Anita's Gigabits

03Nov
0

Flying Trapeze

So in the continued effort to find my ‘natural talent’ I took a flying trapeze class. Coming off of my failed cliff jump in Jamaica, I’m not quite sure why I thought I could do this any better… being afraid of heights and all. But there was a Groupon, and just as they expect, I bought it since I knew I would never do it otherwise. I was able to rope in two of my friends and we set off for our 2 hour lesson. The Trapeze School was inside Jordan’s Furniture and I had seen it a bunch of times before when I went to the IMAX theatre. It was completely different knowing that I was actually going to be doing it though and my stomach sank the minute I looked up at it from the registration desk. I figured I might chicken out. We got a brief lesson and got to practice swinging and doing the knee hang on the low bar in the practice area. Then it was time to go up and just do it. They told us that the hardest part would be jumping off of the ledge… boy were they right. My brain had the hardest time forcing my legs to jump, it was almost as if they had a mind of their own and it was saying “nope”. Once I was able to slide my legs off of the ledge in the most ungraceful fashion, it wasn’t so bad swinging and using the momentum to get my legs up into the knee hang. Took me a couple of jumps but I was getting the hang of it (except for the actual jump part where my legs were just not having any of it).

Our last two jumps involved being caught by one of the professionals. We had to use the skills we learned to make sure that our jumps and knee hangs went as smoothly and quickly as possible so that we could make the catch. It’s all about timing. If you hesitate at any point the timing will be off the you will be out of sync. This posed a problem for me since after 7 jumps I still couldn’t get my legs to jump off of the ledge when I was supposed to. Apparently the guy at the top assisting us knew this as well. When it came to my turn, he had me put my feet together and when the catcher yelled “HOP!” he pushed me off the ledge. It worked great and I was able to make the catch :)

After 2 hours and nearly 10 jumps I still wasn’t any less scared than the first jump, but I survived. Not sure if I’ll do it again though, and it is definitely NOT my natural talent… as if you can’t tell by the look on my face.

Posted by anita in misc
28Jul
0

Learning to Listen to Music

So, I reached the point in my Zumba career (read: obsession) where it was time for me to create my own routine. I picked the song “Mundian To Bach Ke” remixed by Punjabi MC and if you’ve ever been to an Indian wedding you’ve heard it for sure. I’ve heard this song a million times and figured I would just be able to throw some moves to it and be done. I was seriously mistaken. Zumba is not like drunken dancing at a wedding reception or in a club, you actually need to think about the moves you are doing and how they work your body. After my failed attempt at slapping together some moves, I decided I had to listen to the song again, but this time really listen and find the beats I wanted to work with. With this particular song, I wanted to use traditional Bhangra steps kicked up a notch for a cardio workout. The first time I really listened to the song, I heard what felt like ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’, it was madness. But that was how I heard it and these were my notes based on that (where each number after the bracket represents a step):

After getting some input from my instructor, I was advised that I would probably lose people if I kept changing steps so quickly. So I listened to the song again (for the hundredth time) and I was able to hear the base drum beat that is in the background throughout the whole song. On advice from my instructor I just changed the steps based on a count of 8 or 16… instead of 4. I ran through it 40 more times and with some tweaks I think it’s finally done.

Lesson learned from this experience: listening to music to write a dance routine is COMPLETELY different from listening to music just to listen to it. There are so many beats you can use for your steps and choosing the wrong ones can completely throw you off. Coming from someone who knows nothing about music or dance, it was an awesomely frustrating experience and I can’t wait to do it again!

Below is the song if anyone is interested and you can catch my routine on a Friday night at Latin Beat Studio in Malden, MA.

Posted by anita in misc and tagged with
21Mar
0

Shouldn’t We All?

cupcake Via Etsy.

Posted by anita in misc
20Jan
0

My First Pair of Uggs

People either love them or hate them and in the past couple of years Uggs, it seems, are on almost every girl’s (and some guy’s) feet. I didn’t care for the look of them all that much, but all of the people I knew that had them said they were so warm and comfortable and very durable. I just couldn’t bring myself to drop $180 on boots that I wasn’t in love with.

So, a couple of years ago I bought a pair of cheap Payless knock-offs. I would always put them away for the spring and pull them out again in the fall and I only wore them when it was really cold outside. They held up well but the calf was way too wide for my leg which let a lot of cold air in.

Last winter I bought a pair of short knock-offs by Bear Paw thinking they would be a little better quality and I’d wear them more often. Well, the Bear Paw ones were way worse than the Payless ones in that after one winter of wearing them almost every day, the bottom had worn near completely off and the fake shearling lining was just itchy and rough. Not to mention that the fake lining had compacted so much that the boot became way too big for my foot and my feet would slide around when I walked. They were terrible.

So, that brings us to this winter where a freak impulse-shopping-gone-wrong-leads-to-store-credit-only scenario happened and I ended up with a good chunk of change I had to spend. Since nothing in the shoe store appealed to me I decided to give in to the Ugg craze and try them out. I tried them on in the store and was instantly amazed. They fit perfectly well and cradled my foot/leg in real sheepskin. The shaft of the boot was snug without being too tight. The outer is made of sheep suede and is already treated with a coat of waterproofer but you can put more on if you want. Not to sound like an infomercial, but I really do love them. I have a few friends that have had their Uggs for 4+ years without any deterioration in the quality or structure of the boot. If that’s the case, I would consider them very much worth the $180 price tag (give or take depending on the style you want). I have worn my Uggs every day since I got them (about a month), with the exception of a few days where there were giant puddles of icy slush on the ground. They may not be the greatest looking shoe, but they are awesome for a New England winter.

Posted by anita in reviews and tagged with ,
04Jan
0

Another Year, Another Resolution

Or seven. The first being to blog more. And bake more and spend less. We’ll see how those work out.

On an extremely happy note, school’s finally over, at least all the classes for my degree and I graduate in March. I signed up for Elementary Russian I in the spring, I’m hoping to be fluent by June :) Maybe take a trip to the motherland next year. But for 2011, I can already tell it’s going to be a jam-packed year! Going to PA for MLK weekend to see some of my favorite PSU folks, going to London and Iceland first week of February and sometime again in the Spring and going to Jamaica in June. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of traveling, money will probably run out before my energy does. Which brings me to another resolution for 2011 and that is to find another source of income. I’m hoping with a master’s degree in hand that will be a little easier.

That’s it for now. I’ll be posting on the progress of these resolutions, among other things, in the coming months!

Posted by anita in misc
03Nov
0

My Halloween Costume This Year

I had a hard time figuring out what to be for halloween this year. It was down to the week before and my criteria had shriveled down to just something that covered most of my legs, which is hard to do for women’s costumes. So in many a Googling I came across halloweencostumes.com, simple enough. I decided to be a Sorceress mostly because the costume was purple and had long sleeves.

This is me:

costume

And I got it from:

Halloween Costumes

Posted by anita in misc and tagged with , ,
02Nov
1

Zumba Video Contest

The best (at least in my opinion) Zumba instructors in Boston, Nelson and Patricia, have created a video for a recent contest based on the song “Caipirinha”. It was done at Salon Trilogy in Newton. Oh, and I’m in it too :)

Check it out!
Caipirinha – Zumba fitness® Response – Boston

Posted by anita in misc and tagged with
27Oct
1

The Lynn Food Project Petition

A local friend brought this to my attention and I wanted to help spread the word.

The Lynn Food Project needs your support. There is a small group of people who want to prevent the renewal of the Food Project’s lease. This project is great for local kids to learn about food, farming and establish a good work ethic. Plus the food grown is distributed through the local CSA. It’s worth saving.

Here is the link to the petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/foodprojectlynn

And here is a link to a local blog post on the situation:
http://lynnsideedition.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/the-food-project-needs-your-help

Thanks!

Posted by anita in news and tagged with
26Oct
0

Latest Web Project: Zumba Website

My latest “personal time” endeavor is building a dynamic website for my Zumba instructor. I decided to build it in RoR since that is what I currently know best and want to learn more about. My goal with this site is to learn as much as I can by doing. My instructor only required that the site have a class schedule, events listing, photo gallery and a shop for Zumba merchandise. I wanted to build the site CMS style with an admin back-end but homegrown to fit his particular needs.

I began with the basic scaffolding and made the stubs for the about pages, schedule, news & events, mailing list and gallery. After getting the static content of the bios and ‘About Zumba’ in, I began on the gallery. My instructor wanted to display photos and videos of events that he puts on or performs at but required that all video’s be password protected for legality reasons. So I implemented a basic authentication system using encrypted passwords and storing sessions which also allowed me to create the admin account for the back-end features. To house and display the photos, I decided the best route for storage and archive was to use flickr and just pull the albums into the gallery using a jQuery image viewer plugin called Yoxview. It was fairly simple to implement and customize the view and it displays the images nicely with an easy, lightbox-like transition.

Next, I’ll be working on the shop. We have set up a PayPal merchant account will be doing all of the payment transactions through there. So for the website, I am creating an inventory list for my instructor to be able to add, edit and view inventory of items. Depending on the amount of products, I will create a simple list of items for the customer to browse and view individually. Size quantities will be updated in the inventory table when an item is purchased and alerts will be sent to the admin with quantities are low.

Still a work in progress, but I’m learning A LOT. Stay tuned for the progress and in the meantime check out the site!

Posted by anita in misc and tagged with , ,
20Jul
0

Vibram Five Fingers at Zumba

So I’ve been taking Zumba classes for about 3 months now and I’m pretty much addicted to it. I started out with one or two classes a week and have now escalated to 5 or 6 classes a week. It is so much fun and crazy good exercise. Zumba has its own clothing line and branded merchandise, which I am not embarrassed to say that I have purchased quite a lot of… but not nearly as much as others. I am surprised that they have not created specific footwear for it. There is one pair, but they are nothing special. In fact, most of the frequent Zumba’ers wear Nike Shox, I would assume due to the high impact cardio involved. I’ve been wearing my Adidas cross trainers and just yesterday decided to try out my Vibrams. I figured they would help with my balance on some of the moves and have a more natural feel for some of the dance moves. They were definitely a different experience. I had a much better grip on the floor which was great for keeping my balance and doing squats but this was also detrimental when I needed to twist my feet and glide across the floor. Overall the Vibrams are much lighter than my Adidas sneakers and they give me a better grip on the floor while also still be comfortable when jumping and hoping. As far as having elegant dance moves, sneakers are better. I will probably keep wearing my Vibrams to see if they get better as I get used to doing Zumba with them.

UPDATE: So I ended up trying out the Five Fingers for a regular Zumba class, well actually a double header. The first hour was fine except for the toe tapping bits. Halfway through the second hour my legs were starting to give out and both of my big toes were hurting. Either I wasn’t doing it right, or dancing is not a good idea with these shoes. I’ll probably just stick to the Zumba Tone classes for now.

Posted by anita in reviews and tagged with , ,
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