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Worked with Mike for his test on Friday, over an hour and a half almost all of it being Uke. It was amazingly good workout. Woke on Saturday stiff as can be....
There was a lot to pick up in the hour and a half of Ukemi, there were a lot of places that I could feel my Ukemi making adjustments to keep me safe when the technique was not quite right, and some places that there were opening were aparent to me. (Since the test is for fourth Kyu there is no need to point them out, but I could still see them! Wow!!!!)
Training going well, I even have most of my Variations well established, or something comes out that looks like one of them in any case, and my Uke falls over. :-)
Sensei approached me at the end of class, after everyone had left (except Rick), and asked if I would mind being bumped from the testing. He explained that I was doing well, and that I most likely pass if I took the test this time. We had a lot of people sign up after the deadline for the testing, some of them senior to me, and that if everyone tested that was ready and had submitted a request form, that the testing secession would be close to three hours long. This was too long for the audience, and most of us that would have to sit in some form of Seiza for that long . :-)
He explained that my test would be even better in August, and that of the people that he could bump to August, I was the least likely to be effected by being bumped. "You are very…..(hand gestures for a regularly scheduled event inserted here)……" I said; "Consistent?" Rick said; "Fanatical?". We all laughed, and sensei said; "More like what Rick said".
It was a little disappointing, but not really a big deal. Relaxing in a way, three more months definitely won't hurt my variations or my Jui Waza. As sensei said, it will make it that much more of a good looking test.
Used my new Tanto when practicing tanto waza with Rick today, at first I wasn't all that sure of it because of the handle length, but once using
...More
Ok so I am having that stressed out about Aikido feeling that I get every time that I am going to test. I ask myself questions like why am I testing? Am I really ready for this? All that kind of thing. Seems to be normal for most of the people that test. You want to make sure that your test looks as good as it can in a room full of people that are either looking at your demonstration to learn something, or are more advanced than you are and are able to see the things that could use more practice. :-)
The worst of it seems to be remembering the three vbariations that I have for each of the techniques that I have to do… Why is that so hard?
Tuesday night we were working on rolling, and I was trying to roll across the mat without changing my feet, and doing one side then the other side. I ended up doing cross body rolls for half of my rolls. This was strange, they were all good rolls, but some of them felt harder to do than others and I couldn't figure out why until Sensei came by and pointed out that half of them were cross body rolls, and said that they were hard, but looked good. I think that he thought that I was confused about rolling correctly. I remember when I was doing cross body rolls before and felt like a square, these were not like that at all, I must have gotten a little better at it. :-)
Yesterdays weapons class went worse than normal. I think that I am going backwards with every weapons class that I do….Egads!!!!
5/21/05
Went up to the dojo and turned in my test request form. I am always nervous about testing. Rick and I were able to get in a special test prep secession today, it was technically open training, but since no one else knew that the Dojo was open it ended up being just us two on the mat. It was a good workout.
Friday night I had planned on being at the dojo and had sent a note off to Doug, who has agreed to be my uke for my second kyu test, asking if he was going to be there. He sent back a non-committal reply. One of my customers had an emergency I needed to take care of so I didn't make class. I learned from Sensei that he had been there, and fired off an apology e-mail. Doug showed up at my practice with Rick, even though he didn't train he watched for quite a while and gave some good feedback. It was great!!!
All in all a good week, although I would have liked to have made the Friday night class.
05-30-2005 12:12 AM 
