on the activity of painting. I swear I will enjoy the result when I'm done, but the day to day hours of repetitive activity can wear out on a person. I've been putting in 5 to 6 hour days just scraping and painting on my own. In these pictures, two of my daughters came and helped me with the garage. I was astonished how much more difficult it is to paint stucco. It's like one has to fight for each 4 inches of painted space! I'm doing this alone so far because my husband's vacation doesn't start until next week. To be honest, I am trying to get as much as I can done before he goes on vacation so that his whole summer isn't spent working hard on the house.

I still train in karate. I take little breaks every 2 hours of painting to stretch out my legs, and do jumping kicks on a little makeshift "toy" that I made for myself out of doubled pillowcases filled with wool crocheted covers, and tied up with a karate belt to my kid's swingset. I'll try to capture what that looks like on video.. ha ha ha.. It must look strange, and unusual.

I've attended a couple of sessions of Yoga. I am amazed at how similar it is to Karate with the emphasis on proper breathing during movement, and on good posture. But then I realized "Doesn't almost every physical activity have this emphasis... like pilates, golf, dance, skiing?" Well.. perhaps it doesn't focus on proper breathing as much as karate, and yoga, but I bet you that deep diaphramatic breathing would help with those activities also.

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