After many years of fantastic hosting courtesy of Anna and Kurt, I’ve moved my site to a new home at Dreamhost. If you’re looking for a cheap quality webhost, you could do a lot worse.

At the same time, I’ve upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress. My design template continues to work well on the new ver, but I’m feeling like it’s about time for a change, so I may put some work into it sometime soon.

In late July I got to return to Taiji Legacy for the first time since 2004. I didn’t take notes as well as I did then, but we got a lot of video and I’m working on cutting it to DVD. I should have a post about the event pretty soon.

Thursday was my first night sparring since I went in for my elbow surgery. I was really hesitant and protective for the first few minutes but my arm was fine. I didn’t even notice it. My sparring hardly suffered at all for the absence, and one of my sparring partners even asked me if I’d been working on my kicks because they seemed faster. With one of the more advanced students, I tried out some of the Shuai Chiao I learned in Dallas and it worked beautifully.

My post-black-belt training continues. We’ve finished learning the chain whip form using our practice ropes and we’ve started working with actual chains. The first one I got was a heavy nine-section whip that turned out to be too short for me. Since I’m going to replace it with an eleven-section, I’m going to get a lighter chain that will be easier to manage. Swinging that heavy one is murder on my arm.

Since I made black belt, part of my training has involved teaching some of our classes. I usually run one Intermediate and one Advanced class each week. I almost always enjoy it, but lately I’ve been having a little trouble with the Advanced classes. We’re covering the stick, the fan, and nunchucks this level, so it’s a huge mass of material to cover. I always end up feeling like I either spent too much time on one thing or I tried to cover too many things too quickly. I’ve gone through all my notes on that level and written up some ideas to try to give it more balance and still make it a good class.

We have regular adult classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Mondays and Wednesdays some of our black belts hold extra classes for people who need more work or missed some of the usual nights. Until now, those classes have only addressed Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced students, but we’re seeing a need for White Belt makeup classes as well, so one of the other black belts and I volunteered to each lead one class a month. Last night was my first one. I only had one student, so it was a lot more like a private lesson than a class. We didn’t cover a whole lot, just some basic foundational material and some work on the first form, but I felt like I helped the student make some good progress. I’m still a little surprised at how much I enjoy teaching.