Are We Having Fun Yet?

Last Friday, I came down with a stomach bug of some kind. It was no big surprise: Kent had been spewing from both ends for two days prior, so it was only a matter of time before his cellmates caught the same bug. Friday night, I had an extreme temperature spike overnight and was feeling well enough Saturday, but had low energy and needed to stay within a few steps of a bathroom until late Sunday.

Monday night, I was feeling well enough that I went to karate. By the time that I had walked there however, I realized I had no energy at all for this. I might be able to go through the motions, but badly, and it's likely that my balance would be non-existent. In short, I'd be dead pretty quickly.

If I couldn't kick or punch, I could at least sit at the sidelines to watch and perhaps learn something new. And I did learn something: I learned that my classmates suck at cardio.

We usually start with 50 jumping jacks, then 15 push-ups, a number of yoga-like stretches, etc.. Except for the jumping jacks, we're all heads-down so I've never been able to see what my classmates are doing, especially when I'm doing my own thing to my best ability. This evening, I was able to see the entire class, and what I saw were incredibly limp jumping jacks. And the push-ups! Dropping half-way instead of to the floor, pivoting from one's knees instead of toes, and going soooo slowly. The stretches were equally half-hearted. And later in the class, the punches were slow, soft & unthreatening. I will admit many in the class can kick higher than I can, but what's the point when there's no energy behind them?

I have to confess my abs aren't up to the full workout: crunches, then bicycle crunches, etc., for nearly ten minutes, all in quick succession. I'm in pain half-way through. And I will admit this aging body can't bend & stretch as much as others, but it's not for lack of effort.

This past Monday, I passed my test for my green belt. This is still a beginner level belt, of course, but my next belt will move me into the intermediate group.


So far:
- White belt at first class, Aug 17, 2017
- Yellow (gold) belt at first exam, Nov 28, 2017
- Orange belt at second exam, Feb 26, 2018
- Green belt at third exam, May 28, 2018
From this pattern, I expect the next belt exam (blue) will be at the end of August. I also anticipate that progress will become a lot more difficult when I graduate from the beginner levels. Send Aleve.

In each exam, there is a ceremonial breaking of a board. For my first exam, we used a side kick. For my second, I attempted a round kick but failed: I was pulling back because I was afraid of kicking wild and injuring our dear sensei holding the board. Ultimately, I succeeded with a side kick, but I learned I need to either let go of my fear of harming someone, or at least develop the aim & control required to ensure I can use any kick on the board with complete confidence.

In this latest exam, we were to use a palm strike. And that's when I suddenly discovered there was extra material covered during my Amsterdam & Toronto trips which I completely missed. Palm strike? WTF? Fortunately, I was last among eight graduates so I had time to observe the others carefully; one chap needed four hits before he landed the winning blow, so I also had a good counter-example. When it came my turn, I broke the board on my first try. Go me!

We traditionally keep our prior belts, mostly for sentimentality and as a reminder of where we began. Now that I have three retired belts, it's time to get a proper display rack for them (Heavy duty hint to husbands thinking about xmas presents...).

I'm planning to do a double-class this Saturday morning, kick-boxing followed by karate, old body willing.

I've been thinking about retirement a lot lately. Part of it is the dumbass in the White House causing the stock market to crash every time he opens his pie hole, causing my 401k to drop. Part of it is a periodic review & rebalancing of my portfolio per schedule. And part of it is about eligibility for some stuff...

I wasn't sure if I could still get my Canada Pension Plan (CPP) when I retire at some future time. I was sure that my residency in the US wouldn't be a factor, but I wasn't sure if there was a minimum contribution amount or time span of contributions which would block me. I've been trying to get access to my contribution records, but I need a passcode to create a Gov't of Canada personalized services account, and that has been tripping me up.

At first, it was because my social insurance number had been archived since I haven't had any transactions on it since 1996. I submitted documentation back in January to get that re-activated. Then the computer system refused to give me my passcode because it didn't like the information I entered (name, date of birth, social insurance number, mother's maiden name, address of record), but couldn't say what was at fault and gave me to recourse to fix the issue.

Today, I made progress. The website had been updated so that when I got the error as before, I was finally given a telephone number to call!

During that call, I learned:
1. Prior attempts had failed because the address they had was of 9506 Boyer Place, the house Kent & I had rented before we moved to our current house in 1999. Huh. That has been corrected.
2. A passcode is being mailed to me at my current address and should arrive next week.
3. Yes, I am eligible for the CPP. If you make only one payment, you qualify albeit with a very small monthly pension payment. Because my contributions were relatively small (11 years, some of that as a student, all of it at relatively low income [I never topped $50k CDN even in my best year]), I could only get $271.70 CDN monthly after my 65th birthday.
4. I also qualify for the Old Age Supplement. It's a secondary pension which is based on years of residency as an adult, not on financial contributions. Since I was only resident in Canada for 11 years as an adult, it would add $162 CDN per month after my 65th birthday.
5. A statement of contributions to the CPP is being mailed to me, to arrive next week.

So there we have it: I do not need to move back to Canada to work for a period in order to qualify myself for the pension, but it would help my OAS. And at age 65, if nothing changes, I'd be eligible for $433.70 CDN per month.

I have an appointment Wednesday with my Canadian financial advisor to see how far my small $55k CDN RRSP can go. My US retirement savings are 12x that amount, but every bit counts.

On the US side, I'd be eligible for $1,962/month at age 62, $2,979/month at 67 from Social Security, based on contributions to date, and that's pretty much the maximum benefit theoretically possible. When i get back from Canada, I'll be looking to rebalance my 401k, IRA and Roth IRA so see else I can squeeze from those.

While there is no need to move back to Canada, if I really want to maximize my government pensions from both sides of the border, there is a good argument to be made for working in Canada for a while to enhance the eventual payout.

Dear Amsterdam: I have some questions.

It’s a lovely city and I’m so happy to be here, but there are somethings I don’t understand.

1. What’s up with this obsession with pancakes? Seriously, there are pancake houses everywhere. I do love pancakes, but this city’s obsession is borderline creepy.

2. You willingly admit the entire country is carved out of a swamp. Having now been driven through a fair chunk of the countryside, I see that the whole canal & drainage ditch system with its pumps and water management systems is truly amazing. But there is water freaking everywhere… how is there not an unimaginable mosquito problem? Indeed, why is the entire country not already dead from some combination of malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever and west nile virus?

3. Similar to the mosquito mystery above: with so much aquatic habitat, why is this country not 20 feet deep in hundreds of billions of ducks? The Netherlands should be a duck paradise… so why are there so few? Is someone eating them when I’m not looking? Do you secretly have an alligator problem you're not tell us about?

Just curious.

Luv,
Brian

For reasons unknown, someone somewhere decided that the web certificate admin account and my account at work should both be the subject of a major spam attack. These two email addresses were injected into a vast number of online forms, including email list subscription forms. Every one of these targets then generated at least one response, sometimes many, back to my accounts.

After waking up to 400 unexpected emails, I began setting up my own filters to trim out the excess while our Corporate IT folks worked with Exchange to see if they could do a better job of blocking these. Since that time, I've received another 8,500 messages, nearly all blocked or shunted into a spam folder.

This experience has revealed how much crappy web design is out there. Why would you run a sales ordering web site that accepts orders for hardware with no physical address entered? Why are there still mailing lists that allow anyone to subscribe someone else? And why do so many lists not yet send a click-to-confirm-you-actually-requested-this message? Why does any list still exist which doesn't tell you how to unsubscribe? And why does Outlook.com (our email platform) have systems to block senders, but not the senders' domain?

The biggest question for me though is: who profits from this? What gain could there possibly be for adding my name to thousands of mailing lists, nearly all in country I've never visited in languages I can't read? The list owners don't gain, I don't gain... who would benefit that they would undertake this kind of thing?

I think the worst is over... instead of 20+ messages per minute, the rate has received to a few per hour. My bigger worry now is checking that my filters weren't overly aggressive and accidentally swept up legitimate work emails.

I've just dragged my tired carcass home from karate. I walked as is my habit since it's only 3/4 of a mile from home but I was so overheated & sweaty that I just wore my t-shirt and carried my winter coat, hat & scarf in my gym bag. It's an odd situation to be sweating profusely yet still losing sensation in my fingers from the cold.

It occurred to me that this is one of the first classes where I left without feeling any sort of ache or pain. I was utterly depleted of energy, but I think my muscles are finally accommodating the demands of the punches & kicks without requiring pharmaceutical intervention. Then again, ask me in the morning if that is still the case.

Early in the class I also noticed that I can stretch more easily during the warmups, kick higher and punch more effectively than I did when I started. I can't necessarily stretch much further than I did recently, but that it doesn't cause immediate strain is something of a minor victory.

I think I'm getting used to all of this.

In other good news, we had at least five newbies join the adult beginner class tonight. While that makes our class a little more crowded, I'm delighted & reassured that Victory Karate is growing as a business.

As recorded here earlier this year, I took up karate in August at a local dojo which opened earlier this year in our general neighbourhood. Friends had studied karate years ago and frequently mentioned how much they enjoyed it, and I've had a general interest in martial arts since I was a kid, so why not? After all, if now now, when?

In the past, my casual inquiries were stymied by the lack of an adult beginner class. Nearly every program I had looked into was largely designed to introduce children to karate around age 5, then stream them along the various programs as they grew up into adult blackbelts. It seemed there were few options for the grandparents of those same children to begin.

Victory Karate has entry levels for all ages: 3-4 years, 5-7 years, 8-12 years, teens and adults, as well as a few all-skate sessions which mix age groups. I started the adult beginners on Mondays & Thursdays. It's primarily kenpo karate (as opposed to, say, shotokan, goju-ryu, shito-ryu, etc.) with elements of taekwondo and krav maga. Fees are $150/month, charged automatically to my credit card.

I've come to like the routine & light formality of the class. One arrives, puts away the coat & shoes, dons one's belt, collects one's attendance card (each card is collected by the sensei at the beginning of the class where attendance & other comments are made), bows to the dojo, then either stretch or meditate along the side if one is early, or take one's spot on the floor if the class is immediately beginning. The first half or so of each class is a warm-up cardio or stretching, or both. When ready, we delve into the topic of the day as determined by Mr A (Sensei Ibrahim Abdallah): kicks, punches, stances, grappling (and combinations of these), kata, sparring, etc..

Thanks to much weightlifting over the past few years, I have vastly more upper body strength than others in my class. Actually, more than anyone else I've met there. Not that this strength is particularly useful in karate --no strong arms or chest will preserve you from a brutally hard round kick to the head or a back kick to the stomach--, but it lets me generally absorb more sparring hits, make stronger punches, and resist grappling. The biggest advantage is more mundane: I can do the full complement of warm-up push-ups without ending so drained that I stumble through the rest of the class.

Our class has varied from a half-dozen to 15 at any given session. Until recently, I was the newbiest of the newbies: I was the only white belt in a sea of yellow & orange, as well as a few blackbelts who tag along for fun and assist in instruction.

(NB: Beginner levels are white, yellow, gold & orange (green for teens), intermediate is green, blue & purple, and advanced is red, brown & black (blue, purple for teens).

In early December, I graduated up a level to a yellow belt. I have memorized the first three katas, can perform a required series of punches, blocks & kicks without embarrassing myself, and am greatly enjoying myself.

For some extra challenge, I've added the kickboxing class early on Saturday mornings and stay after the Monday class for Mr Tony's taekwondo training. The kickboxing is more like zumba class composed of kicking: we're not boxing each other, but Mr A puts on the house dance music and leads us through a series of high cardio kicking sessions. Imagine lining up on a floor with three kick targets: Each person is to perform one particular kick on the first target, a different one on the second, and yet another on the third, then circle around to the back of the line. In mid-cycle, Mr A might change the target order or the kick to be performed, or right-hand vs left-hand, constantly keeping us on our toes. It's really enormous fun and even more of a cardio workout than the regular karate class.

The taekwondo class is fascinating, mostly because I'm such a newbie that everything is novel to me. It's much more about blocking & grappling than karate has been so far. I've only attended a few classes so far because of scheduling conflicts and the xmas break, but will report more as it happens.

Problems? There are occasional injuries: abrasions on my right forearm from the sparring gloves, the top of my right foot from repeated round kicks, a pulled muscle in my right calf from hopping on one leg & landing badly. Nothing serious. I'm much more flexible than I used to be, but at this point, there is no way I can kick higher than chest-level, and even that lacks any elegance. While that is adequate for defense and my training, I'd really like to be able to kick at head-level with control & smoothness.

What is my plan for 2018? I've been reading a great deal about karate, the history, the physics & biomechanics, and performance guides. I was given a punch & kick target for xmas this week, although I have yet to clear out a space in the basement where I can use it. I need to kick higher: I think this will be a combination of stretching (insert wide-stance joke here) and strengthening my core so that I can pull my knee up to chest level in isolation. I'm exactly how I'm going to get there, but I will start by asking Mr A for advice.

Presuming I can successfully graduate to a new belt level with each exam session in 2018, I hope to end the coming year in the intermediate level as a green belt.

Earlier this month, my old Samsung Galaxy S6 bit the dust. Rather, the pavement. Well, kinda.

I was climbing out of the minivan after delivering Kent to the metro station when it fell from my pocket. It does have a case, but it somehow managed to land flat on its screen, successfully avoiding any contact with the protected surfaces. And the brunt of the shatter pattern was over the selfie camera. The beast worked still, but it was distracting to read because of the shatter pattern, and well, no selfies.

I considered the S8 since I've had a good run with Samsung, but they want $800+ for one. No.

Even the older S7 was going to be $600, much more than I'm willing to pay.

In the end, I went with the Asus Zenfone V. Frankly, I didn't know Asus was making mobile phones but Verizon Wireless was offering it for $240. In my testing, it was slightly less responsive than high end phones but still ran everything I needed to with the same built-in flash storage & RAM, a great screen and higher resolution cameras on front & back.

After a couple of weeks, I'm happy to report it's working well for me. My only significant complaint is that it sometimes doesn't transition nicely from wifi to 4G: occasionally I leave the range of the connected wifi network and it simply refuses to latch onto anything, including the regular mobile network I know is functioning around me. A reboot of the phone brings it back, but that's a bit inconvenient sometimes.

The performance though is more than what I need and the battery life is a big improvement over my old aging S6.

The recent passage of a bill to cut taxes on corporations & explode the deficit has been the capstone to a truly spectacular year of despair.

I've seen many dishonest people and politicians over the decades, but I have never seen such brazen kleptocracy and open lies in stable western democracies in my lifetime. Even Nixon would cringe in shame at the antics of 2017.

We have a president who can't even stop lying long enough to see that no, his electoral college wasn't a landslide, and his inauguration wasn't larger than Obama's. And those were among the first lies, over inconsequential things. There were so much more to come.

And a cabinet stacked with people who not only hate the departments they now run, but they get the double-bonus: they get to dismantle the policies & enforcement which they despise while simultaneously lining their own pockets when deregulation makes their personal business holdings more profitable. And using the gov't credit card for personal travel & expenses is just icing on the cake.

No honesty, no shame, no enforcement, no apologies. That's 2017, and probably most of 2018 too.

I've spent most of the summer and fall of 2017 wondering if I should just jump on the bandwagon: give up trying to be an honest guy and go bilk the masses for every penny they have because (a) I could do it, (b) there's practically no one left to stop me, and (c) there appear to be no consequences for any bad behavior anymore.

Seriously, if even neo-nazis get to spend time at the White House, why are the rest of us even bothering to be good people?

I suspect I could create a private fund investing in Bitcoin or some such other trendy item and make a killing within a few months. Or take a page from the people who brought us the last recession and open a mortgage loan company specializing in sub-prime borrowers. Or get into the payday loan business. There's plenty of opportunity to rip off the public if one is so inclined, and get a tax break for doing so.

We have another eleven months before there's any chance even a fraction of the horrors will be paused, let alone cleaned up. Better get making some easy cash while the getting is good!