Project I am working on at the moment tends to require me to be on conference calls from 7:00 or 7:30 am most mornings. Next Monday will be worse as I will be starting at 06:00! The project is a complicated one from politicial and requirements perspective and is absorbing a lot more time and energy than first expected... Good thing is that it is a short engagement and should be done before the end of the month. Upside is that the manager of the team I am working on (as it is not a Radia project!) now may want me engaged on a year long process re-engineering project!

Apart from that we went to a book signing by Charlaine Harris at Murder by the Book (just down the road from us). Attendees were 95% middle age women and the atmosphere was a lot more vocal and at times screamy than the Jim Butcher one was. Charlaine also talked for a lot less time, so we were able to get out relatively quickly (also helped that I had an insider who helped bump me up the queue to get the book signed!)

Added to all that is Capoeira. You may remember some previous posts about "Mr Dip" from a while back...

... sure is harder than at sea-level.

I am up in Colorado (Fort Collins) for training this week. The training is not physical training, but work related training. Last night I took a drive down to Boulder (about an hour drive) and went to train with the local branch of our Capoeira group. It was fun to see the local group, although almost everyone I know was not there, except for Leomar, who was teaching the class. Anyway, I very quickly found how much harder your body has to work when you are not used to the altitude. Both my lungs and muscles felt the strain, and today I ache like I had worked out twice as long and twice as hard as I actually did!

I knew this would be the case (being harder to train) but it is one thing to know it and another to experience it!

Last week was Kraaawwzzzyyy, with a capital K!

We had a week long Capoeira workshop, leading up to our Batizado. The workshops were classes everynight, due to run for 2 hours, but normally running for closer to 3 (although a good 45 minutes of that was the teachers talking to us). There was also a series of workshops on Saturday but we could not make those as we had to travel down to Port Arthur for the patient party that Angel's parents host twice a year. Also, Thursday through Sunday we were hosting two of the participants who had flown in for the Batizado, a professor of Capoeira from New York, and one of his students. Both fantastically nice people, and we would not have asked for nicer guests in our house!

So, the workshops were leading up to our Batizado, or gradution. It is a grading ceremony where the teachers give the audience an overview of what Capoeira is and do mini demonstrations. Then comes the grading, where you are given your new cord (if you are getting one!!) and then you play with one or several of the mestre's or professors. They will normally try and trick you out and try to take you down. Then after all that, there is a open Roda, where anyone can play.

It was a fun day, but slightly manic. The week was a long one, with early mornings due to work, and late nights due to Capoeira.

Oh yeah, after the graduation was over, we all went to a Mexican restaurant for lunch and then parted ways. At that point Angel and I went home, I packed and we headed over to my parents for a low key, pre Birthday celebration, attended by family and some close friends. At a little after 8:30 that evening, recently drugged up on Celebrex (for my back), I jumped in the car and took a 4 hour drive up to Dallas (actually Plano) for work. And so here I am, just after 7am on Tuesday, my 30th Birhtday, sitting onsite at a customer. I will be here through late morning at which time I drive back home to at least spend a little of my birthday at home!

Do I feel older? Not really, not no more than I normally do when forced to get out of bed at 6am!

Friday night we were at the Relay for Life which is a cancer awareness relay walk. Basically try and keep someone on the track from your team at all times. Problem is that there was no visibility of the whole track and so you could not see how many people are on the track... and no competitive reason to keep running. End result is that although there were a lot of people at the start (19:00) but by midnight over half the people were gone, including more than half our team. I started to fade around 1am, and I went to the car and had a nap, but Angel and her mum stayed up all night. By 3am, we were down to 3 or 4 people in the team, and more than half of the other teams had already packed up and left. Relay was due to finish at 7am, but around 6am someone stepped onto the stage and basically said 'thanks for coming, if anyone turns up they can keep on walking, but BYE BYE!'.

One interesting thing during the night. They had a 'Mister Relay' competition and the woman was calling for contestants to come up on stage. At one point I am sure I heard her say 'Would all Mystery Lay contestants come up onstage?'. I was shocked... they had cub scouts there and all!

We packed up around 7am, and got home around 8am. Sleep and then next step of the weekend...

Went to see 2 more wedding locations and have now settled on 3 potential locations... details to follow. We should have the quotes for all locations by end of next week but the three we are looking at are;

Soo, I was browsing Google Video the other day and came across several clips of our Mestre (Capoeira Master... i.e. the guy who teaches us!) from a couple of years ago...

I meant to post this a couple of days ago, but Mestre (our Capoeira instructor) read my email, and we talked about it before class on Monday. Class started off just as Angel and myself. Funnily enough, Mr. Dip and his friend arrived at class shortly after we had started. I had two options before he arrived to deal with the situation, and had Mestre's backing on either. I could either pull him aside and talk to him, or I could essentially kick him a couple of times in the Roda and tell him that is what he gets for pushing me then running away.

When he arrived, Mestre pulled us to the side and told him how he was out of line. The kid threw out a half hearted apology then did not want to talk about it any more. Mestre left us alone and I managed to get him to talk, but the long and short was that he was frustrated in general and ended up taking it out on me because;

Talk about work on this post, and I rarely seem to mention Capoeira, which is a large part of my life outside of work, and the place where I was lucky enough to meet Angelique. I don't speak about work because I tend to feel that speaking about difficulties, hassles or general crap at work, I feel it is unprofessional to air it in such a public forum. The reason I don't tend to talk about capoeira is different. We go to class, train, either well or not, and leave having normally had an extremely good workout.

Tonight was different. Sure we had a good workout, and class was actually going really well. If you don't know about Capoeira, it is a Brazilian martial art that is played (and it is a game between two people) in a roda, or circle. The circle is made up of participants who are playing instruments, clapping, and singing, and who form the nucleus of the players for the game.

Our instructor, or Mestre, went to pains to tell us to play a good game, and that means to repect each other, give each other space, and not to do anything stupid. After a couple of games I started to play with someone, lets call him Sir Dipshit. So Dip started the game very fast and very aggressively, really trying to push me around in the game. I am happy to play that kind of game, with the right person, but was making sure that I was in control of everything I did. He then proceeded to shove me, two-handed, trying to push me out of the roda. This is neither a standard technique in the game, nor is it a way to play nicely. The thing is... if he wanted to push me, then I was happy and ready to push back. Unfortunately, as soon as he did that, someone tried to buy the game, so as to take Dipshit out, leaving me to play with the new person. I pushed that person back and tried to pull Dipshit back into the game, but he was too much of a coward to come and play again.

That left me in a very bad mood, and to make things worse, our Mestre praised him for finally playing more aggressively. If we had continued, I would more than likely have hurt the guy, and that would have ended in me being the person in the wrong, and being held up as a bad example. These inconsistencies affected both Angel and I tonight and have resulted in us both feeling very pissed off with the whole process.

Neither of us are going to quit, but I am certainly going to curtail my game until I get clear directions on how I should play the game.

Meant to post this a while a go. Angel any myself treated ourselves to a high-class romantic type dinner at Chick-fil-a (Well, with someone on Weight Watchers, it really is a bit of a treat [honest!]). While sitting there eating we saw the usual weirdos walking through including this girl, who could not have been much more than 8, and if she was not in the late stages of pregnacy then she should be barred from stepping within 100 yards of any fast food joint. My only question is how could her parents let her get knocked up or allow her to continue to eat so badly that she gains that much weight???
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This past weekend there was a lot going on in Houston. There was the Shell Houston Open (PGA golf tournament) and the International Festival (iFest). After getting back into town late Friday night from Milwaukee where I was for a 3-hour meeting, we went to Capoeira training on Saturday morning. From there I went home, showered up and headed straight up to Humble (pronounced with a silent H) to watch some golf. Leaving the car in the parking lot of a mall, you take a shuttle bus to the course. I then spent 3 hours walking around trying to find a good spot to watch some golf. I saw some great shots, and some shots that the pros were unhappy with, but which I would consider great if I hit them! :p Anyway, after 3 hours in the sun, I head back into town (taking close to an hour to get the bus back and then wandering round trying to fin the car in the massive mall lot! I then grab a bite to eat, get changed and head down to the iFest for a street Roda. After playing both Capoeira and Maculele I proceed to find water and almost die from dehydration. I was completely parched! Spent the rest of the evening drinking and not needing to pee! :o
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Sunday, which is normally golf day, was not. I was tired, and none of my local golf buddies managed to organise a round, so I spent the day, reading, eating and going to friend's places for coffee! Much more relaxed than Saturday!
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Final happening was the realisation at 3:30 am Monday morning that I had not put my time into the HP time card system. Normally I would not care, but management is cracking down and I would have expected a call from some big wig in management giving me a lecture on bla bla bla... anyway, 3:30 in the morning and I stumble downstairs to put my time into the system... needless to say, I am slightly tired today, but hey Monday is one step closer to the weekend again, where I hope to catch up on some lost sleep!

The Grupo Cafu Capoeira site that I have been hosting in a subfolder on wolfdream now has its own full-time home now.

http://www.grupocafu.com

Site will start to undergo a revamping including building an admin console to allow me or anyone else to update the site easily and quickly!

Robert, central figure to GCCA in Houston has been working on updating his site for the Capoeira group, and with a bit of help, we now have an updated site online. The main site is at

http://www.geocities.com/gcca_cafuleaored/index.html
or
http://www.wolfdream.com/gcca/index.html