Submitted!

It was kind of a big deal last night as I turned in my Black belt paper/thesis.  I went through six revisions and two modest rewrites to come to a grand total of five double spaced pages. What a joke.  I remember suffering through writing my masters thesis and some other big research papers that probably took less time and effort than these five pages.  I mean I love what I wrote, but I'm guessing after it's read once or twice it's going to go in a folder somewhere and influence exactly no one.  My wife enjoyed reading it though and it provoked a few good discussions.

I also turned in my testing fee last week (or farther back), so I'm on track.  I just need to rent a hotel room for the night of testing and I'll be ready to go. 

Reed Sensei wants to put a little structure into class so one Wednesday a month we'll do self defense and another we'll do sparring.  That makes for something to look forward to! 

Mark has returned from a bit of illness and was ready to go.  We practiced before class and got the first half of class to work on some of the test material.  The second half was dedicated to "self defense".  In actuality we worked on our elbow techniques.  The moves are considered something of a Shudokan thing.  I don't think we are doing anything that would be considered earth shattering or unique, but they are "fun" and interesting.  About half way through we went into choking.  We worked on escape and such.  At end of class everyone had red necks and messed up hair.  A sign of a good class.

After class consisted of me and Mark going through the test components.  Lots of fine tuning, but by the time I left we were looking fairly good.  With 21 days to go I think we can still work on being better, but for the first time I'm feeling very good about where we are at.