I had a really nice long lunch of Pho with my friend Michelle on Thursday. Michelle is the only woman I know with a college degree in science. She works in a blood lab down in San Antonio. I had warned her in advance that my concept of laboratories was limited to what I learned from Bugs Bunny cartoons. She gave me a grand tour of her lab.

First off, there was no blinking neon sign that read "EVIL SCIENTIST - BOO!" And while there were no open flasks of colored water boiling over Bunsen burners, there were two sealed containers filled with two different solvents that fed into a top-of-the-line mass spectrometer. Michelle programs what percentage of each solvent goes into the machine. (I believe she was looking for Vitamin B in particular that day.) It takes up to 12 hours to gently separate the part of the blood she needs to test from the rest of the sample. The lab is also equipped with a nitrogen generator, and has a workstation equipped with a fume hood. She uses the nitrogen to force blood serum through a sieve.

Once you know what the machinery is and what it does, it's actually a very simple procedure. Refrigerate blood. Separate with nitrogen & sieve to get blood serum. Fill plastic tray with tubes of serum (2 blanks, 4 controls, followed by the actual testing samples). Seal tray and put it into spectrometer. Set the controls and adjust the range for what you are looking for. Send the waste to the biowaste bucket. Read results. Print and distribute results to doctors.

Michelle's one of the few people in the whole area who has this fancy (very expensive) machinery in her lab and knows how to use it. (Can you say job security? Hell yes.) And since the process takes 12 hours, she has a fresh-out-of-college minion who works the night shift. I didn't get to meet the minion, but Michelle has a very high opinion of him. "He made the mistake of majoring in bio, but luckily he minored in chemistry. That got him the job here."

Michelle is very supportive about me going back to school and getting a degree in the sciences. (She went to a small university herself, so she understood why I prefer UT Dallas over UT Austin.) She also says that I will love calculus ("The lights will go on and you'll realize that everything else you learned in math was leading up to it."), and that organic chemistry rocks ("It's p-chem that sucks.") She gave the big thumbs up to engineering. Any sort of engineering. "Because that is something that leads to doing something in the real world." Just before I left, she said that she would write me a letter of recommendation...which was completely unexpected, but totally cool of her to offer. :-)

My next steps are to sign up for Physics, Chem and Math at Austin Community College, and then contact my old place of employment and talk with Real Live Engineers. I know there are at least two female engineers there, but I don't know if they are electrical engineers or something else. I'm not discounting other flavors of engineering, mind you. It's just that I already have an interest in EE.

Speaking of other flavors of engineering, Monday I have a workday with Edwin. He is a board member at large for Scare For A Cure, an interactive haunted house event that raises money for local charities. Edwin is crazy-smart. He's written articles that were published in MAKE magazine and has a pyro license. He manufactures all sorts of weird devices and special effects. You need to cast a realistic rubber hand? He can do that. You need a festering wound that fizzes for your zombie outfit? He can do that. You need giant tubes of fire that will shoot flames to various heights according to the volume of music being played? He can do that. Oh yes, he will be very happy to do that.

If anyone has a blinking neon sign reading "MAD SCIENTIST - BOO!" it is certainly Edwin.

As part of my Year of Commitment, which includes committing to Texas, I just applied for a TxTag. Never again will I be stuck in Round Rock-Austin traffic! It takes me 10 minutes on access roads just to get on I-35. With the SH 130 pretty much at my doorstep, that's an instant time savings.

And when I'm in Dallas, you bet I'm going to use the toll roads. I've sat on SH 75 for 40 minutes trying to go through downtown Dallas on a Friday night. It's an experience that I don't wish to repeat.

Many Texans have never paid for toll roads so the concept of paying for what they've always had for "free" is new and unwelcome. But that's the trade-off for not having state income tax and (outside of Travis County) low property taxes. There's less money for schools and roads. So if you want an education and a road to get you there on time, you will need to open up your pocketbook and pay for it.

So me and my hoop troupe got together last Saturday for a dress rehearsal. We looked great together. I think we've got the whole "Birth of the Cool" look down for the Blanton Museum of Art event.

During our chat, I noticed Michelle looking somewhere up and to the side of me. "What is it?" I asked. "Is there a big bee by me?" "Oh no," she said, "I just noticed that this is the first time I've ever seen your hair pulled back so I can see your real hair color. I see grey! It looks nice!"

Aaaaaaagh!

And then a big bee actually did land on me.

Aaaaaaagh!

There are some days when even a nice sunny hooping session with friends in the park and a pleasant lunch over Tarot cards isn't enough to lift my spirits.

I hit my first hooping plateau last month and I am feeling major angst about it. I've got the basics down and I've been adding "flair" (frex, high kicks when doing donut step-throughs) and "flow" (smooth transitions and constant speed) to them. But new material like rolling the hoop off of my back, or smoothly reversing directions, or vertical hooping, is eluding me. The only new thing I can do is toss the hoop straight up during vertical-off-the body moves.

To put this in non-hooping terms: I can walk forward, and I can walk forward very fast, but I cannot skip or run.

I should find a video like this inspiring, uplifting, and a whole host of happy words that end in "ing" -- but today it only makes me sad.

I want to be so much more than I am. And my body is not cooperating. :-/

Laura Scarborough has some great slow-motion footage for doing the back pickup for the Corkscrew. Ignore the last part where the hoop slopes over her head in Wild West/Halo. That's just a stylistic thing.

This is the same move I'm doing in my icon, btw.

I've got a hula hooping gig this month. The era is the late 1950s...but not the "Happy Days" or "Grease" kind of 1950s.


No one over the age of 27 looks good in shorts.


No one looks good in argyle, either. This is why golf was invented: to keep argyle off public streets!


Aaaaaah! My eyes!!!!


Boring, but acceptable.


The least embarrassing option.


Fugly Keds = costume gold!

Me and my first hoop (aka "Green MonsterHoop"):


A year later, with a smaller hoop (Hoopnotica TravelHoop):


Okay I still look like a dork. But I'm a very physically FIT dork! Yay!

Anyone who does something amazing, first starts out with nothing more than a dream and determination. These are videos of my friends -- all of which are amazing performers in their own right -- showing how they got that good:

CARRIN
When Carrin was first starting to hoop, there weren't any videos for beginners on YouTube. Just people who were already really, really good. Carrin changed that by posting videos her practice. Carrin and her brave vblog gave me the courage to try hooping for myself.

Carrin, when she was just beginning to learn how to hoop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fghGXT7IF1g
(her doggie gets surprised at 1:02)

Rare footage of her very first performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1343135QFU

And now she hoops FIRE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVrz_lYZQ04


LUCIAN
Think hooping is just for girls? Think again.

"Parkarage"
http://www.vimeo.com/988705

"Astro Not"
http://www.vimeo.com/1115751
(he wrote the music, too)


RANDAL
Randal's never-say-die attitude about life is a constant inspiration to me. "Movement is Medicine!"

Parkour training:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXqTIHnW7_o

Horse vaulting practice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbAwkcwCTSo

Working out on the bars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSouZ2osegg

Parallette training:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehIU8IgQJCk

The Austin Hoopers Meetup is having an explosion of new members. I can't access Meetup from work, but we're well over 150 members now, closing in quickly on 160. Color me pleased. :-)

And the hooping classes at the Dance Institute are doing well. We're not quite at the point where I need to add a second class, but in another month or so it is very likely.

Teaching hooping is a humbling experience. All of my students are learning the moves so much faster than I did when I was a newbie. You should have heard the delighted squeals as, one by one, they sucessfully completed their very first corkscrew.

I am very proud of them!

Performer: Rayna McInturf, founder of Hoopnotica.com
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nj8hpcrrhc

Not convinced? How about this:



Title: Hoopnotica inspired by Beyonce
Performer: Rayna McInturf, founder of Hoopnotica.com
Song: "Naughty Girl" by Beyonce
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZqwSVZvfbg

Oh and ladies...here's the 10 minute workout that will help you develop these moves. It's a taste of what I'll be teaching at the Level 1 Hoopdance classes at the Dance Institute, Sundays in March.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!