Just letting you know that our resident video shooter/cutter extraordinaire Casey is currently on a three-week expedition to cover the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver with Fanhouse‘s Ariel Helwani, and so we have not made any new videos to present to you that are within the world of MMA. I’m taking much needed time off to nurse a head cold or respiratory infection that Casey kindly left behind for me. That doesn’t mean we’re not still doing stuff.

While he’s shooting interviews with skeleton racers, I’m organizing and backing up a year’s worth of photos (my backup software tells me it will take two years to upload all the files at the current and very slow speed) and writing for Fighters Only Magazine.

Mostly, I wanted to say hello and let you know we’re still around. 2009 ended in a whirlwind for us that swept right through the first part of 2010 dropping us here in February making the Chinese New Year closer to our actual new year.

That image above is Mike Swick resetting the round clock for the start of drills. That triple beep for the start of a round has become my favorite sound. While usually digital and very loud, it’s the sound of a start, a beginning, and it always puts me in a certain frame of mind, lifts my posture and focuses my gaze.

My cold medication is kicking in and if I don’t crash now I won’t get to sleep through this wretched sore throat and cough. So I’ll just leave you with a fun image from our time up at AKA. We were driven up by the always entertaining Jason “Mayhem” Miller and on many occasions, Mayhem would open his bag to find some really smelly and overly moist item in his kit. On Thursday, the stench of his knee brace distanced potential training partners, with Dave Camarillo complaining he could smell the rot nearly twelve feet away. Friday, Mayhem sparred but not before unveiling his Triumph United gloves with a fantastic splash of mold, fungus, what have you, growing along the seams of the white leather along with his trainer-suggested new custom Hello Kitty mouthpiece. The rest of the week, we left all of Mayhem’s gear outside our San Jose hotel room, ostensibly to dry but mostly to make it easier to avoid.

Good night.