Progress at 6 months

I think I might have missed a few postings, but I guess there is nothing much to report that grabs the headlines.  Mark and I in a familiar pattern; Two kata, 10 bunkai, 1 Oyo, and 1 application. 

I was actually feeling very frustrated about progress.  I'm totally dependent on Mark for the partners practice and some of the pieces aren't necessarily logical and require some hands on correction to get correct. However Mark pointed out that we need less and less assistance to get going and can sort out more and more on our own.  Within 25 minutes we'd almost completed the above list. 

The Oyo is a combination of the bunkai and application.  Normally bunkai is reminiscent of my one or two step techniques from TSD; a formal attack with expression of technique in two or three moves.  However, the Nifanshi Shodan kata is relatively short so instead of just doing the two bunkai it was combined for brevity's sake. 

Unfortunately Mark and I struggled to remember this at first, but Reed proved to have the patience of Job and got us going again.  Within 20 or so attempts we started looking fairly good, but there a long way to go.

Our note from Reed Sensei was that we are about half way through the year and we are more than half way through the stuff we need to know.  So our pace is good, but once we have both applications squared away we'll both need to learn the other part of each.  And then some elbow techniques.  It still seems pretty far away at this point and I'm not feeling like we have enough time.  My next vacation is going to make me nervous about the forgetting again.