My Saturday

I made it to taiji class. It was not an overly intense day, and my knee was up to everything we did. I had one minor twinge when I shifted the weight to the left foot without the weight being centered in the foot. Then when Mark and I were pushing hands, my calf muscle (gastrocnemus? something like that) got tired and shaky. I suspect the pressure from the knee brace had something to do with that, but I called it quits about ten minutes early because of it. It's been complaining a mite since then, but so far not too bad. Even better, it's not complaining this morning. Definitely healing.

Then, due to random changes of plan which wound up to be fortuitous, I went to dinner with Spencer and my mom at Chang's. The original plan was a movie at seven, but due to commuter issues (you know who you are ;^), I went out to dinner at six. This was fortuitous because Spencer got an emergency flood call towards the end of dinner, and I wouldn't have seen him at all if the schedule had stayed fixed at seven. And with the schedule up in the air, it seemed easier to watch something at my house rather than a theater once the commuter did get there.

We watched Brotherhood of the Wolf. Very odd movie. Enjoyable, but odd. The primary plot is about a huge beast terrorizing a small French village, and efforts to capture/stop/kill this beast. The French king sends a Naturalist (who is also an expert fighter) and his Iroquois sidekick (shaman, healer and fighter) in to "investigate." Most anything else I could say would spoil something in the plot... There are lots of twists and turns. Some I saw coming; others surprised me. One minor...not so much complaint as puzzlement; I suspect it's a cultural difference between European and American films. There were some semi-graphic scenes set in a brothel. They were nothing like the scenes would have been in an American film. There was an incidental feel, like, "See, this is what happens in a brothel," and then some...art shots, I suppose you'd call them. I wouldn't quite call it "tasteful," but it's certainly more tasteful than an American version of the same scene would have been. *shrugs*

Incidentally, the crickets are quite loud at one a.m.

And... in other news, the kittens have discovered the elm tree. This is good in a way, as they've also figured some ways out of the yard, and the elm tree distracts them from those. I've blocked up the ones I've found, but what I can't do is prevent them from climbing up, say, a fence post and climbing down the other side. One minor concern with the elm tree is that they'll get up far enough that they can't get down. Luckily, the lowest branching is low enough for me to reach, and so far the kittens have been able to get back down to there, at least.