webmaster mike's blog

Hey Cool Cats,

P90X Classes start Monday, Jan 16, 2012 and go until the end of June. This is the perfect chance to get in the best shape of your life before summer. Check the P90X Calendaria in the upper right of this blog.

Classes are MWF, 6-7:30 am at the Peninsula Nordic Training Center, 362 Tyee St. Soldotna, AK 99669.

Monthly price: $59.99 + Tax plus a weekly fee of $2.99 to Beachbody. (Grand totals around $75 / month)

Why P90X? It’s an incredible fitness program that stresses the three fundamentals of athleticism – Strength, Cardio, and Flexibility. Based on the concept of Muscle Confusion, P90X constantly changes workouts and routines so your body never gets used to the exercises. With continual and varied workouts, your body will constantly be pushed, and your results will be amazing.

To sign up, call Mike Penland (Not to be confused with Webmaster Mike) at 907.978.9884

See you Monday.

Wow, I haven’t written a post SINCE LAST YEAR. Apologies.

I hope everyone had an enjoyable time over the Holidaze. Following in my tradition of going someplace warm for the break, I did exactly the opposite and went to visit family up in Fairbanks. With temperatures soaring into the -20s, I enjoyed some cross country skiing on Fairbanks’ lovely ski trails, and even had the opportunity to experience minor frostbite on my ear lobes. All told, it was delightful.

After Fairbanks, I spent some time in Girdwood, where I brought the balmy Fairbanks weather with me, as one morning saw -14 on the slopes. Girdwood, too, has put significant resources into building great cross country ski trails, so it was quite nice to see some new scenery. As luck would have it, being in Fairbanks completely recalibrated my idea of cold, so I was more than happy to ski in Girdwood and back here at Tsalteshi despite the below zero temperatures.

Speaking of exercise, I’m scheduled to teach some fitness classes at the Nordic Training Center in Soldotna starting Monday of next week. These will be P90X workouts, and you can find a calendar in the upper right hand corner of this very blog. I’ll have more information soon. P90X is a very intense program that uses the concept of Muscle Confusion to maximize results. After the entire program, you will be in the best shape of your life. College athletes, MMA fighters, and pro athletes use P90X to become better all-around athletes. Try it. You’ll love it, but it’s not easy.

In website news, we’ve launched a new front page feature for 2012. The Essential Images: KPBSD Photo of the Day is a daily opportunity to reflect on the reason this District exists – the students. Take a look at the lower right corner of the KPBSD website, that’s why we’re here.

So, in all respects, good things are happening for 2012.

Stay tuned for a new post from me.

I’m sure it will happen first thing next year.

Evildoers, beware. Your nemesis is afoot. Or, afeet, perhaps more accurately. For on the eve of Tuesday I did stride ardently, festooned with what shall forever be

THE PINK BLADES OF JUSTICE.

And evildoers did flee, rest assured, as I saw nary a reprobate, scofflaw, or politician.

As described previously, I have been limited in my skate skiing excursions by foot pain. Feet pain, more accurately, as it occurs in both of my arches. I attribute this to woefully poor technique on my part. So unsteady on the slippery bits, I grip the soles of my boots, talon-like, causing quick and drastic fatigue to my archery regions.

On Tuesday, I sought to correct this.

• Phase 1: Tighten the bejeezus out of my boots

Thinking that if my feet had no choice but to remain immobile, they would be less inclined to attempt to clench unnecessarily. So, like a doting mother and foot binding enthusiast, I cinched up my boots. Seriously, I think they might have been air tight. Ends up that this didn’t help at all, zero blood circulation notwithstanding. While the rest of the group zoomed around in a figure eight pattern (more complicated than it sounds) I attempted to, and then threw myself to my knees in a frantic attempt to jettison myself from my boots. I thought at one point I had no choice but to call in the Jaws of Life for emergency extraction.

• Phase 2: Loosen said boot bejeezus

After a cooling off period where I took it upon myself to actually bathe my aching feet in snow, I gingerly reinserted my southerly appendages into the boots. I attemped to glide about the figure eight pattern. Gliding, for me, is not without a great gnashing of teeth and flailing appendages, but my feet did feel better. I did however feel quite tenuous in my position, and thought that any sudden movements would seek to separate me from my boots and therefore the crime-fighting PBoJs. And we can’t have that, can we?

So, after five laps on the Green (MOOOOOSE TRAIL (an O for every lap)) Course, resting my feet with frequent double poling, which helped my recovery, I got my heart rate up and even started to feel confident that I might have solved the foot puzzle. Oh, and a quick note about the PBoJs: They’re fast. Very fast. Nigh breathtakingly fast. Consider yourself warned.

I finished with my four laps on my favorite straight up and straight down sprint course (while enduring the puzzled “What is wrong with you, why on earth are you doing that?” looks from my fellow skiers) and called it a night.

Looking forward to a few nights of fentoozling to break up the hectic pace of skate skiing, but will remain forever vigilant in thwarting the evildoings of evildoers, particularly politicians.

They looked askance at their surroundings. A bleak, flat desolation stared silently back. They were alone with the horizon, glass-black and solid, immutable. Polished mercilessly by the wind, their collective fear multiplied.

So anyway, yeah, Skate Night. The ground was hard. Not ice hard, more like polished granite. And the wind had burnished every surface into a crusty, slick mess. So, perfect for skiing, right? Actually, the conditions were really fast, unless you went off the groomed trails, where the frozen sheets would yield not at all, and off into the hinterlands you would plunge. I found that out the hard way. I have been having trouble with my feet when I skate ski. Last night’s session was the worst it’s ever been. I believe it’s a technique related occurence, as the pain seems to be mitigated when I push off correctly, which is at least 0.00002% of the time. The rest of the time, however, is not much fun. It is rather demoralizing when I want to get exercise and I have to rest my feet after 4 continuous minutes of skiing. I would rather the limiting reagent of my exercise be my lungs or legs, and not something as pedestrian (heh) as my arches.

But I’m working through it. I believe Thursday will be another skate night unless conditions change dramatically, so we shall see.

In the interim, I will dream of pain free skating and glorious fentoozling.

They didn’t know. They couldn’t possibly. Air movements in the upper atmosphere conspired, and had chosen their fate. The leader spoke, his eyes red from elemental exposure, eyes full of a lifetime of physical labor, beset by the sharp cold and biting wind.

“Today is the day. Let’s do Wolf.”

Their fate was sealed. The day could only end one way.

Fentoozling.

So, anyway, that’s how my recollection of Thursday went. It had warmed up a touch. A lot, actually. Classic skiing afoot, our group did drills in the increasingly-squishy snow, thanks to the warming trend. The drills, mostly balance and glide drills, bolstered my confidence, but I wasn’t quite ready for the Wolf. Turns out I didn’t have a choice. After the lesson, I got wrangled into going on the Wolf by Coach Kjell. The Wolf is also known as the “Blue Course,” and I have no idea what that means. Perhaps it’s a similar convention to downhill skiing, where blue is intermediate, green is beginner, and black is difficult. The Wolf trail is decidedly intermediate. A good distance with many hills and turns, it is lengthy and challenging. But hey, I’d been classic skiing for a whole week, so I’d be good to go, right? And I was, surprisingly. I did have the added disadvantage of terrible technique. Whereas Kjell glides up and down the hills, I struggle and grunt. I know my borrowed skis are partly to blame, because he let me try his for a bit. I was actually able to pass him downhill with his skis. Unbelievable. But, I suppose if you make Usain Bolt wear shoes made out of depleted uranium, I might stand a chance to outrun him. After we completed the entire Wolf, we did a loop around the soccer field (football pitch, for my readers overseas) and then went to look for the other people in the class, who had gone in different directions. So, we went up Wolf backward. Not like moonwalking up, but just doing the course in reverse. We also did Beaver trail (my time trial favorite) backward, and then I staggered out back to the wax shed. In a brief time, I had more than doubled my cumulative distance on skis, and all in one swell foop.

At that point I felt remarkably confident about my fentoozling ability.

The weekend passed with a skiing hiatus.

And then Tuesday Skate Class happened.

To be continued.

I admit that I have been remiss in describing the day to day goings on with things relating to the KPBSD website. Rest assured there are a great many happenings daily. I spend a good deal of my day updating information on the site. This can be old forms being replaced by new, new events, news stories, even school lunch menu changes. Big changes don’t happen every day, but there are some exciting ones in the works. I’ll try not to give too much away, but I’ve been working with the Communications Department and the IT Department to implement a new change on the front page. This item will feature the reason that any of us working for the KPBSD are here; the students. Without them, none of this would exist. This is a tribute, in a way, to why we’re here. Another major change is a migration from our individual school websites from a remote server to our own servers. This last month has seen me create nearly 50 new websites using WordPress technology. My test school platform Awesome High School (WOMBAT POWER!) has been working very well to get administrators, secretaries and others up to scratch on posting events and information to their new blog site. A list of schools that have already made the jump, and a whack of other interesting blogs from around the District, can be found on the KPBSD Blog Directory (AKA “Blogpile” by popular vote thanks to the Teeming Millions). So, good things are happening, and more goodness is on the way.