Back to life

I’m not dead, nor have I disappeared. Mark and I in fact returned from our honeymoon last Saturday, and we’re working on getting back into real life. Some stuff I should blog about in more detail:

the kitchen remodel
the wedding
both of these things together

And I do promise I will talk about them in great detail, with [...]

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This is getting old

Perhaps just because we are entering tournament season, or perhaps because the Talented Trio hadn’t been in class for nearly 2 months, (they do have their own dojo where they teach, but they have been away from Sensei’s watchful perfectionist eye,) Sensei has become very enthusiastic about exhausting drills this week, as if he had [...]

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New Kata Mysteries Explained

I mentioned last week that my sensei has started teaching me a new kata from a different style, but that it was very hard for me to find any information about it, due to some linguistic barriers. Fortunately, last night he started teaching me a second kata from the same style, with a much less [...]

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Success from Failure, or something like that

The past week and a bit at karate has been interesting. It started two Fridays ago, when I was strangely the only student in class. (Maybe it was spring break? Or people were just lazy? Who knows.) After I warmed up, sensei had me start working intensively on Empi, my latest kata. I had to [...]

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Tournament Pictures

Slightly belated, due to the other news, but I did finally get my pictures from the karate tournament downloaded.
First, the good one of me with my ever so fancy trophy. Please feel free to ooh and aah. You know you wish you had one in your living room. Do click to enlarge so you can [...]

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One of a Kind

… or it could turn out that I would be the only person competing in the Women’s Traditional Kata (18-34) division, and I therefore automatically win. Yes. How anticlimactic.
As it turned out, actually competing in the tournament was the shortest part of my day. I arrived at the community center where we were hosting the [...]

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Required to Lose

Tomorrow, I will be spending all day at a karate tournament. It is, in fact, a tournament being hosted by my school. As such, I’m more or less required to both compete and help out. I have mixed feelings about this.
I haven’t been to a tournament in maybe 15 years. My old school wasn’t very [...]

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On Grace, and the Lack Thereof

I would like to think that five years of ballet, followed by more than ten years of karate would have imbued me with graceful movements and responses in every situation. But on Tuesday, I fell down at karate, bruising and skinning both of my knees. I don’t even have a particularly good story to tell [...]

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I’m so sore; I think I’ll do that again

Last night was my first night back at karate since before Christmas, so it’s been more than 3 weeks since the last time I trained. I can’t even claim that I was good and worked out on my own during the vacation, because I didn’t. I sat around on airplanes, in houses, and at dinner [...]

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Back to basics

A few days ago, I wrote about signs of adulthood over at Geek Buffet. One sign a friend contributed to the overall list was, “I miss homework because I know it helps me learn.” At karate last week, I experienced a similar feeling. I miss basics, because they allow to work on one particular thing, [...]

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