Shrek and Donkey, Setting an example and a Wii bit of fun

Some one in our town made a giant ice sculpture of Shrek and Donkey. Here is a picture of Sam and Grace with their friends Tristan and Chelsey

The other day I was doing my daily workout and doing some burpees(aka squat thrusts) and Connie was holding Grace and Grace started putting her head up and down like she was doing it too. Then Connie let her down and she started to try to do them too. Here is Grace in action

This last wednesday I had Scout Patrol Activity at my house. Since it cold outside and I figure the boys probably aren't getting enough exercise I had them do some push-ups, sit-ups, and try to to do some pull ups for a warm up and then we played Wii Olympics and boxing. It was a lot of fun and everyone worked up a good sweat. The great thing about Wii is it is fun to do, but it is also fun to watch other people do.

The 110 meter hurdles and boxing

We were outnumbered two to one

I went and played airsoft with our neighborhood airsoft group today.
It was a good time. The first game we played kids against adults. There were 3 adults (me, Doug, and Shawn) and 8 kids (mostly kids around 12 years old) . We were playing elimination were the objective of the game is to get all the players on the other team out. The adults left the staging first and then about five minutes later the kids came to find us. The area was thickly wooded, so I decided I would set up an ambush while the other two went ahead. I waited for a while for a group of the kids to noisily make their way towards me. While they were still a ways off, I a happened to turn my head and see through a bush another group of kids, not 10 feet away. They didn't know I was there, so I turned and pointed my airsoft gun at the closest one and said 'surrender!'. He saw that there was no way out of it for him, so he surrendered and was out of the game. This of course attracted the attention of the other kids in both groups and soon I was surrounded by kids on all sides. I put up a good fight and managed to get a total of 4 kids out before they got me. The the rest of the kids went on to find the other adults and managed to get Doug out, but then Shawn finished them off and the adult team won.

The second game was again adults against kids, but this time we had 4 adults because my friend Chris showed up. This time the kids went out first. I thought it would be harder this time because the kids could set up ambushes, but instead we won even more quickly. We split into two two man teams Me and Chris and Doug and Shawn. We went to opposite sides of the course and then worked our way to the center. Chris and I found one kid and did a velociraptor trap on him and got him out. Then a few minutes later we heard a bunch of kids running towards us. Apparently Doug and Shawn had them on the run and they ran straight into me and Chris. We had a brief firefight with them and after a few minutes had gotten them all out.

The last game was the most interesting and challenging. Three players, me, Doug, and Doug's son Ryan where the "hunted" and everyone else were the "hunters". We crossed the frozen pond on the course and hid and then after blowing a whistle to signal we were ready we were supposed to make our way back to the other side of the pond and to Doug's Suburban without getting hit. The big handicap we were given is that we could not use our rifles, but could only use our backup pistols. My airsoft rifle is accurate up to between 100 and 150 feet depending on the conditions. Plus it is fully automatic. My backup pistol is accurate up to maybe 20 feet, so this was a serious disadvantage. At one point Doug and Ryan went ahead of me and ran into Chris . Chris started following them and I was soon in a position to follow him. Then Doug stopped to hold Chris off so that Ryan could run for it. I was still 50 feet away from Chris so I didn't want to risk revealing myself by trying to shoot him. He got Doug out and Doug saw that I was behind Chris so he started trying to distract Chris by talking to him about their little skirmish.
I had two choices at that point. One was to abandon Ryan and try to take an alternate route and never let Chris know I was there. The second was try to sneak up closer to Chris and shoot him before he had a chance to shoot me. I chose the second. I slowly walked closer and closer to him and when I go within about 30 feet I panicked and thought he was going to see me so I tried to shoot him. I missed and he turned around and started spraying bbs at me (he had an automatic rifle). I tried to jump behind a little ridge but just as I was going over he got me twice in back. As soon as I was out, I thought how dumb it was to try to get Chris out when he had so much more fire power than me and that I should of tried an alternate route and tried to catch up with Ryan further on. I guess that is why they say hindsight is 20/20. It was still tons of fun and I got a great workout running and crawling through the thick woods and snow.

What is Parkour?

I have taken up a new hobby this winter to keep me in shape and to beat off the winter blues. It is called parkour. What is parkour? The best summary I can find is by the sports founder David Belle:

"The fundamental idea is a man who runs, and whom nothing stops."

You will find my videos on youtube that are marked parkour. Many are not parkour at all. They are kids doing stupid things or doing gymnastics outside. If martial arts are the art of fighting, then parkour is the art of running away. David Belle said this about it:

"Understand that this art has been created by few soldiers in Vietnam to escape or reach: and this is the spirit I'd like parkour to keep. You have to make the difference between what is useful and what is not in emergency situations. Then you'll know what is parkour and what is not. So if you do acrobatics things on the street with no other goal than showing off, please don't say it's parkour. Acrobatics existed long time ago before parkour"

To be good at parkour requires being in good physical shape. So I have been doing workout from here. The same site has a place where you can log your progress. Here is my training log.

More about parkour on wikipedia

This is an interview with the founder of Parkour, David Belle:




This is an example of parkour in action. This Video is called "Extreme Tag" (Warning some may find the background music offensive, you may want to turn your speakers down)

Old School Winter

This winter has been awesome. Usual winter is just dark, cold and depressing. But this year it has been an old school winter where it snows every few days and snow actually sticks to the ground, so you go and play in the snow without having to drive up in the mountains. Connie and Sam and Sam's buddy Dallin made an awesome snow man (mostly it was Connie though.) When she was trying to lift the middle snowball she asked the boys to help. When they were helping and it was still hard she asked them to lift harder and then they just grunted louder.





We've be able to get some good exercising in by shoveling our walks and driveway. Here you can see how deep the snow is today:

To get a true appreciation of the snow I made this little video of our house: