thebli - ball made from inner tube strips

I have a Tibetan monk friend, Palden, who lives in India.  We write letters to each other and he was telling me about how he and the other monks at his university make a rubber ball out of strips of bicycle inner tube tied together with string.  Then they play a game where he said that they try to bounce it in the air with their feet and get it past the opponent's goal or line.

I couldn't imagine what the ball looked like, but the game description reminded me of what we call a "hackey sack", or foot bag, in the United States.  I'm used to just seeing people pass it to each other in a circle, not competing as teams. But it also reminded me of a game I'd seen played before in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco where players were kicking a hackey sack over a net.  I never knew what it was called until I looked on YouTube.  Looks like what I saw was called footbag net (I think this video is even in Golden Gate Park).  But it looks like a more worldwide version is Sepak Takraw. Amazing how good these players are
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9W5ZBZW8C8&feature=related

Still, those were different balls.  So I asked my friend to send me a picture of the ball that they made.  Instead, he actually sent me one of the balls!  He called it a thebli, and he also spelled it thebbli.  Here is a picture of it:

I searched online for those spellings, and I tried tebli and tebbli, but didn't find anything.  (If you want to make one though, I did find this instructables post to make something very similar).  It may be a made-up spelling of a Tibetan word.  He said they also just call it a Tubeball.

Parallel Kingdom

My latest game addiction is a fantasy MMORPG game that you can play on your phone, iPhone or Android, called Parallel Kingdom.  But its not just any fantasy MMORPG game.  Its a location-based game.  What that means is instead of the game taking place in a constructed fantasy world, like Middle Earth, the game takes place on a real world map via Google Maps.  So instead of killing wolves in Middle Earth, you're killing them around the block from your house, in Kansas City, for example. And you can plant flags to claim territory.  My whole neighborhood was already claimed by Rokbot and Coco444, but I sent Coco a message and she was nice enough to give me several of her flags so that now I own several blocks around my real-life house.

You can initially teleport 3 places in-game:

1) your current out-of-game physical location

2) the town center of your nearest town

3) random places of unclaimed territory

So I was initially teleported with my pet dog to an unclaimed area of central Missouri and I now claim vast amounts of territory near Waverly, MO (real world population 800).

So the real world map and territory claiming features make it fun, and its fun to be able to play on the phone when you're somewhere and need to kill time by killing giant spiders.  Graphics are very basic 2d, but that doesn't make a difference to me when the game is fun enough.  

If you want to play, then the sign up process allows you specify a referral code to get extra gold.  I know that all referral codes give the same amount, 1000 gold.  So please sign up with my referral code with this referral code, then I get extra food.  My Parallel Kingdom referral code is: zldjcy

ceramic monkeys dressed in human clothes

i used to have a fairly large collection antique tapestries. i started that collection back in 1988, finding a rug every few years of that particular style. but they were a bit bulky, and once ebay came around, they were too easy to come by, so i lost interest. i've now sold most of those.

now i've started a new collection. the collection is of ceramic monkeys that are dressed like humans and doing some kind of human behavior. i hope that this collection is specific enough that the pieces will be harder to come by. i like it that way for two reasons. one, i really don't want to acquire too many so that i don't have to have too much space to display them and/or store them, like i needed with the rugs. and second, just makes it more fun to have a very specific and unique collection.

so far i have all of two items in my collection.

1) this one i got at an antique store in san francisco. its a monkey smoking pipe with a serious face. the person at the store said that it was meant to poke fun at the idea of evolution.

2) this one i got at an antique store in kansas city. i think its even funnier because its so ridiculous. it is a monkey dressed like mozart (i'd say its mozart) riding on the back of another monkey and playing a miniature piano. i call it monkey mozart.

barefoot walking

i read an article in backpacker magazine about hiking barefoot. it claimed that walking barefoot had many benefits for the foot and lower leg. basically, the idea is that if you're foot isn't supported then it needs to work harder to give you balance, which builds up your foot muscles. it made sense to me, and i like the naturalist aspect of it. so although i don't plan to ever backpack barefoot, i decided to try some barefoot walks around the neighborhood.

for my first outing i walked in shoes and socks to a nearby dirt and gravel trail. i walked barefoot maybe .25 miles on the trail around noon time. it was a little hard on the feet, but i honestly couldn't tell if it was heat from the gravel or the sharpness of the rocks that was causing me discomfort. when i got home, part of the ball of my foot was sensitive, maybe blistered. i rested it on an ice pack for a while. i think it was blistered from heat, but still not sure.

so next time i only went maybe 1/8 mile on the trail barefoot. that was fine. next time i tried walking on grass instead. it was on a big greenbelt between two directions of a large parkway road. the black asphalt was very hot at each cross street that divided the greenbelt, so i had to keep putting on my shoes, crossing the street, then taking them back off to walk. so the 4th time i went out to try it, i finally realized i should wear sandals so that i can easily take them on and off if i need to switch back and forth. i found that i could even tuck my sandals in the waist band of my shorts so that i didn't have to carry them. that day wasn't as hot though, so it turned out i could walk across the greenbelt cross streets that day anyway.

so today i went for my longest barefoot walk yet. i went for 2 miles total, barefoot for probably 1.75 of it. that meant i stayed barefoot on a lot of sidewalks and street crossings. not as fun as to walk on the cement and asphalt as the grass, so lots of times i would step off the sidewalk and just walk in the grass of people's yards. again, the ball of my foot feels a little sensitive afterwards, but hopefully that skin will toughen up over time. i've still managed so far to avoid any glass, prickly plants, and dog poop. knock on wood!

2011 Tough Mudder, Colorado - fun + injuries

its been about 6 weeks ago now that i completed the colorado Tough Mudder event with friends. my teammates were all from colorado, I came from kansas city. i stayed with my parents out there for almost a week before the event, thinking that might help me acclimate some. i'm not sure it helped.

the event started with a short downhill run, but right after that it turned to go straight back up a ski slope. right from the start, i was hurting. i definitely hadn't gotten in as good of shape as i wanted to in the preceding months. running was hurting my knees so all my training runs ended up being less than a couple miles. and there aren't any significant hills in kc to walk or run. so an event with steep climbs at elevations of 8000-11000 feet really exhausted me, not to mention all the obstacles. lots of tough obstacles, but everyone seemed to agree that wading and swimming in the 36 degree water was the toughest. i was shivering for about half an hour after that. so i was elated to finish. took us 4.5 hours.

one major downer was that one of our teammates severely gashed open his knee when he fell in the mud and hit it on a rock before the giant slip-and-slide. we had to take him to an urgent care facility to have it looked at. this led to having very mixed feelings about the event. when we got to the urgent care facility in beaver creek, we met several other injured Tough Mudders there. in fact, the facility waiting room was packed.

besides our friend, who ended up needing surgery to wash the debris out of his deep wound, we met participants with:
-- broken finger that got caught in overhead cargo net before a fall
-- injured ribs from falling from monkey bars onto edge of wooden platform
-- various injuries from falling during electroshock therapy obstacle, falling into rocks or wooden signs

the urgent care patients seemed to agree that the medical treatment at the event itself was next to nothing. although there were medics on the course, i guess they couldn't do much themselves. and it seemed there weren't enough either. at one point where one was needed while we were on the course, the nearest medic was several obstacles away and required a lengthy relay of participants calling out for a medic before one finally showed up on an atv.

the staff at the urgent care facility at beaver creek wasn't happy either. they hadn't been notified about the event and were totally understaffed. we were there from around 3pm until after they officially closed around 8pm and we weren't the last ones there.

it looks like these types of obstacle course events are taking off in popularity. and it really was "fun until someone got hurt". of course, injuries are inevitable in an event like that, and Tough Mudder took great pains to point out that the event was dangerous and that everyone signed a "death waiver". but still, hopefully in future years they will do a better job of making the obstacles a little safer (like padding on hard surfaces near obstacles) and of providing on-site medical care.