As currently going around ...
This, USS Harry Truman (CVN75), is one of 148 images currently in my wallpaper directory. (I rotate them when the mood takes me. And thinking about it, it’s time to switch again.) I am now supposed to exhort you to post yours.
As previously noted, I’ve been trying to get a bit more of a regular exercise regimen going, starting with a bunch of upper-body exercises with 3lb hand weights while I wait for the espresso machine to heat up. Not long into this, I started adding in first inward and outward blocks, then upward and downward blocks. It wasn’t long before the Silly Goose wandered into one of my exercise sessions, and so I ended up teaching her the basic inward, outward and upward blocks. She doesn’t practise, so her form is pretty sloppy, but she’s grasped the basics.
Today, I started adding in forward snap kicks as well. It turns out I can do a left-foot forward snap kick pretty easily, but right foot is much harder because I cannot plant my left foot properly — for my left foot to be close enough to under me to support me even for that brief moment, my weight has to be divided about 60/40 between the ball of my foot and my toes, and my heel isn’t within two inches of the floor. My foot also isn’t level side-to-side because the first ray of my foot is dropped about half an inch relative to the rest of my foot, which throws my foot to the outside. So my balance on that side is terrible; I can barely keep my balance even long enough to throw a snap kick.
Anyway, once again Goose wandered in while I was trying to do the right foot front snap kicks, and started trying to copy what I was doing, so I started correcting her, and then the Dread Pirate Bignum got into the act, except that Pirate was really excited about it (even more so than Goose) and wanted to turn it into some kind of wild leaping thing out of bad anime. So I would up teaching them both the basics of the front snap kick. Pirate had a big over-excited problem going on and wouldn’t pay attention at all, then got bored after a couple of minutes, but Goose at least got the basic idea, although she wasn’t really paying the least attention to her stance and I had to keep correcting her. She wasn’t getting the form too well either; she kept leaning back and hunching her forward shoulder into it, she kept letting her stance get too narrow, and when she thought she’d got it, she forgot about what she was supposed to be doing, and ended up letting it drift into something somewhere between a side snap kick and a side thrust kick, so then I wound up having to show her those and the difference between them as well to show her what she was doing wrong. So once again my intended exercise session turned into martial-arts instruction.
Goose probably could actually do pretty well at a martial art, if she could calm down and take the time to properly learn the techniques and develop a bit better awareness of her stance and her form, and if she could develop the patience and and the ... dedication, for lack of a better word ... to actually practice. But at the moment, she’s only willing to put enough effort into it to flail wildly around and think she’s Naruto.
Still, at least she has the “worst swordsman in Spain” thing going for her, and the fact that she’s big and strong for her age.