ice water and ocicats

I have to hand it to gymnastics, which is running two nights a week now: it's capable of training me plenty hard without bothering my hamstring. I've been doing handstands every day at work, and when I mentioned that the teacher said he could tell I'd been working on them -- which almost has to be a lie, but a kind one. Anyway, I did handsprings in the harness on the trampoline again, then tried to take the front handspring over to the tumble track, where it promptly evaporated. Le sigh. Maybe that is what Wednesday is for; today is definitely a rest day. A rest, go to PT and have a date with my bug day.

I'm done reading Code now, and the book club at work is beginning to move into the book we're really covering. Near the end, Code was covering binary-coded decimal numbers, which meant talking first about binary numbers that fall between integers. These work about the way you might imagine -- the numbers after the dot represent negative powers of 2 instead of negative powers of 10. So, 1.1 in binary is 1.5 in decimal; 0.11 is 0.75 in decimal, and so forth.

That dot is referred to as a binary point. And I honestly thought it was a typo. What? There's nothing inherently base-10 about the term decimal point, I thought. Hello, does the "dec" in "decimal" mean nothing to you?

The Numerical Relations office is probably going to send me off to sensitivity training if they ever get wind of this.

Through great good luck I found out that Eliott from my studio was doing an arm balance workshop yesterday -- it wouldn't necessarily have been an inversion workshop except that Eliott loves handstands. I'm doing an inversion workshop (actually an inversion workshop) with Ana Forrest next weekend at Back Bay Yoga, so I feel especially lucky in my handstand training lately. This balances my bad luck in being sick all week, and therefore really weak. :b

The best thing we did in Eliott's class is practice falling out of handstand into wheel in the middle of the floor. I didn't really straighten up into my full handstand before falling, just came over with knees bent. Up and... thud. Up and... thud. Up and... thud. It was rather cathartic, actually. I still wonder why gymnastics people caution against doing it that way, while yoga people caution against cartwheeling out and rolling out. All three ways seem okay to me. The gymnastics ways do seem lower impact as long as a person is good with working with momentum, but I'm getting better at falling into backbend and I certainly see it as a legitimate way out. It probably helps that I have a pretty comfortable wheel.

I haven't whined yet on LJ about having a slightly torn hamstring. :-( It's my right semitendonosus, for those who really care. The massage therapist wants me to go to physical therapy, where the badly healed-up fibers in the muscle can be ultrasounded away and where they will give me exercises to do. Also, I'm supposed to not be stretching it too much. It's hard for me to feel the difference between the good stretch and the bad stretch, so I may just take this opportunity to focus on other muscles for a while. I suppose this could screw up my annual stretching pictures in March... only the hamstring ones though, and healing up properly is more important. Goddamn hamstrings.

I'm still strongly considering NASM peronal trainer certification. I have a friend who will do it with me if I do. We're about to start up another technical book club at work, so I might be studying a lot this spring.