My mind works in odd ways. I can find any paper I need in the massive piles on my desk, remember exactly where I saw a certain fabric in a shop, and can figure out which book a kid wants when he asks for "the blue one about a dog that my friend had last week." But when I'm learning new things, if I don't write things down, I tend not to remember what I've heard. That being said, sometimes my notes make absolutely no sense. I wrote down a bunch of notes over the past few weeks while intending to turn them into a post, but they make absolutely no sense without anything to connect them. For example, this is what greeted me when I returned to finish this week's blog:
Keystrokes
Uberfluffen and Unterfluffen
This is the house that jello makes
Abschneiden
Schnikt - Wolverine?
Riceballs
Robot videos
Guest readers- guys, cops, firemen! Inhibition games too.
Grapevines
The point of a versetzen
Noisy windows
Most of that makes no sense. Some of it I remember writing, though not necessarily why. Thankfully though, my mind is used to the weird, convoluted twists enough it all comes back eventually. Usually.
Schlussel. The keys were funny. For some reason, that morning before practice, the Professor stumbled over a certain YouTube video of an instructor telling his students how to 'turn the key,' which involved some crazy hip movement thing and a lot of disgust on his part. So during practice when the Professor's daughter and I paired off to do an exercise about parrying off an attack before sending a new one, it degenerated into us snickering "parry it off, turn the key" with a little hip twist and a lot of giggles. A stern look and a proper explanation of what schlussel should be just made it worse. I at least, was fairly useless for the rest of class.
Uberfluffen and Unterfluffen I can't forget. They're my furry darlings. Tonka, my super-fluffy husky mutt, has more fur than sense. He's the one who sits on the table on the deck and stares forlornly at me when I practice and has taken to running alongside and trying to trip me while I do footwork drills on my own. He's also the reason that every bit of clothing I have seems to have a fluffy golden thread woven in. Unterfluffen is the dear little black chupacabra-looking mutt that I had on loan for a while from the Professor. He has a thin black coat of wiry fur that barely covers his body, and spent most of his time while I was practicing alternately sleeping and systematically destroying all the screens in my windows. The Professor has been kind enough to let me bring the fuzzy boys with me to practice at times, and the difference in their coats and shedding capabilities earned them their new nicknames.
This is the house that jello makes... That one was actually a lot of fun. We were all paired up and were supposed to be going back and forth, throwing attacks, parrying them off, then counter attacking- only we were supposed to move as slowly as though we were fighting in jello. Pardon, JELL-O®.
Since my left hand was in a brace, I couldn't hold my longsword properly, so got to break in the singlesticks and play with sabres instead. It would have been great, except that I had to use my right hand for everything- normally with the single handed weapons I switch back and forth. The Professor had us going back and forth, explaining about the rolling motion of a ship that would necessitate movement. Then of course, our ship was full of jello, and we'd go into slow motion, which just made the whole thing a snicker-fest. We were playing cooperative uncooperative sword fighting. The massive slow-down was to get us to recognize the incoming attack and give us time to come up with the proper counter- which sometimes took a few tries. I got paired up with Riceball (his choice of nicknames, not mine!), and we took turns: strike, parry off correctly, then counter. Once we got the idea, the Professor had us add in another move each time. So Riceball would attack. I'd see it coming, prepare a parry. He'd attack again, I'd parry it off. He'd attack, I'd parry it off, then counter attack. He'd attack, I'd parry, I'd counter, he'd parry, and so on and so on. Reminded me of the "this is the house that Jack built" story I read to the kids sometimes. Or maybe that game Simon, where you poke the colored buttons that correspond to the tones you hear, and it keeps adding them until you're ready to throw the thing out the window. When we lost the pattern, we were supposed to start over with a new one. I think we made it to ten steps once. But we started over a lot. It was a neat exercise really, and the slow speed gave us a chance to figure out what counter worked best- and to notice that the right one was usually one that felt the most natural. A cumulative tale in steel. Oh, I like that...
Abschneiden. Gesundheit. Wait, that's slicing off... stuff. I think. No, pretty sure. Not sure about the what or how, so I'm just going with a generic slicey motion for that one- drawing or pushing your sword along someone's tender bits. I could go look it up, but I'm tired.
Schnikt. That's the noise Wolvie's claws make in the comics. You gotta love onomatopoeia. Or it could've been schnitt- that makes more sense. Oberschnitt comes from above. Unter comes from below. Duh. We did those with the melon-baller thing.
The video reference must've been referring to Deadpool's birthday gauntlet. One minute for every year older- and HEY! I would totally like to know why it's only one minute now, and I had to do a three minute match for every year?! I'm twice their age! Mine took two days! Oh, maybe that's why. Well, at least mine wasn't filmed. We filmed Deadpool's. The Professor was going to have us critique the fights after, but thankfully seems to have forgotten about that. It's so much easier to pick out the bad than the good anyway- especially when I'm critiquing myself. I do it with everything- a new recipe I tried, a quilt I just finished, these goofy blog postings. And seeing yourself on video is an extremely eye-opening and horrifying experience. We held Deadpool's birthday gauntlet with 24 minutes of fights for him, 5 rounds for most of us, whatever weapon sounded good at the time. All of it on camera. And I am not at all photogenic at the best of times. In any way. Seeing my horrifyingly bad footwork and malfunctioning robot stance is definitely something that needs improving. But I did pop the birthday boy with a lovely scheitelhau at the end of one of our matches.
Ah, the guest readers thing I'm thinking I wrong-windowed while taking notes at school. Sorry about that. Inhibition games could be fun though- duck, duck, goose WITH SWORDS! Red light, green light SWORD! Simon Says SWORD!
Grapevines. That has to be referring to the footwork stuff. The Professor had us do some drills that involved the different steps- passing, triangles, that skipping one- and moving across the field, both forward and back. Then we had a ladder of swords laid out on the ground, and we had to footwork our way through the gaps. Triangle step this way, passing step this way, shuffle step the other, then the one where you do an about face that I can't remember the name of. We'd done this one at the IGX seminar too, so the reinforcement was cool. All practice long, we were supposed to be sure that we stepped with every swing, which is still not an intuitive or natural thing for me for some reason. Apparently I'm all good with just standing there and letting someone hit me. Professor gave us all a quick and dirty assessment of our footwork at the end of class too. One of the guys moves his feet less than I do. One leans forward before he takes any step and broadcasts what's coming. One of the others moves his just to move them- the Professor says it seems without point or purpose. Mine apparently is STILL the faerie feet. I'm convinced that comes from walking in heels and being forced to walk on tiptoe. Next time I'm going to try practicing in heels, see what that does. The guys have all been into the "Wiggins Kick" lately, booting each other in the chest. Just imagine how much more effective that could be in heels!
Vier versetzen: Four ways to break a guard by throwing your opponent's sword offline and seeing that you threaten him enough that he gets the point... of your sword, hopefully at his throat. We paired off and practiced lots of those, both breaking the guard and then trying to counter whatever broke it too. I got paired up with Deadpool, who also had a skitchy hand- mine's still recovering from IGX- works fine most of the time, but it doesn't like repetitive swiveling motions- which means no zwerchs for a while :( As we were versetzing with our off hands, we were working together to figure out counters for each as well, then counters for the counters.
It was at this point that we discovered that there seems to be a direct correlation between the vehemence of my apologies, and my doing something correctly. I'd been hanging out in pflug, Deadpool schiel-ed me, and I countered that with some kind of absetzen-ish thing that resulted in a wicked thrust to his throat. We weren't wearing masks or anything. I was horrified. Apologies flowed like water as he tried to cough it away and we took a break. We were using sabre simulators and weren't at combat speed or anything, but still. Deadpool's an odd duck though- he seems to like it.
Lastly was our homework assignment. Sprechfenster. Talking windows. That much I remember, and it's all tangled up with langenort, but I'm too tired to figure it out just now. We're supposed to look it up in the manuals and check on counters or how to apply it or something. Tomorrow.
My windows don't have screens anymore anyway. Thanks Unterfluffen.
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