Thanks to coverage on my local radio station of choice, Fresh FM, Tuesday December 3 is International Day of People with Disability (http://www.idpwd.com.au/).

I actually hadn’t heard of this before, despite the fact I’ve had my awesome leg of awesomeness since I was a year or two old, so it was great to hear it getting a bit of exposure, and I thought I’d try and do my bit to promote it and talk about it. Particularly special was that Melissa Noonan, co-founder of Limbs 4 Life (a not-for-profit organisation supporting amputees through peer-support programs and an excellent website with forums for people to post in), was a recipient of of the 2009 Social Inclusion Award for all of her hard work helping out fellow amputees and their loved ones.

I think in the lead up to next year’s day I’ll see if there’s something I can get involved in to help out or just celebrate the day. Hopefully this little plug here will wander out into the various search indexes floating online to draw attention to the event, as I think it’s an extremely worthwhile cause.

In the meantime, I’d encourage you to check out the International Day of People with Disability website (http://www.idpwd.com.au/), as well as Limbs 4 Life (http://www.limbs4life.com/). I’ll be adding links to both sites to the side navigation after I post this up.

Bloginated Thursday, 26th November 2009 / Prosthesis or amputee stuff
Tag-isms: amputee | Amputees doing cool stuff | International Day of People with Disability | Limbs 4 Life | Melissa Noonan

Stumbled on this one via the Prosthetic Center of Excellence News blog – the Sun Journal has an awesome story on a young below-knee amputee’s push to learn karate and earn her junior black belt!

Now this is the kind of thing I love to read about – like the girl in the story, Jaedyn, I lost my leg when I was really young as well (click here if you want to have a read of my story), but I always wanted to learn martial arts, and I always had the support of my family and instructors in doing so. I tip my hat to her parents for encouraging and supporting her in this, I’d like to pass along a big thank you to her instructor for doing such a wonderful job, and a big high-five to Jaedyn for earning her junior black belt. This is such an awesome thing to share, and I wish her the best of luck on her journey.

For those interested, please visit the site and have a read. The direct link to the story is here.

Bloginated Tuesday, 2nd June 2009 / Prosthesis or amputee stuff
Tag-isms: Amputees doing cool stuff | Karate | prosthesis

Wifey passed along a story to me this morning – published in The Advertiser (13/5/2009, page 12), but originally published in The Daily Telegraph, it’s a piece on Paul de Gelder who had his right hand ripped off in a shark attack while testing equipment for the navy; due to the nature of the attack, he also had to have his right leg amputated below the knee. The awesome thing is that he’s back in the water now, and has started surfing again which is amazing considering the attack only happened a couple of months ago. Well done mate, good luck and keep it up!

If you want to read the full story and see some more pictures, the story on The Advertiser’s website (AdelaideNow) is available here, and the original source (The Daily Telegraph) is available here. The text is similar between the two (they’re both News Ltd publications), but The Daily Telegraph has an image gallery attached to the story. If you want to skip to the gallery itself, here’s the direct link.

Huge thanks to Wifey for passing along the story from The Advertiser to me 🙂

Bloginated Wednesday, 13th May 2009 / Prosthesis or amputee stuff
Tag-isms: amputation | Amputees doing cool stuff | prosthesis | shark attack | surfing

Source: Gisoku no Jutsu
Original post date: 12 August, 2007

Despite belief to the contrary, I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet 😛 Apologies to any regulars for the lack of updates for so long, it’s been ultra crazy around here lately. Wifey and I are still getting the house ready for sale, it’s been taking much longer than we thought, but it’s looking great. On top of that, we also celebrated our first wedding anniversary in July, I had my industry’s ultra huge conference/exhibition two weeks back that I was heavily involved in, and Wifey and I have been in Sydney holidaying and visiting my brother and his wife for the past week. Crazy stuff.

As a result, I haven’t had the chance to train for about 6-8 weeks, but I’m finally in a place where I can get back into the groove of things. I’ll be training Wednesday night and starting back on my weekly regime of stretching and pushups/crunches/etc. I’m also going to do my best to knock out my love handles by trying a few more exercises that should do the job.

So you can expect some more regular updates as a result of this 🙂 Wifey and I are also taking this week off work and she’s offered to take some pics of my doing some techniques so I can plonk some more photos on MySpace, which is cool. I’ve put some pics from the recent trip top Sydney up as well if anyone’s interested. The new lotus pic on my profile was taken in the awesome Chinese gardens in Sydney, and there’s an amusing composite of me doing jump kicks in front of one of the things in another part of the garden 😉 Kudos to Wifey on both accounts for indulging me ^^

I’ve also recently been in touch with a guy from the US who is an amputee martial artist. He coined the best phrase for it – amped fighters. He’s into full-contact mma, and I’d encourage you to check out his profile (click here). Even though we approach this from different angles (I’m going down a more traditional martial arts path, whereas Robert is going into the more full-on, full-contact tournament style with greater practical application), we’re both heading towards the same goal – to push our bodies to the max regardless of our physical condition. I wish him all the very best of luck and look forward to continuing to read up on his progress.

So with that, I’ll leave you all to it. Thanks for sticking around, I’ll be looking forward to posting more as I go!

Bloginated Wednesday, 18th February 2009 / Karate, MySpace blogs
Tag-isms: 2007 | Amputees doing cool stuff | Karate | mma