Sunday: At training, I took part in the second in a series of lessons introducing Meyer’s dussack fighting style. The wooden dussack was used both as a training weapon for single-handed fencing and as a cudgel carried by the town guard, particularly in eastern Europe. The style is very quick and reminds me a lot of sabre fencing.

Monday: Kathi and I were booked in for another frozen embyro transfer. Well, that is to say, she was booked in for the procedure and I just accompany her in order to look on dumbly and hold her hand. The embyro didn’t survive the thawing process so rather than let this opportunity go to waste, we asked for another to be defrosted. See below.

Tuesday: A bunch of mates came over for a couple of games of BloodBowl. Never in the history of Games Workshop has there been a 4-4 tied game. Yay. Also, I started a running program called Couch-To-5km in 8 Weeks in order to improve my stamina and maybe even lose some weight.

Wednesday: Kathi and I went back to the clinic for a frozen embyro trnasfer. This time all went well.That night at training, we had an introduction to medieval knife fighting as outlined in several historical treatises. This was tempered by one of the guy’s 20+ year long career in the military and his opinion as to which historical techniques work and which were merely advertising to fleece noble kids of their pocket money.

Thursday: I can’t actually remember Thursday at all. I’m sure I did stuff because I’ve put Hesiod’s Theogony on the finished reading pile and all the laundry is done. Also, I put in a second session of the Couch-To-5km program. (The next effort in this regard is due Saturday.)

Friday: Amongst other similarly joyful activities, I’ve scrubbed the mold off the patio roof with some disgustingly evil chemical goop. Now I hurt. A lot.

Anyway, that’s the must-dos out of the way and I can prepare myself for Charlotte’s and Marianne’s wold-have-been birthdays coming up on Monday. I’m taking Kathi out somewhere nice for lunch and we’re just spending the day together.

Right now, I need a coffee and I’m going to throw on the Sarah Connor Chronicles to see what they’re like.

I have four weeks off work starting at the end of today and, yes, it was planned. Now I’m starting to think of what to do during this vast amount of time to myself. There will be, of course, celebrations of Charlotte’s and Marianne’s birthday and a memorial something to remember their deaths. I’m coming to terms with this part of my life and I need to think of other activities I can take this opportunity to do.

My plans at the moment include:

• Studying for an exam which counts as certification by the French government that I don’t mangle the language too badly;
• A little technical training to fill in some gaps;
• Reading a whole pile of books which I’ve not had the time to even look at;
• Fencing practice;
• Finishing some of the renovations Kathi and I started two years ago;
• Getting stuck into the yard and garden to sort that out once and for all;
• Doing a bunch of stuff to improve my fitness;
• A whole lot of miniatures wargaming with friends who work decidedly odd hours.

Kathi is working for most of the time I have off and I’m looking forward to kicking her out of bed in the morning for a change. I’m going to enjoy that a lot.

We’ve been thinking as well of getting away somewhere for a few days but the financial implications of the current contract dispute may purt paid to that idea.

Give me some more ideas. Four weeks is a huge amount of time and now that I don’t believe I’ll be a gibbering mess all during all of it, I want to use it productively. What else can I do?

Training with the ACA has been pretty good lately and a lot of technique is starting to click into place (at last!). One of the causes for this is the introduction of some training documents into the group. While we’ve had a basic text for our longsword trainging for a little over a year and another for single-handed weapons, they’ve not been particularly useful outside of the group training night. They were about imparting knowledge and not so much about training. Don’t get me wrong: they are both good cources of information, just a little too high-level to meet my needs right this minute. The new doco puts these texts into practice.

The first of the new texts lists a series of eight drills which take the techniques described in the previous doco and connect them into sequences and patterns of movement designed to promote muscle memory and automatic responses to threats from an opponent. The drills have two features which really interest me.

Fitness: As a fencer, you can never have enough stamina and the drills have the side effect of increasing one’s endurance. It’s well known that body motor skills diminish the higher one’s heart rate. For example, at around 115 beats per minute (bpm), one begins to lose fine motor skils. At around 145bpm, complex motor skills become problematic and it just goes downhill from here. Since I’m dead keen on the rapier, which relies for success on controlling how the point of the weapon moves, the fitter I am, the lower my heart rate during a bout and thus i can maintain better control of the weapon. Presumably, this will result in winning more bouts but that is a theory as yet untested.

Style: Let no one tell you that fencing is solely about effectiveness as a fighter or as a competitor. Grace and style are major components of the sport (or, for the purists, martial art). The truth is that there’s very little chance of me being challenged to a duel to the death, let alone a duel using seventeenth century weapons. Training, to me, is more about recovering or re-learning our lost martial heritage and sportsmanship than it is about preparing to defend my life, hearth and family (until the impending zombie apocalypse occurs, of course). The drills promote style and grace by training your body to move in a particular manner and they focus your attention on performing the moves perfectly and precisely.

As an aside, I first became interested in the precision of my technique after seeing a demonstration of iaido, a Japanese martial art which concentrates solely on drawing the sword, performing brief offensive and defensive moves and returning the sword to the scabbard. The art shows just how beautiful a technique can be.

The second text is a defined set of responses to particular threats while standing in a particular guard position and is (somewhat grandiosely) called The 24 Master Techniqies. This is basically the syllabus for the school. In essence, what it does is say “Ok, you’re standing in middle guard back (our equivalent of the German pflug) and someone attacks to your high outside line (throws a blow at your upper right for the right-hander). How do you defend against it?” By removing the thought process from the rock-paper-scissors like thinking evident in many historical treatises (eg: zwerchau breaks vom tag), it becomes much easier for us moderns who training maybe once a week to become proficient at what we do. It turns historical fencing from something concerned only with static knowledge of the medieval sources into something much more dynamic and functionally driven. These techniques are also built into the drills so that they become automatic and very natural responses.

The best way I’ve found to preform the drills is to do them a few times until you know the moves then do them again with your eyes closed. This makes you (well, me) concentrate on how my body feels and moves during the drill. You can feel how each muscle group changes and interact with other muscle groups during the drill. I’ve found that the precision of movement I can achieve using this technique greatly increases my confidence in my abilities as a fencer – and makes me look good. This concept of muscle memory is dead interesting.

It’s been nearly a year since my daughters Charlotte and Marianne were born and died and I’m still living very much day-to-day. I have no plans for the future. I can’t even realistically imagine me in any kind of future and that’s largely what this post is about.

Why post publicly? Definitely not as a call for sympathy. Unless you’ve held you children in your arms as they die, you just don’t get it and hopefully you never will. There are three reasons behind this post:

1. Knowing that other people may read this focusses my mind and sharpens my expression. Writing publicly demands that I give my ideas a clarity they will never achieve otherwise. This in itself may help me towards an answer.
2. This is my life and I like the idea that others know a little bit about how my mind works – but not in an emo “Heather is such a bitch,” myspace kind of way.
3. There are other blokes out there going through this who also don’t know how to handle it. If I show them that they’re not alone or trigger a new way of looking at things, my work here is done.

(The distant fourth reason is that someone out there in teh interwebs may actually have a clue about how I can deal with all this stuff.)

Back to the future…

There was a time not too long ago when I had a plan for my life without children. IVF is a gamble and I was always aware that the gamble may not pay off. I had an idea of what my life would look like, the kind of things I’d occupy it with, a sort of overview of how it would unroll. Kathi and I would always regret not having had children but we would always have the knowledge that we did everything we could have done to have kids. It was a fairly positive view of the furture, albeit tinged with sadness.

Then came my angels and I worked out a new idea about how my life would unfold. I now looked forward to all the joyous life events being a father entails: arguing with Kathi about who’s turn it is to be elbows deep in dirty nappies, avoiding the sword of damocles of twins demanding which of them you love more, trying to keep “daddy’s helpers” from undoing all my work in the garden, arguments about “you’re not going out dressed like that, young lady,” and even loading the shotgun to fend off the inappropriate boyfriends, etc.

Now that they’re gone, I can’t imagine life without watching living children grow up. Having had a taste of that life, I can’t find a way to go back to being happy with the idea of never having living children. But the reality is that this may never happen.

The result is that I live day-to-day. I find it hard to get excitied about anything. Most of my time is devoted to short-term goals such as going to fencing training, painting wargaming figures, reading trashy fifties hardboiled detective novels. All of these are pursuits of limited duration. Work is nothing more than a painful annoyance without which I know I’ll lose those things that make my life comfortable. There’s no long-term planning. There’s no “where will you be in five years time?” None of these things matter. I’m in limbo.

If I can’t have my girls with me and watch them grow and discover the world, the next best thing is to talk about them. I love talking about my girls, how they looked, what they did, what they could have become. The problem here is that they only lived for 11 and 12 days. They’re gone and the curse of the surviving parent is that I will never have new memories of them or new things to talk about. What will happen – and is happeneing even now – is that the once scalpel-sharp detail of my memories of my girls blur and fade and in the years to come all I will be left with is the memory that I once had two beautiful daughters and the shared (possibly confabulated) stories of them that Kathi and I tell each other.

Since we started back on IVF this year, one of the main points of discussion is the idea that if we get pregnant again, it almost certainly won’t be with twins. It may sound ungrateful but even if we have a baby in the future who survives more than two weeks, we’ve lost the chance of belonging to the special club of parents of twins. As we get older, the chance of IVF working diminishes. It may be that the brief lives of Charlotte and Marianne will be the only marks of parenthood we will ever know.

I really don’t know right now how to handle this. I can’t live in the past as that way lies madness. I can’t live for the future because a future without living children is just as horrific to contemplate as a future without the memory of my girls. That only leave me the now, the eternal present.

I make sure I keep up with my mates and keep myself busy doing things I know I used to enjoy: historical fencing, reading, roleplaying, watching movies, wargaming, coffee, talking crap with friends, passing particularly harsh judgements on idiots, etc. But these are all ‘now’ events. They have no future either.

While I enjoy all these activities and I love spending time with friends, I feel keenly that there’s a wall which separates me from them and prevents me from fully participating in the fun of whatever playful stupidity we’re currently engaged in. This stuff is nothing but actions to fill in the great emptiness of the now. There is no goal that they’re leading towards that I can see other then they prevent me from crawling into a bottle of either scotch or anti-depressants or both. Maybe that’s enough and all I should expect for now.

The problem is what comes next and what happens after that. These are questions that at this stage I can’t answer.

So, just as all the cool kids are doing nowadays, taking the place of any real content is this lovely little ditty: Miss Emeline Spankhurst sings the Tin Foil Hat Song.

Warning: I haven’t been able to get this song out of my head all week.

I’ve been interested in this game since it first appeared as a liftout in a holiday edition of White Dwarf magazine – way back when it was still owned by Steve Jackson Games and not an in-house advertising vehicle for GW. The game is basically a parody of American football played with fantasy races. Of course, given my Flintloque proclivities, I’ve settled on a team of elves.

Elves, being what they are in the Warhammer universe, are agile and graceful. In game terms, this means they are fast and can throw the ball about quite well. Hence, the strategy for my team it to split the defense by running deep towards the goal line and make long passes to the receivers. Two turn touchdowns will become my team’s speciality.

Also, to highlight the prissy nature of the race, the team refuses to cheat or foul against other teams, indulge in “rough-house play,” or any other form of nastiness. They are here to play the game and show that beings who understand bloodbowl at infinitely deeper levels than any other Warhammer race is capable of are inherently superior. They are frequently know to launch official protests at “ungentlemanly conduct” and other such infractions of the spirit of the game.

In the first league game (last week), the Angels played Peter M Ball’s Underhill Maulers, a team of halflings and were mauled. We launched the first of, I’m sure, many official protests to the league management. If including ten foot tall treeman on a team of halflings doesn’t go against the spirit of the rules, then using them to throw halflings at the opposition surely must be.

Last night’s game, the Angels lost in a complete whitewash against Nic’s Dwarf Warhammerers. In their turns, they grabbed the ball, placed the guy carrying it in the centre of an armoured mass and slowly marched forward into the end zone. In the Elves turn, they rolled ones. For every dice roll which could have affected the game, they rolled ones. You can’t argue with fate.

I’ll post some photos when I get a minute to myself.

Last Sunday was the twelfth anniversary of the day we were married. Yay us! After all we’ve been through it was a bit of a shock to realise that we’re still together and that we actually like hanging out with each other. To celebrate, we did two things: dinner at a new (for us) french restaurant called C’est Bon on Saturday night, traipsing around the Glasshouse Mountains looking at rocks and stuff Sunday. Both our Satruday night and our Sunday wanderings were brilliant.

C’est Bon has earned itself a good rep both generally and within the french ex-pat community in Brisbane. The restaurant is rather expensive ($150+ for two) but food is simply brilliant and well worth the price. The aspect that sold us was the entree and dessert platters. We love sampling the range of tastes offered by a restaurant in order to decide whether we’ll go back. The degustation d’entrees consisted of all the standards: pate, tomato tart, escargots, scollops (coquille St Jacques) and a mousse of goat’s cheese. I took ownership of the snails and seafood immediately and had a little of whatever else Kathi deigned to leave on the plate. For mains, she choose the Duck a l’Orange (another classic) while I opted for the cassoulet because it always reminds me of our stay at Carcassonne. Both these dishes a la version original tend to be a little too oily for Australian tastes but these successfully and very gracefully leapt this hurdle. The degustation de
desserts included a mini creme brulee and mini creme caramel, as you  would expect, but added to these a lemon tart and a chocolate tart whose filling was so dense it generated its own gravity. During dessert, the last Brisbane Riverfire ‘dump and burn’ by the soon-to-be-retired F-111s roared by.

Glasshouse Mountains Excursion

The Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane were given their name in 1770 by James Cook who likened these volcanic plugs to glasshouses standing above a generally flat landscape. We wandered about the various lookouts and belleviews that are noted on the maps and took a bunch of photos. One of the things that surprised us was that the local aboriginal legends about the formation of the Glasshouse Mountains were completely lacking. For me, the legend is interesting because it, like many other legends of coastal peoples in the northern half of the continent, speaks of a rapidly incroaching tide which in undates the coastline. Is this a memory of the rising sea-level at the end of the last ice age? The legend is fairly well known but there is no eveidence of it at any of the sites we visited except for cryptic notes saying things like “this mountain features heavily in local legends” or that it is “considered sacred by the traditional owners of the area.” Perhaps, we theorise, the owners of the legend have not given their permission to have the story displayed publicly. Perhaps, it’s a simple oversight by the EPA who manage the area for the state govenment. Hands up anyone with more info? I’m dead keen to know.

Migrating from Geocities

Moving to Wordpress, I had to deal with how to redirect people from my Geocities web site. The problem is the GeoCities is not interested in letting me access anything interesting such as an .htaccess file, a server-side 301/302 redirection, etc and did not allow me to post perl or php code to do job. I had to fall  back to javascript to redirect a browser to here. The unwanted side-effect of this is that Geocities would wrap a very annoying frame around the redirected page.

Never fear! The Wordpress add_action() function is here! A small bit of javascript hooked into wp_head did the trick. The add_action() function takes a pre-defined function and adds it into the hook specified – meaning that the function is added to the list of stuff to be processed when Wordpress is deciding what to include in the HTML <head> tag it sends the browser. Here’s the code in question:

function kill_geocities_frames() {
   echo "<script type='text/javascript'>
      // <![CDATA[
      if (self != top && self.location.host != 'sleech.info' ) {
         top.location.href = self.location.href;
      } else {
         if ( document.getElementById('y_gc_div_adcntr') ) {
            y_gc_div_adcntr.innerHTML = '';
            y_gc_div_mast.innerHTML = '';
            y_gc_div_au1.innerHTML = '';
         }
      }
      // ]]>
   </script>";
}

add_action('wp_head', 'kill_geocities_frames');

Excerpts and Ellipsis

My preference has always been to have the front page of my blog include the full text of the latest post only and excerpts of all other posts. To me, this just looks better. The issue is that the theme I prefer did not support this. The code to do this is better explained pretty much everywhere so I’m not going to dig into the explain here.

The problem that concerns me now is how to make make the excerpt display in the way I want it to. This problem can be broken down into two goals to be achieved:

1. I want the excerpt to show more than just plain text. I want it to show links, images, bold text, etc — all the standard HTML.
2. I want to convert the standard ellipsis [...] at the end of the excerpt to be a clickable link which takes the reader to the full version of the post.

There are numerous plugins which solve one of these problems but none that I’ve found that do both at the same time to the level of quality I want. None of the plugins I tried wanted to play nice together. I chose Advanced Excerpt to solve goal 1 and give me complete control over what HTML is displayed in the excerpt.

To solve goal 2, Wordpress again came to the rescue in the form of add_filter(). This is a function through which you pass a bunch of text – such as the text of the excerpt – which is manipulated and changed according to a function you write for the purpose. In this case, I wrote a function which searches the text given it for the HTML ellipsis entity added to the end of the excerpt by the plugin and replaces it with the HTML code for the link I want. Add_filter() then hooks my function into the the_excerpt() template tag. Here’s the code:

function my_excerpt_ellipsis($text) {
   return str_replace('[&hellip;]', '&hellip; <a href="'.
         get_permalink($post->ID) . '" rel="nofollow" class="more">
         read on »</a>', $text);
}

add_filter('the_excerpt', 'my_excerpt_ellipsis');

Man, I love this stuff!

Size comparisons are unavoidable

Swordplay 2009 was an inaugural event hosted by the Australian College of Arms. The ACA wanted to see if there was any interest in a small inter-school tournament for historical fencing groups in the Brisbane area and ended up drawing participants from all over the country and as far away as Hobart and Perth. Apparently, the gathering even garnered the interest of swordplay groups in New Zealand.

Events on offer included:

• a grand tournament using the (still under development) ACA tournament rules which test skill-at-arms with rapier and a companion weapon,
• a demonstration of the fifteenth century Belgian guild tourney rules,
• a general melee using padded and rubberised weapons and armour organised by KnightFight,

as well as seminars on various topics ranging from:

• an introduction to sixteenth century Italian rapier fencing and
• the bio-mechanics of swordplay.

Chris Slee (ACA) v Ben (Prima Spada)

For me, the highlight of Swordplay 2009 was bouting with guys from the other schools. It’s only natural that you get used to the techniques of your own school and the responses and reactions of the people you train with. Bouting with someone from another school is a whole ‘nother thing. They react to your feints and strikes in ways your training has not anticipated and their strikes on you come from directions you’ve not previously considered. I think these friendly bouts, when conducted at a slowpace, are an invaluable training tool and when we bout at something close to full speed they can become true competitions of skill. There’s a couple of guys from the SCA and from Prima Spada that I seriously look forward to meeting again in the arena.

Tournament Play

In terms of the ACA tournament, the event was great fun even though I was knocked out (not literally) in the first round. There were a few injuries but these were confined to later rounds when the participants were becoming tired. Fatigue and swordplay are two concepts which just plain don’t mix. However, I think there’s something at the core of the experience and within the rules that, with a little tweaking, can provide the foundation of an annual event that all participants can safely be very proud of. I’m sure Scott is being bombarded with comments and suggestions for improvement.

The Belgian Guild Rules tourney put on by Leith Golding of Collegium in Armis was basically a fast and furious version of piggy-in-the-middle using wooden wasters and German longsword techniques. The wooden swords are a little light and under a padded fencing jacket it’s a little hard to register whether you’ve been hit or not. Next time, I’m told, it will be run using proper federschwert. This will make a world of difference to the event.

Richard Callinan (SCA)

Richard Callinan ran a workshop describing the basic offensive and defensive maneuvers of the Italian, specifically Bolognese and Dardi traditions. For me, this workshop made the readings I’ve done into the tradition a lot clearer. The problem with reading the original texts (apart from translation difficulties) is that they all assume that you are familiar with the system or at least with fencing in general. Richard reduced the number of guards to the minimum common across all treatises describing this style of fencing and showed the actions or attacks common to all of them which start and end in these guard positions. A lot of stuff we did in the workshop, we do in our own ACA curriculum but there was plenty of new stuff and extensions on top of what we do. I’m plan on incorporating some of these techniques into my own style.

The seminar on the biomechanics of swordplay was dead interesting and I’d like to know more about the subject. Stu MacDonald of Core Life Concepts talked about how energy moves through the body using the mechanism of contraction and relaxation of muscle groups. He then demonstrated how these muscle groups chain together to create typical swordplay motions such as swinging one’s arm to strike with the blade edge or lunging forward to thrust the blade point into a target. He also provided a bunch of simple exercises (which reminds me that it’s been a few weeks since I went to yoga) to better utilise these muscle chains and improve strength and reaction time.

Scott McDonald (ACA)

From my point of view, there’s plenty here to commend in Swordplay 2009 and I truly hope that others felt the same. I’d really like to see it become an annual event and, with appropriate tweaking, I’m sure it will.

Lastly, I’d like to ask for a big round of applause for the ACA’s own Scott McDonald for going to the effort of bring us all together for this wonderful weekend.