The Other Side

Now that the countdown is on for the few people in our class to go to testing in Washington, the class tension is slowly rising.  And not in a bad way.  Everyone appears to be more focused, and the after class practice time has gone way up. 

Sensei definitely wants Mark to get his blackbelt.  Mark had a five hour training session last Saturday and it wrung him out.  However, everything he does is very smooth and he's pretty comfortable with everything we do. 

The stuff he and I do in class is the application of a kata (which I have no idea of the name even though he's told me a thousand times).  I've done one side enough now that I know it fairly well and Sensei can see that both Mark and I have got it down fairly well.  So last night he had us switch roles.  Although we had a messy start we were able to get through the whole thing at a slow speed. 

As I drifted off to sleep last night I kept thinking about the parallax view of taking the other side.  It was like being in a dream in which you take each person's roll for while.  To see me act out the things I've seen takes on a surreal and often confusing aspect, but we were able to eventually educate ourselves by simply pointing out each piece that we knew. 

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I'm holding my weight steady at 200 lbs.  I'd definitely like to see 195 again some day and to that end my wife has encouraged me to see a naturopath.  She really wanted to see the doctor herself, but when you get in they drag in the rest of the family.  It was refreshingly like a regular doctor, but with more questions.  I have to go off all supplements and medicines for a month and get a comprehensive blood screen to start the whole thing rolling.  Neither my new doctor or think I'm getting of Statins to control my cholesterol, but we shall see what the blood test shows. 

On top of that my wife, who loves a good fad diet, has decided to go on an anti-inflammation routine for the next month.  Although I understand the idea, I can see that's it's going to be personally very difficult for me.  She's working on the house and it really doesn't leave her a lot of time to shop or cook.  That means a lot of that might be left to me and I'm not sure I can be that supportive when carbs are cut out.  I guess not-so-secretly eating lunch out during the week won't be too bad.