Michelle's Blog

….THUMP THUMP THUMP. ……….THUMP THUMP THUMP

Those are the sounds you can hear coming from my room as I start to juggle, miss a ball, and end up dropping all of them on the floor. I then pick them up and do the same thing again, much to the annoyance of my family. My dog won’t even come in my room because he’s scared I’ll hit him.  I’m getting better though.  Each time there is more space between the thumps.

I have not met with my mentor yet as we’ve had a bit of trouble finding a day that works for both of us.  She said Thursdays work though so hopefully we can get together next Thursday for my first lesson.  In the meantime, I’ve been trying to teach myself.  I realized pretty quickly that juggling three balls was really hard. So I got down to the basics.  Two hacky sacks-one in each hand.  Throw the right ball up, then the left. Catch with the left hand, catch with the right.  Throw with the left hand. Throw with the right hand etc…  Soon I was able to catch and throw before I caught the other ball.  Just this morning I mastered three balls:throw right throw left catch left throw right catch right catch left. Pause. Repeat.  Hopefully with some more practice I can catch and throw simultaneously and not one thing at a time.

I decided to start with hacky sacks because they are smaller than juggling balls and therefore easier to hold/catch two in one hand. They also don’t roll out of your hand and are easy to catch with two fingers when you already have a ball in your hand. I was really surprised with how difficult catching and throwing 2-3 balls at once is.  I have really good hand-eye coordination and reflexes from sports so I figured it would be a piece of cake to catch a ball with your left hand right after you threw a ball from that hand. I couldn’t be more wrong. You throw with your right hand and start tracking its arc. Then you lose track of it when you throw with your left hand.  So now you are looking at the ball you just threw and readying your right hand to catch it. Then out of the cover of your eye you see the ball with your left hand pass two inches away from it and hit the ground. As you internally (or sometimes out loud) curse, you miss the ball heading towards your right hand.  It’s really difficult to keep track of two or three objects at the same time.  Catch and throw with two hands and throw right after you catch, and catch with one hand and throw with the other at the same time.

I know I’ve only been at it for 2 weeks so hopefully I will improve with practice. Maybe my mentor will show me some techniques to help with this.  One issue I’ve been having is with my concussion, the concentration has been really iffy.  It looks like I’m all healed now though so I should improve pretty quickly. I’ll give you another progress report in two weeks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 at 5:40 pm and is filed under 2012 In-depth, Class assignments and Tagged in-depth project, juggling You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.