Trampoline Gym from Darren Schwindaman on Vimeo.
Trampolining is one of my favorite ways to reschool, for these reasons:
1. It’s incredible aerobic exercise. I’m a regular jogger but get exhausted in about ten minutes. Your legs and booty will feel sore the next day.
2. It makes you feel like a little kid. No matter how old you are, on a trampoline you bounce and giggle like you did when you were five years old. At Sky High, there’s also a foam pit where you can fall in backwards or do bellyflops, and a dodgeball court where the littlest kids will surely get you out in the blink of an eye.
3. It brings out your inner daredevil. You feel emboldened to try all kinds of crazy stunts. I’m normally very cautious, but I end up somersaulting and doing adventurous things like jumping off the bouncy walls (which is how I fell and skinned my elbow). I curbed my risky behavior when I remembered what kind of basic insurance I have and how accident-prone I am. But for a few precious minutes, I felt like Evel Knievel.
This post marks the debut of the video series capturing my spring learning. When I launched Reschool Yourself in August, I bought a digital FlipCam with the expectation that I’d film some of my key experiences and publish video logs. There were just three small problems: I didn’t know much about a) filming, b) editing, or c) publishing video to blogs. I was already expending so much effort writing that I didn’t want to invest the effort to learn amateur filmmaking for the web.
Trampolining in June: If Darren and I had an 80s sitcom, the opening credits would end with this freeze frame.
Luckily, Darren got his own digital video camera (in HD….you think you’re better than me, huh?) for Christmas and is already putting it to use. We took one of my former Spark students to the trampoline gym in Santa Clara, and he took the above (slightly shaky but awesome) video of Darren and me attempting our patented double-butt bounce and flying high-five.
We’ll be filming this spring as we take on a bunch of do-it-yourself projects. These are a few of the ideas we have:
- Building a dining room table.
- Refinishing wooden picture frames.
- Installing a pegboard in the kitchen for hanging pots and pans.
- Screen printing t-shirts that we design.
- Turning a boy apartment into a co-ed apartment in a variety of ways. (I may patent a device that will train Darren to leave the toilet seat down.)
Stay tuned for more video!
I did the pegboard thing in one of my past apartments that didn’t really have any cabinet space. It was neat and inconvenient at the same time…I liked the way it organized the space, but I hated having to reach over bubbling pots and open flames to get things off of it. If I had to do it over, I would hang it on a different wall.
As far as turning a boy apartment into a coed apartment…well, you’ve seen my apartment, which isn’t really a coed apartment so much as it’s a really disjointed melding of our collective crap. And it looked so much worse few years ago. The two solutions I have are: 1) Move in first (not such an option in your case) or 2) Make sure you have a big closet and/or storage space. It’s hard to incorporate yourself into his stuff, but it helps if he doesn’t have to get rid of everything. Until it’s time to move halfway across the country, at which time you can tell him to either donate the coconut monkey head collection or pack and haul it himself. (Coincidentally, guess what’s sitting in the office closet right now?)
Strategically placed fresh flowers also help. Well, except for the toilet seat thing. Only the Baby Jesus can help that.
I have no advice on your pegboard or on turning a boy apartment into a coed apartment. Good luck with that.
I’m simply amazed at this trampoline gym. I just did a search for something similar in the LA area and found an antigravity sports complex. But it looks like it’s for small children and serious athletes, both of which I am not.
Katie, thanks for the tip – we’ll make sure to leave enough room to reach over and grab pots while the stove is on. I’m a big fan of hanging pots on hooks or an overhead fixture, but I think the pegboard makes more sense in the space. Haha, my equivalent of the coconut monkey head collection was a drawer full of flash cards saved from college exams, which I finally got rid of.
Kathleen, you’d think that there would be a trampoline gym in LA, of all trendy places! Did you search by zipcode at http://www.jumpsport.com/partners/?
Wow, that looks like so much fun! And I particularly appreciate the flying high-five maneuver. You and your 80s paraphanalia…
What exactly do you mean by refinishing? Like, scraping, staining, etc? or something bigger? I had a summer or two in my day as a paint apprentice in SLO Town (for my dad), so there’s one thing I can do on Melia’s Ultimate Survival List- yay!