DeadPeopleAllOver

A rough day

My girlfriend and I live together in a house that we bought last year. We've been together for about 5 years (on and off). One thing about her is she loves animals. Now, I love animals too, as do many other people. But she loves animals almost as much as she loves my sorry ass. Because we live together, and she is insane about animals, you can imagine the myriad of animals that run around our home. We have cats, dogs, tree frogs, guinea pigs, you name it. We have 2 dogs, a male and a female, and their names are Naveah (or "Vay", as I like to call her) and Brutus, respectively. Both are very sweet. We recently found another female dog, a black lab. For some reason, Vay does not like this new dog at all. So she has attacked this new dog several times. Now, we have to keep the 2 dogs totally separated until we find the new dog a place to live. I take dog fights very seriously, so when I've broken up the fights I have been very careful. The dogs only weigh about 40 lbs. apiece, but still. On Wednesday, February 1, I got a frantic call at my work from my girlfriend, who was home alone. The dogs had "somehow" gotten into another fight. Of course, my girlfriend tried to break it up. Upon doing so, she got the tip of her left ring finger bitten off - completely - just below the fingernail of her left ring finger. The cut was so clean, it was as if someone chopped it off with a sharp object. She told me that she didn't even know that it had gotten bitten off until she saw it fall on the floor. She was smart enough to immediately pick up the severed finger and put it on ice. For those of you who don't know, if you ever sever a limb (whether it's a finger, arm, whatever), if you want any chance of re-attaching it, you better put it on ice. I rushed home from work and got her to the hospital. Unfortunately, they were not able to re-attach the finger tip. I have to say that she never complained about the pain. She was more concerned about her "ugly finger" lol. But ..

Serious - I mean serious - card fan progress

Happy New Year, everyone. It took me a full 8 months to do a perfect thumb fan. That's right, 8 goddamn months, when there have been people who have learned thumb fans in 8 minutes. Granted, I wasn't practicing the thumb fan the entire time, but still, I had major trouble with card fans in general. It was so frustrating because I learned some very difficult flourishes very quickly. But yet one of the easiest flourishes was totally kicking my ass. Fans are easy to learn, but difficult to perform perfectly. So now that I can finally do a decent thumb fan and giant thumb fan, I decided to mess around a bit with different fans. And after only a couple days, I have learned 5 new fans - and pretty damn difficult fans at that. 8 months to learn one basic fan, 2 days to learn 5 difficult fans. WTF? And the fans actually look good. So it's not like I stumbled upon 5 fans that look like hell. Palm back fan circle - fan circle that ends up on the back of the hand. I saw this performed by Ciappi from HL. The only difference is my fan is kinda small, but it still looks cool. And it looks more like a spiral than a fan. Kinda hard to explain. Maybe a more appropriate name would be: micro palm back fan circle/spiral? Giant palm back fan circle - same thing as a palm back fan circle, except this is the giant fan circle, obviously. (Haven't seen this performed, but I obviously got the idea from Ciappi's palm back fan). As far as the 3 other fans, I've never seen them performed, so I'm assuming that nobody has invented them. I'll put them in my next video. I haven't made names for these fans yet - still trying to come up with some names. They're kinda hard to describe, so I won't bother. Thanks for reading.

My Progress

Hello, everyone. This is just a brief summary of my progress after 7 months of card flourishing. Some of you might find some useful information here. Feel free to holler at me if you have any questions.

Here’s some (not all) of the flourishes I can perform comfortably:

One-Handed Shuffle

This is the first flourish I learned. I can now perform this with both hands, simultaneously, behind my back. Frustrating to learn at first, but well worth it.

One-Handed Overhand Shuffle

I don’t see this flourish too much. This was easy to learn, but took a long time to perform smoothly with good speed.

Turning One-Handed Shuffle

Most people use the standard one-handed shuffle to divide the deck in half. The turning one-handed shuffle is a good flourish to know, though. I like to use this once in awhile. It’s not that difficult to learn if you already know the standard one-handed shuffle.

Perfect Faro Shuffle

Breaking ..