Jonathan (ジョナサン)

Memorial Day Weekend

    Yay for extra long weekends, and not having to work. Saturday, Sunday and Monday off, it is a nice thing. During this weekend, Laura and John have gone off to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and have left their sons and daughter with our parents. This means I got to help spend time with them.

    I took the boys over to the "Kelley Reserve", and we ran around a bit and then were playing hide and seek when Kane came out on the back porch wondering what all the noise was. We thought he was working today, but he wasn't. This meant that we got to go inside to escape the heat for awhile, chase poor kittens, and play with helicopters and a plane, then a tiny bit of TV. Inbetween, Kyle and CJ switched off between being the human, and being the pet kitty:




    After taking the boys away from my mom for about 3 hours, Aunt Emmy finally arrived and the boys got to play outside with a new bubble blowing machine. Then we walked back to Grandmas and 'relaxed' a little. You can see some of that relaxing on my mom's blog post.

    Then we had dinner and then playing outside with the bubble machine again. I took a few more pictures with my camera:




    And then Kyle took over taking over 20 pictures and filling up the on phone memory, here's a collection of some of the better shots he took (they got smaller at the end b/c the camera's memory was running out).





    CJ and I had a lot of phone on the swinging bench, I would pull it back really really high, and then let us go. Don't worry Laura, I had my arms on each armrest acting as seat belts MOST of the time =P

    TUMEO.

Survived

Well, the test is quite over, Totaling Around 3 hours, 1100 push-ups, lots of techniques, 17 katas, lots of sparring at the END, then concrete breaks and board breaks, oh joy.. Here's a picture from afterwards (click it to see bigger):

I was just a little tiny itsy bitsy tired at this point! It was a great test though, and I know for sure I earned it. Lots of getting beat up and surviving, heh.

On the plus side, I'm not nearly as sore as I thought I would be, though I haven't been moving around a whole lot just yet. We'll see how I am feeling tomorrow as well. Mainly just my triceps and biceps and pecks are sore, which could be related to all those push-ups I did.

This particular 3rd degree is in American Tang Soo Do Moo Duk Kwan Tae Kwan Do.

Most likely in another 6 months to a year I will be testing for my 3rd degree in American Freestyle Martial Arts as well. The big difference between the two is that Freestyle has Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in it, and doesn't have a lot of the traditional things, such as forms/katas.

Oopsie, what day is it?

    Ok, so, I'm finally updating my blog. It's only been nearly 4 months, that's not that long of a time is it? I'll start of with a link I was planning on posting back on Jan. 22nd (yeah, I had saved a draft with this link in it to show my friends, though by now I would think they would probably be aware of it: Star Trek, apparently they are remaking the original, blah blah.

    I know have 10 students, and possibly 3 more very soon. The school has been going well, but a little slow on growth, partial because of me. I haven't been pushing too much to get out there and find students, at least not as much as I could be.

    Tomorrow, Saturday, I will be testing for my 3rd degree Black Belt under Brian Bryan up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm not entirely sure on my full readiness for the test, but I will do the best that I can, and never give up. The hardest part for me will be the push-ups (probably pretty close to 700~1000 by the end of the test) and the katas. I need to know 17 Katas, 14 open hand and 3 weapons. The katas are my weakest point right now, as I haven't been around them to practice, but busy teaching in Texas. I haven't practiced them as much as I should, but I have got them in a lot regardless. In reality, I should have been doing each one at least 10 times a day for the last 2~3 weeks. We'll see how it all ends after Saturday though. 3rd degree is considered the last 'physical' test, and the degrees after that are all about what you put back into the art. This is true in many other styles as well. That being said, it also means this is the hardest physical belt test, with lots of me getting beat up.

    Anyways, thought I'd just post something, since Emily has been harassing me, and others, as of late. Apparently there are a lot of Emily's co-workers that read the PotterFam.com site, even though they don't ever leave comments.

    Hopefully this is the first step towards me updating more, and there are a lot of e-mails I need to reply to to people, as I haven't been checking my non-work e-mails very much either. Planning to get to that after Saturday.

    TUMEO.