Also, this.

Breaking the Silence was a huge success. On the road of Marfamania!

Been a while, people. Not a lot has gone on for me wrestling wise lately. It's all been work, work, work. Being understaffed during the busiest quarter of the year kinda sucks. We had a new manager come in and quit in less than three weeks. Her training was longer than that and cost the store three grand. We've been preparing for a visit from a couple bigwigs and it finally happened today. I'm still employed, so I'm calling it a success.

Tomorrow I will attend a seminar, doing yoga with Diamond Dallas Page. That's exciting enough, but Saturday we're putting on a big show featuring quite a number of big names. Along with DDP, we've got Charlie Haas and Shelton Benjamin, U-Gene, Raven, Jackie Gayda-Haas, and of course our local talent. It'll be one hell of a show. We have an upcoming one in Marfa in May I will be participating in. Now that the big visit is over, we have some staff, and things are slowing down, too much work is no longer a valid excuse to stay out of the ring.

I'm still here, people. I promise.

Another training session under the belt. We restarted our crossfit training today, and it was mostly arms. That's ok; Monday is paperwork day at work so losing the ability to lift my arms isn't so debilitating. However, after squats, leg drops, knee drops, flying headbutts, and Lou Thesz presses (especially those) my knees have seen better days. This is the first real practice since the injury, and it feels that way. But, nothing is broken or strained; just sore. Gonna work through it and come back Tuesday with no excuses. It's the only way to be.

Last Sunday was the first time I'd been back in the ring in a while. It felt good. It also reminded me that leaving for any amount of time will certainly bring on ring rust and destroy cardio. Due to long hours at work I was unable to attend practice that Tuesday or Thursday; or do anything fun, get anything done, or even give my girlfriend a ride home from work. So, yesterday I was happy to be able to make it.

We practiced many things, none of them new to me, until we were going over the top rope onto somebody on the outside. I didn't quite get horizontal enough and my right shin hit the apron. There was some significant swelling, but it was easily walked off. That would have been no big deal, but we followed that with second rope cross bodies. Well, I decided to volunteer first for three reasons: I want to do a top rope one as my finisher, my adrenaline was still flowing, and I'm dumb.

I landed two in a row just fine, but because I was consciously trying to avoid landing on my shin (and spraying blood and pus all over the canvas) I took it too hard in the knees. My right knee swelled even larger than my shin by the end of the night. I was fine as it happened; I was able to run the ropes without much issue. Today, however, walking is hard!

Hopefully I'll be back up and running soon. It's just swelling and bruising.

New year, new party

Once again, a sustained absence. Allow me to catch you all up. We have (at least almost, at the time of this posting) purchased our first house. Between the stress of that, our jobs, hurting my back for a bit, and various other things, I have made maybe half of the practices. And recently, several of those meetings were not traditional practices. Not to mention, sometimes I just can't motivate myself to go. Motivation has been my biggest obstacle for any undertaking of mine.

As for " untraditional practices," that leads me to my next point. It's been posted about on my Facebook and Twitter, but definitely warrants a post here. We went to the funeral of OSW's own brother, Luis Romero, today. I will not go into the details of it. I will only say that he mentioned he had suffered a concussion two weeks prior to his collapse, and soon after slipped into a coma. No one knows what caused it, as he only mentioned it after the fact. It was a set of unfortunate circumstances that I hope will be avoided in the future. We love and miss our brother.

Looking towards the future, I want to get more active in the ring again. I may miss the next few upcoming practices as we finish the old house and set up the new one, but I fully intend to put myself back into it with the vigor I had when I first began his journey 8 months ago. That sounds like a New Year's resolution, but I never put any stock in those. As Calvin said, that implies imperfection. And along with that, I'll try and keep this blog alive. There hasn't been a lot to post lately, but that's partially my fault for inactivity. The party continues in 2013!

I'm aware posts have been few and far between. I certainly haven't been able to make every practice, but the main reason is that what has transpired in practice is mostly a repeat of things I've written before. I've already started following this policy, but I suppose I should announce that I'll only post when there's something noteworthy.

We've got some new blood. People come and go, but it's nice to have fresh faces at the facility to clothesline. Some of them have some natural talent, even. We taught them some new moves. We practiced hip tosses, back body drops, belly-to-back suplexes, DDTs, vertical suplexes, dropkicks, and fall away slams. Jastin wanted Isaac and I to do a short match. We had 5 minutes to plan it and 5 minutes to execute it. I didn't have it recorded, but I'd say it went well. Jastin told us we followed the formula and had some good psychology.

Just gotta stick with it...