To help me meet my fundraising goal of $250, I would like to offer to paint a portrait of a pet to anyone that donates $50 or more through my donation page.

Here’s the deal:

• Donate $50 or more to the Time to Fly event via my donation page
  
• I’ll get an email notifying me of the donation
• I will do a happy dance, sadly there will be no witnesses
• Within one week of your donation, I will contact you via the email that you provided when you made your donation to discuss the details of your pet portrait and get reference photos

Rules, restrictions and mumbo-jumbo:

• This offer is limited to pets or animals in general only. Trust me, you don’t want me painting your child or your favorite vacation spot.
• Reference photos must be supplied by you and you must have legal rights to them. Please do not pull an image off of the internet and say you want that painted. That’s not nice.
• Art will be done using the supplies I currently have. I’m not made of money at the moment and don’t intend on buying a bunch of new supplies to feed this whim. Check out the list below for available options. You aren’t limited to paintings!
• All pieces will be completed in the year 2013. If you are thinking about making this a gift, I will do my best to work with a deadline. But please tell me in advance.
• The size of the piece may be limited by the amount of your donation. I’m not going to do an epic three canvas triptych of Fluffy riding into battle for $50. Email me if you want more specific sizing information.
• I reserve the right to photograph and publish the finished painting, progress photos and/or your pets name on this website. I respect your privacy and will not publish your name or email information.
• If you are not located in the Twin Cities area, we will need to arrange shipping. All shipping fees to be paid for by recipient.
• I reserve the right to cap this offer at any time if I get overwhelmed with requests. Although I have my doubts people will be lining up for this. PROVE ME WRONG!
• This offer ends on June 22nd. All funds must be raised before the Time to Fly event. Paintings will be complete in the year 2013.
• These rules are subject to change if I think of something else important.

Mediums, supplies and options:

I have A LOT of art supplies. Over the years I’ve sampled waaaay more techniques than any sane person would bother with.  That being said, you can pick and choose from any of the fun options below. I am notorious for mixing mediums and would love to explore your ideas.

• Acrylic paint (Canvas sizes available: 8″ x 8″ or 8″ x 10″, larger canvas options available for larger donations, email me for details)
• Chalk pastel
• Stencils/spray paint
• Scratchboard (Sizes available: 8″ x 8″ or 8″ x 10″)
• Munny dolls
• Watercolor
• Water soluble pencils
• Charcoal
• Espresso watercolor
• Embroidery
• Digital illustration
• Decorative paper
• Watercolor paper
• Yupo paper 
• Gloss varnish
• Spray fixative

I was inspired to do this by my co-worker, Annette who is having a bake sale to help raise money. If you want some of the most amazing cookies in your life, head over to her site and give more money! If you decide you want cookies AND art, I could be convinced to have your donation to Annette’s bake sale count toward your donation for art too. I would need to confirm your donation with Annette before beginning and the balance of your donation would need to be made on my donation page so I can get closer to my goal too!

• Why are you still reading this? Go Donate!

I didn’t get to go to many classes this week but I did manage to go on Tuesday for a Beginner Parkour class. Unfortunately (or fortunately, however you want to look at it) the calendar that Mitch put up on Monday that shows what the weekly rotation of topics are was completely wrong. So when I thought it was a “B” day which meant I would be going to a class about Slap Outs and Landing Continuum 5-7 (honestly I have NO idea what that is, which is why I was curious enough to check it out), it was actually an “A” day which meant we were working on various Flying and Soaring Vaults.

Between not having the muscle memory of what each vault should look like, not feeling able to get the power from my legs and not feeling like my arms are strong enough to support me through the jump, vaults and I don’t get along very well. Making them start sooner and end later with “flying” and “soaring” did not help matters at all. I’m not too proud to admit that my fear of vaults is so great that I was terrified of doing vaults in front of so many people. People that for the most part know vaults and can do them with all the fun flair that I can barely dream of achieving.

As panic stricken as I was during the first five minutes when I heard we were doing vaults, I ended up really enjoying the class because it got me doing something that was out of my comfort zone. I got to hang out with some great people and work on getting better at something I might usually avoid. I need to get over that silly fear, this was just more proof that showing up is 99% of the battle for me.

Tonight I decided to check out the “Flips!” class and see if it’s something I should bother with. My knees are still being cranky little jerks about all this fitness stuff so I had my doubts. I’ll be honest, as the title of this post implies, my attempts at flips were pretty much all flops. But I had fun. I’m slowly getting over my paranoia of being the only woman in class and realizing it really, truly, absolutely doesn’t matter. The guys are all great and welcoming, and they never do anything to make me feel awkward.

The random doodle below is a reference to one of the guys in class constantly wanting to add fire to things to make it more fun. The original is from the amazing Hyperbole and a Half, you should go read it now.

FIRE ALL THE THINGS!

Time for bed, we’ll see how angry my knees are in the morning. My goal is to go to two classes tomorrow, Weaponry and Workout with Chad…(they need to come up with a better name for that class…)

Anyway, the first time I was supposed to do this move, I was still recovering from a weight lifting session I had had a few days prior and my back/shoulders/arms were useless. I felt weak and embarrassed when I was the only one who couldn’t do it. My feet kicked up and smashed into the bar without being able to clear it. I kept getting freaked out when I doubted my arms could support me through the twist. To be fair, I seriously don’t think they could in the state they were in, but I hated looking weak.

Last night, I got off work a little early and decided to go to the gym to hoop a bit, knowing that the Freerunning class was covering these again and doubting I would actually stay for the class. I’m finding that showing up is 99% of the battle. Once I’m there, my fears are pretty well gone and I can just give it my best shot. I’m glad I did because the feeling of getting it on the first try, with fully recovered arms, felt AMAZING!!! I don’t care that Skinny says it’s a stupidly easy move. Little wins like that are the best.

Making friends is becoming easier as well. I feel like I hide my insecurities with bitch-face sometimes and it makes talking to new people very difficult. The more I lighten up, the more I realize that just about everyone there wants to see everyone else succeed at whatever pace they are going. There are a few that probably couldn’t care less about fluffy crap like that, but that’s okay. I was praising this adorable 10-year-old kid for is awesome monkey-like skills, telling him how much I wish I had this kind of thing when I was his age and he just beamed with happiness while swinging into another impossibly effortless one handed pull-thru with that care-free “look what I can do” attitude.

Tonight I’m going to another weight training class, hopefully I won’t be too broken for the next week. I’m looking forward to the time when working out doesn’t feel like being run over by a steamroller the next day. My body just isn’t used to this stuff because I’ve always wimped out before I saw results. The fact that all of this is helping my confidence so much is fueling my desire to go more often. I’m even getting over my fear of the “normal” classes!

I’m not sure why this time feels so different. A good chunk of it is probably because I got in the habit of going to the gym for something I could do right away. When I started taking Krav Maga at Fight or Flight Academy in mid-December last year, I was able to catch on quickly and everyone in the class was welcoming. I started making friends on the first day. The community of a hobby is generally what draws me in and keeps my attention the longest. Seeing people do amazing things makes me happy and gives me hope that I can overcome my own limitations. I needed that to get my foot in the door and after training in Krav 1-3 times a week for 4 months, I feel more confident.

Earlier this month, I saw that the owners of the gym were offering a women’s parkour class. It kind of felt like they were meeting me half-way; they offered a more comfortable environment for me to start training in, I just had to show up and show that it had value. After three weeks, I can say that the classes are still humbling, but I’m not comparing myself to guys that already have the upper body strength to do practically anything they want. I’m to the point where I actually kind of want to start going to the normal Beginner Parkour and Freerunning classes to get more training time in. I don’t think I’m much farther along in my ability to overcome the physical obstacles, but some of the mental blocks are more manageable than they were before.

Last week I officially made myself an Unlimited Member at FOFA, which means instead of only being able to take 8 classes a month, I can take whatever I want, whenever I want. Two months ago I was struggling to make it to the 8 classes a month and feeling like I was throwing money down the drain, but this month I was having trouble choosing between classes I should take without going over my limit. I took away that barrier and now I’m just running with it.

As a nice bonus, I’m starting to see and feel results. My weight has remained pretty constant, but I’m feeling more toned, which is a bigger win in my book anyway. More importantly though, my knees are slowly getting used to the idea that their vacation is over. After years of telling myself “I can’t do that, I have crappy knees”, I’ve silenced the excuses and decided that if I never try, I’ll never be able to do anything. With the number of knee replacements and severe joint pain in my family, I’m realizing that if I don’t do anything now there could come a day when I can’t do anything at all. Over the past month or so my range of motion has improved greatly. I feel myself actually wanting to crouch down, making my knees do more of the work than my back and arms. I still feel a little grindy pain, just not as much. I’m not entirely sure if it’s the classes or if it was a mental block the whole time and I’m just giving myself permission to move now. Crazy how things work.

I’m going to wrap this up now, but I want to leave you with a video that really drove some of these things home for me. Rooster didn’t let Cerebral Palsy stop him from doing what he wanted to do. Major props to his mom and his training-mates that encouraged him instead of holding him back.

Art has always been a good release for me so I spent the weekend commemorating Cooper’s life in a small portrait for Annette and Brent. I’m really happy with how it turned out and wanted to share the process photos here. It was fun to see it evolve. Cooper was such a beautiful and inspiring cat.

Annette and Brent loved the painting. They were glad that the first piece of custom art that went up in their new home was so personal and special. Cooper will always have a home in their hearts.

Something possessed me to add a bit of personal flair to these sweatpants so I got to work designing my own pair of wings to embroider onto the legs, a la the Greek god Hermes. The sketching process was fun and reminded me of Graphic Design at MCAD. Drawing multiple options, choosing the best concept to move forward with and refining it in Illustrator. Embroidery is a bit of a new hobby for me and I’ve only done patterns that someone else created. This felt pretty cool doing something that was completely custom. Because I’m a nice person, I’ve included the design as a PDF here in case anyone wants to use it. The wings measure 8″ when printed on legal size paper. Have fun and if you decide to use it, send me a photo of the finished product!

Anyway, the project came together very quickly and I was excited to wear them for the weight training class I took this evening. I know it’s silly to fancify your workout gear but hey, whatever it takes to motivate me to go to the gym. I don’t mind being silly once in a while.

Here they are! The finished product. Now I just want to run around in them all day!

While I was working on the embroidery, I started thinking of them as my training wings. They’re kind of a mental burst of energy to help me through the difficult phase of trying something new. Parkour has felt exceptionally difficult for me because in high school, I developed Patellofemoral pain syndrome when I played basketball. I ignored a lot of physical therapy recommendations because I lacked the discipline to follow them and didn’t feel like they were worth my time. I wanted instant gratification and wasn’t willing to put the time in. Silly me.

Since then, I’ve become very good at telling myself I can’t do various things because “I have bad knees”. The first time I tried parkour, vaults, jumps and any kind of knee bending actions seemed impossible. I told Chad and Mitch “I have bad knees, I can’t do it.” and they told me to try it anyway. As I tried some moves, I actually surprised myself with what I was able to do. Sure, I failed at most of the movements, but that’s reasonable when starting something new. I’m realizing that most of my issues have been mental blocks, working through those is the next challenge.

During parkour training days, if I can’t do something, I just need to modify it so that I can. On non-parkour days, I’m focusing on strengthening my legs and doing myofascial release exercises with a foam roller. Tonight I started taking a weight training class to help speed up the process of being physically capable of key moves like jumps, kong vaults and pulling myself up walls. I think it’s a little funny how I couldn’t motivate myself to care about my knees before, but now that I have found parkour, I’m excited to test my limits and push past them.

I want to wrap this post up with a video I found tonight while browsing Reddit. This video really gets to the heart of why I think parkour is amazing. Enjoy!

After not taking parkour classes for many months, I finally decided to give it another go because Fight or Flight Academy started offering a women’s class. When I first started up in the summer, I was struggling with low self-esteem in the regular classes because everyone else was so far beyond my level and the guys naturally didn’t have as many issues with upper body strength like I do right now. As much as I dislike the idea of women needing separate classes, I feel like it is exactly what I need to build up my confidence at a more reasonable pace instead of expecting instant results.

Tonight’s class was an awesome one for me to reflect on. We focused on learning how to fall and dealing with what happens when you fail at a move. There is so much of that concept that translates well into my life! With any of my hobbies, the most debilitating fear that stops me from progressing is not wanting to fail or “look stupid”. This means I don’t make the progress I could if I just worked through the failure, learned from it, and moved on. Even though I’m fully aware that failure is part of the learning process, I panic and avoid it at all costs.

That little voice in the back of my mind says, “What if this painting turns out looking like crap and no one likes it? You’ll just add it to the pile of half-finished canvases stacked on the floor”, Or “Hooping just looks silly, people will think you’re crazy. You aren’t learning new things fast enough, so clearly you just aren’t good enough to really hoop.” Or “What if you fall and make a fool of yourself at class tonight? You could get hurt and then where would you be? You don’t have the upper body strength or knee mobility to do parkour”.

I read a parkour blog post this morning that pushed the exact message I needed to hear:

“Parkour doesn’t take strength, parkour makes strength.”

That is easy to apply to everything I do. From work to play, if I just get over my fear of not being amazing at something right now and allow myself to experience failure a little more, I will begin to reach my goals over time. I can’t expect to be at a high level of expertise until I put in the work to be there.

I went to the cardiologist this afternoon to assuage my paranoid doctor’s concern about my heart having its own little rhythm (which turned out to be a false alarm, YAY!). When the nurse was taking care of the standard pleasantries of checking vitals and whatnot, she quickly noticed the bruises and was very concerned if I felt safe at home… I think it’s morbidly funny when I have to explain that my hobbies are abusive.

This Monday, I brought some hoops to class to play with before class started. Some of my classmates and the instructor asked to play with them. The instructor, Paula, was having a blast jamming out with reckless abandon. She was exploring all kinds of movement that took me a long time to be comfortable exploring when I was just starting out. The joy of playing was overwhelming any fear of “looking silly”.

Watching Paula hoop made me think about the fact that I tend to think too much about  how I look to the passer-by. This causes me to be restrained in my movement to tricks I’m super comfortable with to minimize the risk of me messing up. This, combined with the fact that I don’t make myself practice nearly enough, is why I’m not as advanced as I feel I should be after doing this for almost 3 years.

So tonight I decided to make myself  be a little more chaotic. I moved faster than usual so that I would have to react faster and think less. I had to improvise quickly when a move went awry. This resulted in lots of neat transitions and really cool spasms of pure flow. It felt amazing. At one point, later in the practice session, I randomly did a move I wanted to learn but just hadn’t put the time into figuring out yet. It was this crazy one handed isolation spin that felt so cool I did it over and over again until I was dizzy and completely useless… and then I did it the reverse way. It made me happy.

Anyway, I’ll keep this one short tonight. I know I suck at updating this blog, but I really like having it around. It’s okay if it’s mostly just for me. Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

I’ve been thinking about my past a lot recently and felt the need to acknowledge it somewhere. I don’t like who I was, how I treated people or how I let myself be treated. I’m glad the cycle ended there and I learned from the experience. I feel fortunate that I’ve recently been given the opportunity to rebuild a friendship that was broken during that rough patch. It’s helping me make peace with my past and realize that life is too short to hold grudges. A friendship is like any relationship in that it takes effort from both parties to value each other. Although it is a painful process that involves digging into ugly memories, this particular friendship feels worth it.

I’m beyond thankful for so many people in my life and all the opportunities I’ve encountered. Last year I was offered a promotion at work that pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone and got me to do things I didn’t think I was capable of. Now I feel like I’ve grown into the role pretty darn well and am excited to continue doing so. The mentorship of my coworkers and instructors from college has been life changing.

Chris and I are getting close to our two year anniversary, which shocks me to think about how time has just flown by. He’s been my best friend through everything and I can’t imagine my life without him. With all the studying he’s been doing for his up-coming exam, I’m grateful we live together or I would never see him. I love seeing his dedication in this process though, he’s going to kick that actuarial exam’s butt in March!

My main hobbies have brought me so much joy as well. Hooping and Krav Maga are getting me to feel more confident in myself, both physically and socially. I’m still such an introvert but these hobbies have such wonderful communities of people that I’m learning to get out of my shell a bit.

As stressed out as I have been over work, family and life in general, I have it pretty good. I’m grateful for it all, even the rough patches which just make the good things shine brighter.

Day 3: Technique Intensive

Sunday is when things really started happening. After warming up, we jumped right back into where we left off with shoulder hooping since we would spend most of the day on the shoulders. There must have been something about letting everything sink in for a day because I started shoulder hooping with less difficulty than the night before. It’s still a struggle to maintain but it is definitely feeling more natural and that’s always a good thing!

The first technique of the day was learning how to break the hoop while hooping on the waist or shoulders. When I say break the hoop I don’t mean to snap it in twain or anything like that. I mean breaking the direction that the hoop is traveling and push it in the opposite direction. If you break the hoop and let it continue in the new direction, it is called a reversal. If you break the hoop and quickly break it again, that is what Baxter called a fit of breaks. I haven’t really gotten far enough into learning second current that I can do anything beyond fits of breaks, but learning the different break styles has been very helpful.

Baxter advised that he thought most hoopers would improve their breaks by improving the moment the hoop reverses direction, or the catch. Instead of stopping the hoop completely, we needed to try to absorb the hoops momentum with the rest of our body. We started to twist into the catch instead of purely stopping the hoop and pushing it in the other direction.  Our hoops were less likely to be off kilter when we sent them in the new direction which is a common problem for people first learning breaks. If the hoop is just stopped suddenly, the side opposite of the catching hand has no where to go with all of it’s momentum and has to go either up or down. The added benefit of this movement was that our breaks became more fluid and dancerly with our knees bent and our torso twisting with the hoop.

After learning a few different breaks, we started working on learning about “paddles”. These involve pushing the hoop along in the direction it is going by using your hands inside the hoop. This might be a little tougher to explain so now is a great time for another Baxter video (even he makes mistakes sometime! ouch). In the video you can see one of the many techniques Baxter is famous for, a combination of breaks and paddles that creates this wonderful rhythm of motion and sound. When we started working on paddles, it was key to keep the hand as flat against our bodies as possible. Gradually we worked on trying to paddle with our arms more than the back of our hands to give the hoop a rounder surface to move on. This is where the bruises really happened! The combination of breaks/paddles is definitely something to work up to, the speed that hoop is moving is a little too much for me to process at the moment. I’m excited that I know the elements of this move because it brings a new connection to the music with the beats!

We were starting to run out of time when we dug into the Warrior technique that Bax is also well known for, so it was abbreviated. This style is more aggressive and tends to channel more meditative martial arts feelings. Check out Baxter’s video of Warrior while he hoops to Tool to get an idea of what it looks like. This time was spent mostly playing with combinations of breaks, paddles and holds with the mindset of channeled positive aggression. I loved it and I look forward to playing with it more as I get better at the foundation moves.

Point was next and very brief due to time constraints. This technique involved not gripping the hoop at all, working with the natural movement of the hoop as it rested on you hands. Although this video shows more Isolation than Point, it’s still pretty close to what we are aiming for. It was difficult to let go of the hoop so much and just let it go on the path of least resistance, moving with it and seeing where it took us but the challenge was interesting. I accept the fact that practicing this stuff will mean I look ridiculous to onlookers, but the point of Point isn’t to impress people, it’s to explore movement in a different way. At the end of this section, we tested our patience by balancing the hoop on the back of our hands at 5 and 7 for 2 minutes… Ben was the only one who maintained the balance the whole time (which was apparently a first for Bax, to see a student go the full 2 minutes on their first try, Go Ben!).

The very last thing we worked on in class before we called it a weekend was the toss. Tossing the hoop it pretty much the most fun thing in the world. Also the most terrifying. Between being worried that you’ll cast it far off in another direction, thinking you might just miss the hoop entirely, and having it smack you in the face, there’s a lot that could go wrong with tosses. The only toss I was all that familiar with prior to the class was the J-motion throw which gets tons of momentum. But a problem I was experiencing in my practice was beating the crap out of my hand when I caught it on the way down. Baxter told us that if we focused on catching the hoop at 5 or 7, not 6 and definitely not 12 (if the hoop were a clock-face), we would ease into the catch more and it would become more fluid.

At this point, we had gone over our time by an hour and simply had to wrap up. I was sad to end the weekend and say goodbye to Baxter (not without buying my fair share of HoopPath merch though…).

I think I will follow up with more thoughts on hooping in general since there’s a lot of stuff I just didn’t get to cover yet. Blogging might just have to happen more often. I’m having fun with this…

Photography by Jessica Bessette