Neon Run

Brooke has been busy with other projects and she's been encouraging me to contribute to the blog, so hopefully she won't mind if I post about one of the really awesome events we participated in recently.

A few months ago we saw a deal online for tickets to participate in the Neon Run.  For those of you who don't know what the Neon Run is (and I'm assuming that's pretty much everyone, including us before we saw this deal), I like to describe it as halfway between a 5k and a rave (minus the illegal drugs and pacifiers).  It's held at night, and everyone dresses in either neon colors or glow in the dark stuff.  Every so often they have these tents where they've set up a bunch of black lights.  As you run through they spray blacklight paint on everyone so you glow in the black lights.

We have been planning to do a race together for quite some time, so when we saw this deal we thought it might be a fun way to get started.  Our original plan was to come up with really awesome costumes for this race, but between starting the new job and looking for places to live (we're moving soon, but that's another post), I didn't get much farther than ordering a bunch of LED strips from ebay.

The week of the race came and I decided to throw something together that would still be cool, but not quite as incredible as we'd originally planned (we're saving that for Halloween).  We got some glow in the dark fabric paint and decorated some cheapo shirts.  We also used some black light body paint (provided in our race packet).  Here are the results:

Brooke would have you know that  the B on her shirt
stands for Brooke and not for the Red
Sox since she is a Yankee's fan

It was Brooke's idea to trace my
veins in blacklight paint.

The things I'm most proud of, however, were the LEDs.  I first put a couple rows of LED's behind my race number and hooked them to a battery and a switch so I could light up my number.  Then I put a strip of blue LED's around each of our shoes and hooked them to a 9V battery that I taped to the back of each shoe.  This is what they looked like at the beginning of the race:

But as it got darker, they stood out more and more.  I have never in my life gotten so many (or any) compliments about my shoes.  We literally could not go more than 100 yards without hearing someone say "look at those shoes!"  or "your shoes are awesome!"  It was a nice boost to my ego.  This picture should give you a better idea of what they looked like in the dark.

The run itself was pretty fun.  It was definitely not a race where everyone was super competitive.  I'm pretty sure some people walked the whole thing.  That was good for us, since neither of us is that fast.  We jogged most of the way.  Most of the time when we stopped, it was to adjust or fix our LED shoes.  I think we were both a little surprised at how easy it was*.

*Brooke's Note: I had heard of "fun runs," but I always just thought "fun run" meant "it's short, which is more fun and less hard/serious than more miles would be." Maybe I was right, but I felt that the Neon Run was probably the most literal definition of "fun run" I will ever see. The starting area was totally filled and refilled over and over with the thousands and thousands of runners, and it was actually nearly impossible to run at the beginning. From there on, it was more of a "go through the cool blacklight course and, if you want, you can run!" OK, most of the people ran at least some of the time, but loootttsss of the people defaulted to walking except during the exciting parts or after the first half mile. So, this is the perfect run for people who want to do a 5k where you actually are just at a giant party that moves.

Here are some more pictures and videos of us during/at the run.

Brooke's high school advice to teachers

I was going through some old papers today and found this list I made in high school. I don't know if I was feeling especially great about classes I loved or especially frustrated with classes I didn't, but it's still an interesting list. There are one or two I don't completely agree with anymore, but most I think I could still get behind. (Photo credit - the Washington Post.)

--

PRACTICAL THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM SCHOOL AND TEACHERS

1. Never try to make someone write a satire on something they don't care about.
2. Fun and creativity are good. People remember the things they enjoyed learning. Keep the fun focused on the subject and it will make the subject fun, not just the experience.
3. Ethos, pathos, logos! It works in persuasive argument, why not in teaching?
4. Remember that your students do not have your experience, and just because you think YOU can get a good "why the author wrote the book" from an R.L. Stine doesn't mean that they can (or that you're right).
5. Be fair.
6. Encourage people to write what they know, and to expand what they know so they can write more (and more effectively).
7. Invest yourself in your students. People respond well to sincerity.
8. Yours is not your students' only class, and school is not their only activity. Give efficient homework whenever possible.
9. Hold debates. In any class. Over anything, from whether or not Napoleon was a child of the Enlightenment to why this particular mathematical method is better than that one in a given situation. People like to argue.
10. Hold to your due dates enough of the time that your students believe you when you give them, but don't be afraid to give extensions.
11. Don't be so serious!
12. Convince yourself first.
13. Hands on, hands on, hands on.
14. Make kids think. Don't just present the material. Make them ask questions.
15. Some kids will never respond. Try to reach them anyway. Don't treat them like a lost cause.

Maker Faire 2013

For those who weren't around for last year's report, the Maker Faire is a huge DIY festival that takes place every year in San Mateo. (They have others around the country, too.) It's put on by Make Magazine. It's a great community of people, and really fun to see the things everyone comes up with. Also, I don't know why this is showing up as all-caps, because it looks like boring, lower-case Times New Roman to me. So, sorry about that.

Anyway, for my birthday, Jonny got me a Wondermark comic book and a really excellent Wondermark print, of a comic that I might as well have written. He got them for me specifically because we had tickets to the Maker Faire, and David Malki (who does the Wondermark comic) had just announced that he would be there with a booth. So Jon got me things to have signed!

(That says "bibliophibians" up there.) We went to the Wondermark booth as pretty much our first activity of the day. He does this thing called a Roll-a-Sketch, where you pay five bucks and roll some dice that correspond with different pictures. He will then draw you a comic of your very own, combining those pictures in crazy ways. So I did this! I was the first one of the day.

The "roll" part of "Roll-a-Sketch":




The "sketch" part:



The outcome:

After that, we explored the rest of the place. Here is "The Imperial March" being played on Tesla coils (this was Jon's favorite part):




And here is art made from piano parts:

And here is a thing where a guy took a piano out to Half Moon Bay and played on it every night for a few weeks, letting it deteriorate in the weather before setting it on fire for the last concert (more). Yay for the Maker Faire!

gonna-be-old-later things

While I have no children (and am not pregnant), I do have a thing with saving stuff (less like hoarding, more like scrapbooking). This morning as I was lying in bed, I thought about a sheet of 37-cent stamps I had, and was wondering whether to use them up or save a couple in the name of When Stamps Were 37-Cents.

Which got me thinking, how old would they have to be for someone to care?

Which got me thinking, who would get those stamps when I died? (likely my currently non-existent posterity)

Which got me thinking, what if those posterity people were to have a packet of their own of stuff from when they were born?

Which got me thinking, what would I put in it?

I think this is not a new idea, but crowdsourcing is fun, so. I made a mental list and would love additional thoughts. What is any and every thing you could possibly put in a packet or book of "Stuff from When I Was Born?"

• Stamps
• A postmarked letter
• A newspaper (probably the most common one, but possibly to get harder in coming years with paper news getting more scarce)
• Their first rattle (I have this of mine)
• A picture of the gas pump prices
• A picture of your car(s)
• A picture of the building you live in
• A picture of your cell phone (or even the cell phone itself, when you're done using it)
• A video of you with your new baby and spouse and friends (it would be interesting to see what my parents' sociality was like when they were 22)
• A copy of a movie that was made that year or your favorite book
• A few of your favorite or iconic comic strips from that day, or an iconic comic book printed that year
• Other era-iconic things, like a Netflix envelope, a Hot-and-Ready Little Caesar's pizza box top (give me a break, I'm brainstorming), the front of a couple cereal boxes (again), a fast food bag with the company logo on it, a piece of iconically fashionable clothing
• A Wired/Time/Newsweek/People magazine from that month or week
• A list of your favorite songs from that year
• A piece of art from/about the city you live in
• A list of statistics from that year (basic census data, sports teams that are winning, important weather patterns like Hurricane Sandy or the Oklahoma tornadoes)
• A For the Strength of Youth or Personal Progress booklet (those things get updated relatively frequently, and the old ones are AWESOME... one Personal Progress goal was that you could pour kerosene in all standing water for one square mile to get rid of mosquitoes, and one important youth standard was to not go out in public with curlers in your hair)
• Your favorite print ads from magazines or direct mail
• Pictures of your favorite billboards
• Ticket stubs from a movie or concert or game you went to that year (both for the movie of that year and for the look of what today's ticket stubs look like)
• Screenshots of your most-used websites or music players or programs or Freecell?
• If you live in a small town, pictures of the main street (big cities are probably less likely to change as much over a lifetime ... unless you get a picture of Times Square with the ads and everything)

Anything else?

p.s. I think this is also known as a time capsule.

why we love Oakland

OK, one reason, anyway. One night a couple of weeks ago, we wanted something to do, so we just googled for stuff to do in Oakland and came up with this festival. There's a big warehouse called American Steel Studios in west Oakland, just a few blocks from where we used to live, and it's been converted to art studios that individual artists rent out. They were having a small festival, where you could take tours inside and also check out their fire art. with gushing flames. nbd.

Jon wants to make his own fire art now, so watch out. (He was already itching for a warehouse, so this only made it worse.) Also, just outside the building, they have these gigantic, awe-inspiring metal statues of people, which you can drive by and see at any time. We've been by the outside of the warehouse a few times to check those out, but we had never been inside. Here are a few statue shots my friend Esther got awhile back. I particularly love the chains-for-hair thing.

And here is a tiny model of them, that we saw in the warehouse, and a cool photo of them done by "Eileen, Kneela, and Epiphany":

Other random things include a model Golden Gate Bridge stuffed in a corner behind some plywood and how we saw our friend Joe Aliling from church there! Oh, also the warehouse filled with studios (there are several aisles like that, and there's that much space again behind us.

Also, some fun pictures Jonny got:

We love Oakland, and in particular we miss living in west Oakland. Yay for fire art!

the enemy's gate is down

Years ago, Jon donated to KQED (the Bay Area NPR station - yes, the name is a little hilarious) and received two free passes to iFly, an indoor skydiving place. (Fact: He told me about the passes when we were first starting to date, and you can measure the growth path of our relationship by my degree of certainty that I would be the lucky +1 to use the second ticket.) Well, a few weeks ago, we finally used those passes to celebrate our anniversary.

How it works (according to Jon): They had a couple of really big fans that would pull the air through this tunnel. It's basically like blowing on a feather to keep it up in the air. The force of the wind blowing on you is enough to counteract your weight, and they could change the speed of the fan. The way you shape your body also changes how much the wind pushes on you. The wind was going 100-130 mph, depending on the person and they were using 200-300 kw of energy to do it.


We signed some waivers, watched another group for awhile, watched a safety video and learned a few tips, and then we suited up and headed for the wind chamber. Each person got two one-minute turns. Here we are, flying!

 

Here are some other people doing the same thing as we did (but we have video of them and not us).





Here is an instructor demo (he's showing off and doing tricks - our instructor was more fun to watch, more Spiderman-y, but we couldn't take cameras in during our session. And this guy is fun too.)




Here's what we thought:

Jon, overall: It was easier than I thought it was going to be. I thought it would be impossible to control, that I would just be flying around randomly, but it turned out that my movements around happened very gradually. it took some time but I figured out how to kind of stay in one spot. It was fun. It was more work than I expected - afterward, I found that I was more sore than I expected, because of the way they have you stretch your arms and chest and shoulders back. It was pretty fun. I think it was definitely worth going once for free. I don't know if I would pay the full price to go that first time, or to go again. I thought it was going to be a little more freaky than it was, but it wasn't really scary to me at all.
Brooke, overall: I had fun. Their first-time prices are higher than their after-that prices, and I don't know if it would have been worth the first-time prices for our isolated experience of two minutes each. I think if you were going to go more times, it would be more fun once you got good enough to be able to do tricks and stuff. It's just, I naively expected it to feel like zero-gravity or something (hence the blogpost title), but it didn't at all - you feel almost completely supported while you're in the air. It was fun to think about the fact that you weren't being supported by anything solid, though. The instructor had done both indoor and real skydiving, and he said the main difference was that in regular skydiving, the air is harder, but past that it didn't feel much different. So that was cool.

Jon's hardest part: It was hard to control where I was going. I wasn't too concerned about being very good at it, though, so that didn't bother me too much. I couldn't move forward or backward on command, I was bouncing off the walls pretty regularly.
Brooke's hardest part: I COULD NOT CONTROL MY SPIT. Seriously, I was wiping it off my forehead at the end.



Jon's most-fun part: I think it was fun when I got to the point to where I could think about it enough to realize I was floating in the air. It was also really fun to watch Brooke. I did not notice any drool at all. She looked like she was having lots of fun.
Brooke's most-fun part: I loooved the end when the instructor would hold onto you and whirl you up high (like in the first video). Except, it was weird because I had kind of a hard time breathing during that, at first. But it was a rush.

Overall, we both had fun, even though we both wanted it to be more like floating. Yay for indoor skydiving!

exercise week with a broken elevator

Lately, I've been trying to get back on the exercise train. My friend Kimber is an instructor at a gym called Fuse Fitness, and Jon and I are sans gym membership right now, so I thought I'd try it out. Fuse is one of those one-room gyms along a strip, where they only do classes and personal training. There are no machines or anything, it's just a smallish floor that hosts one class at a time and some space for individual training in the back.

Here's a secret: Except for the occasional Church activity exercise class, I have never been to a one of those, and I have always been sort of terrified of them. At our last gym, I always would be on the elliptical or treadmill or whatever machines faced the class floor, and I would see everyone walk in with their yoga mats and towels and think, "It is going to take eons to work up the guts to go to one of those, because look at all their STUFF. I am gonna forget something and I'll look stupid in the first five minutes. And that's before they all notice that I am too out of shape to do hardcore exercise video work for a whole hour."

So after months of being interested in/scared of trying out this tiny gym, I just stopped thinking about it and went, last Thursday. And I got lost and couldn't find it, so I went home and went running instead, but then I found out they were doing a free intro class that night, so I went. (YES, THIS MEANS I WORKED OUT TWO TIMES IN ONE DAY.) It was a TRX class, which I had never done before, and there were three attendees and two instructors. This was excellent because I had awful form at everything, so one of the instructors was nice enough take breaks to solve my problems while the other one was leading things. For the uninitiated, TRX is a thing where there are metal rings screwed into the ceiling with adjustable straps hanging from them, and you hang from the straps in various torturous ways. I was sore until Sunday. It was fun! OK, really, it was fun. New twists on old exercises are always more fun, and it wasn't intimidating, because it was supposed to be an intro class, and it was, you know, three people. And the instructors were friendly, encouraging, not-businessy, human people I felt totally comfortable with, which I'll admit was something I probably have worried about in my class-avoidance mindset.

I paid for a trial week, so here's how it's been. My first class, Monday morning, was called Metabolic Surge, and it was a lot harder than the TRX class, probably because there was cardio, and cardio is hard. At the end, I was exhausted, but I didn't feel stupid or underprepared. It was nice, because it was set up so you did a certain exercise for 50 seconds and then rested for 10 seconds, and then did another exercise for 50 seconds, etc., but you could go as slow as you needed to, and there were lots of modifications.

Tuesday morning was the devil class. I went to an early class, because I had other commitments during all the other class times. (It was really early. This time, four attendees and one instructor. When I walked in, the instructor said, "Thank you [for showing up for this early class]!" Haha.) He was nice and bantery and then we did squats and pushups for twelve minutes straight, and I couldn't think about any mannerisms at all anymore. Next came some ab work, and then he dropped the bomb. We were all going to sit on the wall, and we could have a break from it while we took turns doing 20 pushups. So, there we are, four of us sitting on the wall while the fifth is doing pushups, and then as soon as they finish the next person's down. Until when? Until, collectively, we had done five hundred pushups. That is a lot of sitting on the wall. We finished up with more ab work, and then this quivery version of me walked to the car and drove home.

When I go running, I usually try to run extra fast for the last stretch. You know, pour in all the rest of my energy. My goal after Monday's class was to apply that principle to the classes, so I showed up to Kimber's core class today with that goal. In some ways, I achieved it; we had sets of exercises to do with 100 times of jumping rope in between each set, and I was pretty terrible during the first set (and maybe didn't even get to 100 ... shhh), the second set I did 33 jumps at a time and finished to 100, and the third time I did 50 at a time. So there was improvement. But my muscles were so done from the other classes, that by the time I got to the end of this one, I realized that attending the class at all was kind of my last master push. I felt super wimpy because my muscles felt so weak and shaky that sometimes it was all I could do just to stand up again after floor stuff. I still did almost everything, though. (And the last straw was that our building's elevator was broken this whole week, and we live a lot of stairs away from the ground. It took me probably three times as long as usual to get up the stairs all this week.)

I took a rest day on Thursday (to give me some hope of completing Friday's class). Which was smart, because on Friday I did TRX again, and there were a lot of hamstring workouts. When I did my evaluation at my last gym, my hamstrings were the only abnormally inflexible muscle I had, so they get sore easily when I do much with them. What with sitting around all weekend for General Conference, it was Sunday night again before I could stretch my leg out straight without feeling it all down the back of my legs. Ouch.


But, I did get the weekend off. I left Monday and Tuesday this week for homework and chores and stuff like that, and headed back today... because I signed up for a month this time! I went to Kimber's core class again, which I was better at this time because I wasn't super sore.

**EDIT** I should mention that Kimber is awesome at this. She is great at showing people how to do things right in a way that doesn't make them feel bad for doing it wrong, totally patient and encouraging, and every time I felt wimpy, she would come by with a well-timed compliment on my form or ability to do something I didn't actually think I was going to be able to do. Hooray for positive reinforcement! She also picks the best music.

They tell me I'll never be as sore again as that first week - wish me luck!