Welcome to 2012!

Wow - has it really been Halloween since I last posted? I need to do better about updating here! It's really easy to get out of the habit, and the next thing you know it's months later and you haven'tput a thing on the blog. Oops!

Life has actually been fairly busy over here. Karate continues apace. All three of our white belts have passed their yellow belt tests within the last month, so congratulations to all of them! It's very nice to look at the class and see all that color. Now I just want to see a little less color again - a few new white belts, and our brown making the leap to black would make the winter just perfect.

I, personally, appear to be on a serious learning binge. Given that I'm always learning something (hence the name of the blog) this translates into a serious amount of new stuff coming down the pike. In karate, I'm plugging away at Urashi Bo, the longest of our kata, and my second-to-last 1-person kata to learn. I seem to be about a third of the way through right now, which means about the length of one of our normal kata. In karate-related, I'm plugging away at learning Japanese. This is seriously fascinating, and the more I learn, the more interesting it gets. It's very, very different from English, and it's probably going to take a while to achieve any fluency. Right now I can form and parse simple sentences. I can (for example) Ask how much something is, where something is, order food, introduce people, or discuss the weather (and have some prayer of understanding answers). We'll see how all this holds up the next time it gets put to use (2013 at the next World Tournament at the earliest).

In addition, somewhat inspired by the Japanese, I've been brushing up on my French, at which I used to be fairly fluent, but which I let lapse after never really having a real-life use for it. I may never speak French real-time, real-life to a French person, but at least I can read my Tintin and Asterx le Gaul books in the original (OMG there are soo many puns in the Asterix in French. It's awesome!)

We have a new choir director at church now, and he's exercising me pretty thoroughly too. Whereas the previous choir director seemed to be a little reluctant to have me sing, and would often only decide to have me do something reluctantly and at the last moment, the new guy seems to be more than eager to have me do solo work. Unfortunately the first thintg he's pulled out for me is gospel. I love good gospel, but I have never trained or sung gospel (unless you count two songs sung as part of my HS choir), and my usual style of presentation runs to the formal and somewhat stiff. I'm very afraid that me attempting gospel may be more pathetic than inspiring. Or possibly inspiring of laughter! I'll give it my best, but we'll have to see how it goes down. I'm very hopeful, though, that once he runs me through my paces on a couple of his choices, he might let me choose to sing something of my choosing, which would be really awesome. (Also something that's never happened at this church. I tend to do solo work when it's down to "We want to do this piece, and Cindy's the only one who can (hit the high B, handle that run, learn it that fast, etc.) which means I do a decent amount of solo work, but almost never stuff I love.)

In a complete aside, I did not, despite pre-planning for almost an entire year, get to do a duet of "Oh, Holy Night" at Christmas. For some reason I did not quite fathom, the Music Committee decided that the ladies who did the piece three years ago should repeat this year - and then those ladies decided, when it got to be the week before Christmas and they were still having serious performing problems, that they would bow out and not sing. At which point it was too late for Cindy and Cindy to get back in. So bummer, I still didn't get my shot, but at least we broke the standing tradition of "It's not Christmas until somebody mangles "Oh, Holy Night"! Seriously, if after this much effort I had had to listen to a bad rendition, I think I would have burst into tears.

And the last bit of new learning for the new year, and my favorite of all? The flute! My wonderful sons, with their father's collaboration, got me a flute of my very own for Christmas. (My precioussssss!) Despite various family medical emergencies (now over, thank goodness), I have practiced every single day since. I'm up to about an octave-and-a-half of range, though I still have some problems with flipping registers unintentionally. Recognizable (if breathy) music can be heard! I've wanted to play the flute since middle school, and it would never have occurred to me to ask for one for Christmas, but I really, really love it it pieces.

Per Request

Robbie as Colonel Roy Mustang. I may be biased, but I think he is rather frighteningly good looking in a uniform.

Good looks were obviously not relevant to Aaron's Xenomorph costume. He had literally not an inch of skin showing. Unfortunately, he also couldn't see all that well, since the eye holes are little vertical slits beside the internal mouth. The tail didn't last the evening either, it ripped off its mounting and had to be left home - which was probably just as well, because with the lack of peripheral vision, Aaron couldn't see what was beside or behind him, and kept whapping things with it. He did get a lot of compliments, though several people thought he was a Predator rather than an Alien. Light trick-or-treating this year for some reason - we still have about half of our candy, and usually we get cleaned out.

Seminar

Sensei and I spent most of Saturday at a pressure point seminar given by Will Higginbotham. This is the second time we've gone (he apparently does one in this area every year around Halloween), and as it was last year, it was really interesting. This year's seminar was a bit more focused than last year's, primarily because we had half-a-dozen police officers attending, and Sensei Higginbotham concentrated heavily on things they would find practical: control grips, come-alongs, ways to safely intervene in a third-party assault - that sort of thing. (Several wrist and finger-locks, Bill!}

I find pressure points fascinating, but they remind me of my father's description of neuroanatomy. You need a certain (large) amount of base knowledge to sink in before you can start putting things into a framework that makes sense. Right now these seminars feel like standing in a rainstorm with a teaspoon trying to collect the water. I come away with a few specific things that work (or not to do), and a broader fact or two, and try to remember them without having much of a knowledge structure to hang them on. I know the structure exists, but I haven't got it straight in my head yet, so things don't stick all that well. But each time, a little more makes sense, and I trust that one day, if I keep working on it, it will start fitting together sensibly.

It turned out to be a good thing that I was scheduled to conduct the choir instead of sing this Sunday, though, as I turned out to be the victim of choice when it was time to practice peeling off a guy who's trying to choke someone. So I got choked, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by about eight people, several times each. My neck is still feeling it today, though not too badly.

The conducting went pretty well - especially for my first time ever. The choir was very kind to me, and paid excellent attention. If I'm going to do this again, I need to work on keeping my beat pattern while also giving cues, though. I know how to sketch time, and I know how to do entrances and cut-offs, but I tend to lose my pattern (though fortunately not my beat) when trying to combine the two. This might have something to do with it having been 23 years since my one semester of conducting class. (If you ever read this Constance, THANK YOU for being so stringent that most of what you taught has stuck. It saved my butt.) We're currently auditioning candidates for a new organist/choir director, and with any luck we should get one before Advent.

I'm also supposed to be playing my first full church service on the 13th of November. This is our Kirkin' of the Tartans service, with bagpipes and drums, in addition to the organ. I'm nervous (it's a lot of music), but I think it's mostly in hand - except possibly for the bagpipe bit. The piper said something to our priest about organ music to play with the pipes, but hasn't provided any - and if she doesn't get it to me within the next 2-3 days, there's no way I'm playing it. My biggest failing as an organist at this point is the sheer amount of time it takes me to get new pieces under my fingers. E.g., I should play this service fine, but it's been two months of prep work to get here.

For tonight, I'm working on Halloween costumes. Sewing for Robbie's costume (Colonel Mustang from Full Metal Alchemist), and somewhat more engineering like stuff for Aaron's (the Xenomorph monster from Alien). My children don't believe in easy Halloween costumes. Actually, if they keep this up, I'm going to have to teach them how to sew, so they can do these themselves.

Dare

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Blog note

Pictures from our home tournament, the Southern Indiana Open can be found here.

There's quite a few of them. I think the photographer was on a personal mission to get at least half-a-dozen shots of every competitor there.

New Kata!

I'm not going to be able to say that too many more times. It's a little sad, but I'm getting close to the end of the Isshinryu set of kata. As a style we don't have all that many - eight empty hand kata (Seisan, Seiuchin, Naihanchi, Wansu, Chinto, Kusanku, Sunsu, and Sanchin), and six weapons kata (Tokemine no Kun, Urashi Bo, Shishi no Kun no Dai, Kusanku Sai, Chatanyara no Sai, Higa no Tuifa - aka Hamahiga). There are also two unofficial two person katas, bo-bo, and bo-sai.

As of right now, I have two of the official kata left to learn, Shishi and Hamahiga. I know that Shishi is part of what I learn at nidan (not least because Sensei started teaching it to me on Thursday). I suspect I'll also learn Hamahiga in here somewhere - which should be interesting, since I've never even seen Sensei bring tonfa to class. But I'm feeling a little sad that I'm getting so close to the end of my kata set. I love deepening kata I already know, learning more applications, more bunkai, other ways of looking at things - but I also love digging into new kata, and there's just not that much more to go!

On the plus side, Shishi looks like it will take me a while. It's the longest Isshinryu kata by a fair margin. It's about twice as long as Urashi, which is itself a fairly long kata. It's got a lot of familiar moves, but also several new sequences and different strikes than the other two bo kata. If I'm seeing it correctly, it shouldn't be as prone to leaking into the other kata as Urashi was for Tokemine (they share several very similar sequences).

As part of the effort to deepen my other kata, I'm currently working on mirror-image Seisan. It wasn't as difficult to figure out as I had feared. It took about 2-3 good working sessions, and the left-right switch clicked. I still have to watch the first 5-6 moves carefully to make sure I'm not doing it the normal way, but once I make the first turn, all is good. I'm hoping to find a partner to do the Lennox Legacy team kata with, since I think a pair of us acting as mirrors for each other would look very cool. Maybe I can talk Robbie into it, since he's planning on coming and competing this year (kata only).

About that announcement...

(Photo description: close up of my nidan certificate, newly arrived from Okinawa.)

I'll also note that it's a nice validation of my growing Japanese skills that I can actually read about 30% of this certificate, including my name, rank, and date of issuance.

I haven't been on-line a lot lately, because my computer is having issues. We managed to do a defrag last night, and have been trying to do a full virus check, which is giving us problems for unknown reasons, but we'll get there. At least it's telling us we can't do stuff in about half the time it was before.