A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
Alright, so this time there's a reason I posted this blog entry late, classes. No it's not that I'm being bogged down by them, though I am, it's that I wanted to wait until I'd had my first class of all my classes so I can talk about them here.
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Man I really do need to get a CAD job. it's the one shot I really have at being able to make up that 1000 dollars in less than a semester and still have spending money for stuff. Of course, I have my certificate and good references, just need a good connection so that I can get to work.
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Speaking of work though, my job with Cutco has finally really solidified, and I know with confidence what I'm doing when I go to the office once a week. I still loathe the core of the job, which is that I'm selling knives and relying on people to say yes to an appointment, but it's not all that bad really. It's just complicated is all, at least the presentations are fun to do :P
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I've thought a bit recently about Jugglers On Juggling, my juggling podcast, and I think I'm not really going to continue it until the summer, partly because of some advice I got from Michael Karas, and because I've already had the show on hold for almost a full half year. I do want to continue doing it sometime, it's just such a chore to do, especially when with the current show format I'm really doing all the work and stuff, but yeah. We'll see what happens with it in the future...

Daily Life:
So college has started, and right now a few things are immediately clear, it's going to be a varied one. I have two computer courses and two art courses. Like I said last week, the classes suck because both art classes start at either noon or 9AM, when the college is most packed and when I'm having the most trouble staying awake, and I did find myself fighting off the urge to nap during my 9AM classes, but luckily they only last for 2 and a half hours so they're not hard to get through, that class would be Graphic Design skills by the way, where I'm FINALLY getting to use more photoshop and technology to put together art as opposed to doing things on paper and in theory.

My noon class is also tough to stay awake through, and I'm still a little unknowing as to what we'll be learning in it because the class was vague, even the description is vague, "Print Production", but all I know about it is that it's a full 5 hours, and it's going to be the class I like the least almost for sure.

BUT! There is another competitor for least liked class this semester, remember two semesters ago or so when I took my computer applications in business course? Basically it was a tutorial course on how to make a slide in powerpoint and indent paragraphs in MS word. This Tuesday course of mine seems to be the hardware equivalent of that course, "Microcomputers" is the course title, and basically we'll be learning how a motherboard transfers electrical signals to the cpu and out to the different devices and stuff like that. Basically everything my dad taught me about when I was 10 and I watched him build my 2nd ever computer from scratch.

The last class to round out my semester I suspect is going to be the most useful and fun one, and it's "Information Security". Just from the title you'd expect it to be some course about how to control and oppress data within a network, but the professor is a professional white-hat hacker, and he's already outlined our final project as going to a website, and doing some hacking to discover and report vulnerabilities :D That ought to be awesome.

Juggle This:
So I've really been interested in working on my beer-pong tricks video recently, and so far I've gotten quite a good bit of new footage for it, of course each clip only being 4 seconds long or so it takes a lot of clips to make a video even with slow motion replays on some clips, so I've got a bit of a ways to go with it. So far though I've found that I can use spare wall tiles that I found in the basement to make pretty good bouncing pads so even though the entire house is pretty much carpeted I can do shots anywhere. They're definitely hard targets to hit, being only 4" by 4" and having a few surface imperfections from the way they've been painted (they have a big pattern on them), but their versatility definitely makes up for it. It is strange learning this new skill, because like bounce juggling, I'm used to throwing upwards, and here I have to throw downwards, AND add in the fact I'm using an entirely different size ball and throwing technique.

I am making some really good shots like I said though, including a massive pinball machine ramp like shot where I bounced from the floor to about 5 feet high, landing in a channel I made and falling out of the channel back to the floor where the cup is. Another shot I made was of course the long distance shot, which by my measurements was about 8 feet and no bounces. Then another of my big shots so far is the 6 bounce shot down a thin strip of bouncing surface, which came courtesy of my new bed frame.

Besides that video though, I'm also working on an idea or two for my next renegade performance coming up at Juggle This. I thought about doing Muffin Clutches again but after getting advice about repeating the performance from Sean Blue and Michael Karas I figure they're right, it's no fun doing an old routine everyone's seen before, especially if it's so short and basic. I really wanted to do another routine which takes advantage of my body type, especially in a Renegade style way, but so far I'm just coming up completely dry on ideas other than maybe leaning back and doing balances on my chest? Nah, that sucks.

I've got another idea I'm kicking around with a ball on an elastic string and using it in a cascade with crazy 423 type tricks and stuff, but right now I'm nowhere near consistent with it or have enough tricks with it to show it off. I thought about doing a routine using my yo-yo sticks, but I have absolutely no idea how people would react to it, especially since I haven't come up with more than 3 more tricks since releasing the big video showcasing them, and they're really tough to make a routine that flows with them. It's another idea, either way I'll be performing for Renegade again, what I'll be doing is anyone's guess. Maybe I'll bounce a ring up off the ground behind me and catch it between my butt cheeks x_x

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150