I've been going through lease documents and insurance policies for the dojo (martial arts training facility) out here. I'm leaning towards moving it from its current location on the top floor of Teikyo Loretto Heights University to an industrial-area warehouse. There's a lot to be said for the simplicity of a large, high-ceilinged empty space for training and filming purposes. Add some suitable flooring and an overhead grid I can use for the movie lights and you don't need much else. Rather than doing any finishing on the walls, I'm thinking that movable black curtains will be sufficient for most purposes.

It does look like I'll need to be careful about a few details--there's a few things I should probably avoid doing because, reading the fine print in the dojo's insurance policy, they wouldn't be covered. Pretty much any kind of nuclear accident, for starters. That's okay, I think I can live with that. Actually, now that I think about it, it's probably easier to live with that policy restriction that it is to live with a nuclear accident.

The truth is that it's been quite a few years since I've had even the slightest involvement with nuclear weapons, and I've never, ever taken any home with me after work even when I did work for the defense lab.

That incident you may have read about last year...that was way overexaggerated.

Tanning-related accidents--nuclear or otherwise--those are excluded from the coverage as well. Good thing it's a martial arts training facility and not a martial arts tanning facility. What a difference a letter or two makes.

But, then, I've never had very good luck with tanning facilities. I'm pretty good with sunlight--even when I do burn, it just fades into a tan 99% of the time--but tanning booths and I haven't gotten along so well. Mainly the problem has been that they're apparently designed for someone who doesn't have shoulders--or, if he or she has them, they're about half the width of mine. So I can get a great tan on my tummy, but my arms and shoulders kind of get left out of the process, which may be an interesting effect, but it's not the desired effect.

Apart from that, any accidents or other claims arising from "Cheerleader Pyramids" are also excluded. Good thing I checked the fine print. Fortunately, I think I can manage a workaround: looks like there's no prohibition against pyramids of Ninja, which is really a more common occurance out here anyway. And I guess I can do whatever I want with cheerleaders *other* than build pyramids out of them, so that's okay, too. Cheerleader rectangles are fun, too, even if it does usually take more cheerleaders to build a really good one.

It'll just require some experimentation--but I figure that learning new and creative things to do with cheerleaders is a skill that I'll be able to apply in many other parts of life, so it'll be worth it. Isn't learning new skills part of what life's all about?

Bleah. But I mean that in a *good* way. I hit the bike trails for the first time this year; I should have done it earlier, but I plead laziness and an enduring fear of ice. It was okay, but I could tell that it had been months since I'd been out on the bike--my sudden burst of speed from "hey, it's great to be doing this again" gave way to some extra fatigue soon enough, so I was moving a bit slower than usual by the time I got back.

So, naturally, I figured it'd be a good day to work lower body in the gym--squats, hyperextensions, leg extensions, that kind of stuff. Pretty good--and you know you're doing well when you work yourself until you're feeling nauseated and dizzy when you set down the weight. Yeah, really.

I've been taking creatine for a while--I tried some when it was the new big thing on the market, stopped taking it after I ran out, and then started again when they came out with studies suggesting that oral creatine usage improved memory as well as athletic performance. It's cheap--at least when you buy the raw powder--so there's not much reason not to use it. The one reason I do hear often enough is that gobbling a spoonful of creatine powder is "yucky." Well, that's where squats come back in: if you think a bit of creatine powder is too yucky, you just need to do squats until you puke a few times. Then it won't seem so bad. You see, it all works out.

Actually, it's been years since I've barfed from doing squats, but I have done it a few times. I'm not very proud of this...more like just a little bit. :)

Then, still being in a movie mood (and already breathing heavily, so it's not like I really needed a movie that would inspire this reaction), I figured I'd watch, Muppets From Space. It's a fun watch, with more in common with the Kill Bill soundtrack than I'd have expected, and more realistic fight sequences. One thing that just didn't suit my mood, though, was that it starts out with our hero, Gonzo (and he is so often our hero), filling the screen with way too much angst about being, as he puts it, a "one-of-a-kind freak." Hey, some of us are proud of being one-of-a-kind freaks. That's is a good thing.

But, hey, if everybody--whether or not they're made out of cloth and foam with a hand inside--were happy with themselves, we'd lose a *lot* of movie plots. And, well, as much as I feel that I have in common with Gonzo, at least in the Muppet Show TV series, there's a lot of kinky stuff that muppets are into that I'd just as soon skip. That whole "hand inside" thing, for starters. Bleah.

I've been in a serious movie mood lately, either going to the theater or firing up my own home theater almost every night, which has been making a serious dent in my pile of still-wrapped DVDs. Given my job description, it's probably surprising that I don't do this more often than I do.

Feeling incomplete somehow? Alone in the world? Like you've lost your other half?

I don't shop on ebay much--I think the last time was almost a year ago when I'd gotten some body armor for a film project that then didn't happen--but you might recall from earlier this month I'd gotten the urge to update some of the servers and, as it happened, I'd ordered a couple of parts for the Sun Ultra machines from an ebay seller on the East Coast. They showed up today, complete with a very nice fan letter.

Which is pretty amazingly cool when you think about it, at least for a fairly ordinary techno-geek like myself. I've gotten a few other fan letters lately, and it's funny how they come from random places in the world; certainly I get more of them from Europe than from Colorado.

Though it is true that Europe is bigger than Colorado. I checked.

Even so, I'm probably more recognizable in Colorado than in Europe--at least more people speak up about it, anyway. Sometimes it's a little puzzling--I'd stopped to get gas earlier and while I was waiting for my tank to fill, a guy came over to tell me that his sister had been dreaming about me the night before. He wasn't sure of the details beyond that, though; I'm just hoping it wasn't the kind where she woke up screaming. Sometimes I think this is pretty close to the best of all possible worlds: if I were somebody of stratospheric reknown like Tom Cruise, people might react with shock and awe when I'm out pumping gas, but I'm just a guy whom they might have been gracious enough to invite into their living room for ninety minutes some past evening--kind of like a quirky, eccentric neighbor who occasionally attempts to take over the world--so it's like having a world full of friends I just hadn't met yet.

some days it's you and me against the world

'Course the *last* person who spoke up about recognizing me from a movie thought I'd been in Jason X. I didn't think to ask if he'd thought I'd played the title role. Hmmm...I'm going to go check my complexion and make sure it hasn't abruptly gotten much, much worse since this morning.

Life at the treehouse isn't all just playing with the servers and troubleshooting network equipment. Sometimes there's real work to be done.

This weekend, for example, I've been appearing in the upcoming sexy comedy, Strip School, the heartwarming tale of a troop of exotic dancers who start a school teaching the finer points of their trade to everyone from frustrated housewives to aspiring fashion models and thus contribute towards the betterment of all mankind.

(Don't we look like the next hit sitcom?)

Regardless of what you might expect from the title, you'll be relieved to know that I do *not* have a nude scene. [insert sound of crowd cheering] It's something of a change of pace for me: I don't have to dismember anybody or pick up my assailants and throw them through the walls...I'm not even a bad guy in this one. Go figure.

Think of it as a chance to rest up a bit before playing a demon in a month or two.

...even if I do still look a little demonic, all the same.

I've only got twenty-three rooms here at the treehouse; it's too bad that I don't have at least a few more, because I keep getting everything tidied up and put away...and then soon enough I end up messing up one or more rooms all over again by building computers in them.

I guess there are worse habits one could have. Give me a bit, and I'm sure I can come up with an example or two.

This particular batch started with whipping up a machine designed mainly for playing back high-definition video in the theater, but then I had one of those nights that just wasn't meant for sleeping, so I got started on a few other computer projects.