Eat your hearts out. My 95mm contact ball has arrived. Unfortunately, the shop was out of clear ones so I took up a blue one. I’d really be partial to a ebony one but I was afraid that scratches would ruin it. It’s very much heavier but the butterfly seems to benefit from the additional weight. It’s very intimidating though and I keep getting this bad vision of dropping it and having it smash a hole in the marble floor in my room. Or shatter my bookshelves. Or both.
And might I also add, my replacement glow balls have arrived. Shipping costs way more than I’d have liked but I’ve now got 8 glowballs including (at least) 2 faulty ones. I’ve yet to charge the new ones but I’m quite inspired to get a bit of filming done with these after seeing Thomas Dietz’s new trailer.
By mere coincidence, I happened to bump into this French contact juggler twice. And both times are when we’ve got our contact balls with us. He’s pretty damn good and there’s a few new moves that I’d be working on over the next few days. I’d have to get my fingers to be less stiff than they are now though. I think I am learning at a pretty good rate – I think I like contact a lot more than juggling – with juggling, no matter how good you are, as long as you aren’t juggling big objects, you’re almost unnoticeable.
In other news, turns out you can’t slackline at the Botanical Gardens.
Being incredibly stupid, I dropped my ball and it rolled into a drain and it got scratched all around.
Today I started learning a few new rolls with my practice ball. I’m still not sure what I think of a 100mm ball though but i think it’d look visually more stunning though I don’t like how it controls. Butterflies don’t look as soft and flowy as with a smaller ball. I guess given my 80′s now scratched, I’ll end up getting a new 100 and some 70s.
I’ve started a cult at work. Maybe I’ll initiate a lunchtime group or something.
I need to get back into running. I took the first step by emailing a running group near my place but my email bounced. I’ll contact someone somehow eventually but for now I guess I run alone. I signed up for two 10km runs, one in June and the other in Oct. I don’t intend to finish either in anything more than an hour ten. I think that’d require some warming up.
2 weeks into contact juggling. Just to get a rough idea of the amount of practice, I’d spend about an hour a day while watching TV doing palm rolls. And I spent something like 5 hours on one of the weekends getting the butterfly to work with both hands. This is an impromptu routine and there’s tons of mistakes there. I don’t think my palm rolls are as steady as they should be though. Very annoying.
I should really be studying my Japanese notes or something here but I spent about 4 hours today obsessively smoothening out my contact juggling moves. My palm rolls are almost seamless now but I hate how I can still tell that the ball is bobbing up and down slightly. I’m a lot more comfortable with the butterfly now but my right hand is still a bit wobbly at times.
Today, I progressed to doing a bit of backhand transitions. Nothing is smooth as expected but I’m happy that I’m now using my acrylic more comfortably than before. 3 more deep scratches were also added to it after I accidentally flung it to the wall during a butterfly. It rebounded and in my unsuccessful attempt to catch it, I whacked it back into the wall. I’m going to get another 100mm ball because it’s a better size to do single ball contact with. I’m looking at multiples as well and I’m wondering if I should just stick to getting more 80mm ones or getting a set of 70s. My palm isn’t large enough to handle 4 80s I feel but it might be something that practice would resolve.
Who has opinions?
In the meantime, I’ve been motivated by these
I’m also very inspired by this Michael Moschen vid because he’s using an unconventionally smaller ball which I personally am more used to weight-wise (for now) but which doesn’t look as impressive given the hands-to-ball ratio.
This is ridiculously stupid, yes, I know but you have to bear in mind that I don’t use my comp for anything more than to surf the net, to type documents and to edit photos and videos. So it’s naturally unnatural for me to remember that my iMac comes with a inbuilt webcam. It’s nondescript, hiding in a little enclave on the top of the monitor and there’s no reason why anyone would pay attention to it.
I find out today that you can use it with GTalk for Show and Tell AND I also started messing around with this Photo Booth application that comes with some presets to edit your photos with on the spot. I really liked the ones where you could swap out your background for say, the ocean floor but it shows up better on video than in pics. The burst shots mode was my favorite. Here’s a stock photo with a sepia effect which is good because my room’s too confusingly colored anyway.
I’m now the proud owner of a 100mm (and very smelly) orange PVC practice ball and a 80mm acrylic. Mike might be right – a 100mm ball is better to learn with. I’m still happy with my 80mm acrylic though because that’s what I’m used to.
It’s very intimidating to use the acrylic one because it looks so pretty, I’m quite afraid to drop and chip it. I played around with the practice ball for about an hour today and I think I’m getting competent with the Butterfly on my left. I can’t seem to do it as well with my right hand though but I’ve kind of got the hang of a sketchy version of a palm-to-crook-of-arm roll. I do hope to be able to get a more solid version of the butterfly on both hands and then move into a bit of body rolls.
