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For the past few years, I have tried some crossword puzzles in the local papers from time to time when I feel like sitting down to rest during the day.... It's kind of an interesting thing to do which they recommend for older people to exercise their brains! For me, it reminds me of words in English, and the occasional word many Americans know from other languages.
Some phrases are also included, and some were more commonly used a few years or decades ago.
I don't remember seeing "I'll go along with that" in a crossword puzzle, but it might well have appeared when we didn't have a subscription and only occasionally picked up a paper at the local store.
Now we come to the original titles of this week's post:
Aikido, Art, Carpentry. The point of view was to be the loft my husband and I had for a couple of years in the late 1980's. I had originally hurt my knee in 1986, while I wasn't training, and had the bright idea of teaching people with injuries in a spare room at the art loft. Actually it wasn't my bright idea, it was Linda, who had gotten a shoulder injury . Our old loft and other work spaces were in Westchester and she was working at a hospital in Westchester, and was living in the border town of Byram, actually a part of Greenwich CT. So we were in the Byram-Port Chester area pretty frequently, and I think we saw Linda around there a couple of times, and each time she asked about Aikido. She had only Tuesday evenings off from work, and couldn't atte
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This isn't exactly Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, just one of those funny memories of New York Aikikai. I mentioned Valerie and Kitsy as swordswomen in my previous entry, Valerie did kendo at the American Buddhist Academy on Riverside Drive, and Kitsy studied iaido somewhere downtown. Valerie liked the spirited competitiveness of kendo, she went to tournaments and was very insistent in demanding rights for women there.... sorry I don't remember the details.
Kitsy was about a decade older than we were and was raising her two youngest children in New York, I'm not sure where the older ones were. Same parents, the kids were just different age groups. She was spirited too, but almost shy in a way, in contrast to Valerie who was as I hinted before, very outspoken in matters of Women's Lib as it was called at the time.
By the way, Valerie took her large white cat Loki to the kendo tournaments because she wasn't sure of Paul giving Loki the insulin shots correctly. That was the first time I heard of diabetic cats and their treatment.
I miss Valerie too, and so does Kitsy. The last I heard Valerie was teaching courses in Medieval History at a college not far from New York City, but when I checked Google there was nothing recent and the email address didn't work. Another notable thing about Valerie is that she had her own column in Black Belt Magazine entitled Fighting Woman, which she later expanded to magazine format as Fighting Wo
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06-16-2012 07:23 AM 
