As of the beginning of the latest session, my friend Jay has started studying at our kwoon. If you enjoyed the stuff I was posting back when I was a beginner student, you should check out his blog, as he’s doing very similar things there.

It takes about a year, minimum, in Lung Shou Pai kung fu to go from getting your black belt to testing for your second degree. The second degree test is, in some ways, less strenuous than the first. It’s less rigorously defined, for one thing. You aren’t called on to demonstrate everything you’ve ever learned. You demo everything the lower-ranking classes have been working on, plus all the forms that you’ve learned in your time as a black belt student. For me, that meant eight levels of colored-belt material, plus Ssu Wang (the first black belt empty hand form), the chain whip, and the kwan dao. Plus an endurance test and a 3-man pyramid sparring test.

I did well on everything. I didn’t work as hard preparing for this test as I’d planned, but I felt like that ended up being a good thing. My endurance was never an issue, my familiarity with my material was as good as I could’ve wanted, and my sparring felt pretty acceptable, even if I did get a shiner. I always get hit in the left eye. I should probably do something about that.

I’ve got two years of training before I get tested again. That one will be another serious, comprehensive examination, but now that I can relax and breathe again I have a lot of stuff I want to work on. Tai chi, for instance. Chin na, too. During a break from testing, Sigung showed us some chin na applications that did things I hadn’t even considered.  I’d like to put in some work toward developing my sparring using more forms applications so that my fighting is concretely kung fu, not kickboxing.  I want to do some documentation on some of our higher-level material. I’m looking forward to the change in pace.

Also, I need to get my new certificate framed.

The guys over at Macheist have put together an awesome bundle of Mac apps for under fifty bucks.  There are only two of the eleven programs included in the package that don’t really seem like I’ll use them:  iStopMotion and CoverSutra.  I don’t do stop-motion animation, and I rarely listen to iTunes directly, usually only through my iPod.  Every other program looks really useful.  I’m especially happy about Cha-Ching.  I’ve been needing a new personal finance program anyway.  I’m tired of booting into Windows to balance accounts.

If you use a Mac and any two of these apps look worthwhile, you’re saving yourself a chunk of change by buying the bundle.  Check it out:  Macheist Bundle.

My wife Deirdra is about to start her second Yoga Teacher Training program, detailed here.  She’s already certified in Vinyasa yoga, but she’s branching out into Anusara as well.

As you can guess, a fight at my house looks exactly like this:

Starting next weekend, I’ll be teaching private lessons at my kung fu school.

One of our other black belts has recently decided to take some time off, so we were one instructor short and there’s a test coming up soon, meaning that there were students who want private lessons but not enough hours to go around.  Hopefully I’ll be able to help take up the slack.

I’ll have my own key to the school so I can open it for teaching, plus the privilege of working out there anytime.  I’ll get a cut of the profits from the lessons, but it’s not really a lot of money.  I’m doing it for the teaching experience and because I honestly enjoy doing it.  I’m really looking forward to this.

A couple of weeks ago Deirdra and I drove up to Memphis to visit my parents for my mother’s birthday.  While we were there, we met up with some old friends for some gaming.  I hauled most of my indie games, but we ended up playing The Shadow of Yesterday.  I’d had an idea kicking around in the back of my head for a one-shot for a while, so I was happy to GM.

The setting was a melange of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Fairy-tinged England and (obviously) Pirates of the Carribbean, with some strong influence from Farscape, since I’ve been re-watching the whole series.  All but one of the PCs were convicted criminals on a prisoner transport ship being hauled off to an island prison.  The sole standout PC was the ship’s pilot, the only one able to control the living vessel.  We started the game with their escape and overthrow of the ship’s crew and captain.

We had a grizzled terror of a pirate who had got religion in prison and reformed, a gypsy witch imprisoned for striking down a corrupt bishop, a half-breed son of a noble fairy house with a grudge against both his heritages, an ambitious pirate captain who loves long odds, a noble lady-in-waiting framed for the murder of her mistress, and the sea-touched liveship pilot.

They avoided engaging with another ship flying the flag of the Church, navigated to a port on the Barbary Coast to take on supplies and a new crew, tangled with the locals, shipped out and sailed up to the North Sea to raid English shipping lanes, befriended Viking pirates, and eventually faced down a corrupted liveship with a voodoo priestess pilot and a captain driven mad.  It was pretty great.

I should be going back to Memphis in October.  I think next time we’ll probably play some Capes and/or some Primetime Adventures.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Last week was my birthday.  I’m sure my instructor didn’t intend it as such, but I’m considering this my present:  on the thirtieth anniversary of my birth, we finally started working on a basic tai chi form.  It’s not the actual Li family set, not yet.  First we learn a simple series that’s repeated several times on the left, transitions to the right, then repeats several times on that side.  We get to practice that set as we learn the principles and the building blocks before we move on to learning the real deal.  Even so, it’s really great to be moving into something internal.

We left Jackson for the tournament on Thursday evening around 6pm. There were four of us, Billy, Katie, Jason, and myself. We tried pretty hard to get other students from our school to go, but everybody else who was interested couldn’t make the time or didn’t have the money. Any more people and we would’ve needed to take another car, maybe gotten another hotel room.

We stopped in Monroe for dinner, took a wrong exit and ended up wasting about an hour trying to find a decent place to eat. Once we got back on the road we made good time and pulled into the parking lot of our hotel in Plano at 1:30am, just about the time I’d expected.

Last time I went to Taiji Legacy, the hotel for the tournament was a La Quinta surrounded by a light industry wasteland. There was a Steak and Ale and a Bennigan’s just one street over, within walking distance, but nothing else around except office parks, mini-storage, factories, concrete and asphalt. Not even a convenience store. I hoped that the Holiday Inn we were given for this year’s tournament would have a few more amenities nearby, but it turned out to be right next door to the La Quinta. And Bennigan’s. Nothing was open after midnight anyway.

We checked in to the hotel, passed out, and rose early on Friday. Billy and Katie both had a 13-position Wu Hao Taiji seminar scheduled to start at 10am and we all had to register beforehand, so there was no time to waste. The hotel breakfast spread wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t fantastic, either. The cinnamon rolls were good, but I missed the waffle bar over at the La Quinta. I figured it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to sneak over for waffles and settled for cereal and a warm Cinnabon.

It was still early, so there wasn’t much of a crowd yet, probably only forty people milling around in the hotel lobby eating breakfast, watching CNN on the big television, and lining up to register. I think all of us bought at least one Taiji Legacy 2007 t-shirt while we waited, and Jason and I made friends with some taiji guys from Oklahoma City who were behind us in line.

Billy and Katie disappeared into the big hotel ballroom for their seminar, leaving Jason and me to find some way to entertain ourselves. We went for a walk to try to find some redeeming feature nearby, but the neighborhood proved to be even more dismal and sparse by the light of day and the Texas heat made it almost unbearable. We ended up back in the hotel room practicing a Lung Shou Pai two-man set that we started refining back before I had problems with my knee.

Around 11:30, Billy came back from his seminar and showed us the Wu Hao 13 he’d learned. I took the same seminar in 2004, so I was able to follow along a little, and then Jason and I gave him a refresher on the two-man set while we waited for Katie. She has more experience with taiji than the rest of us do, so she’d elected to stay for the next Wu Hao seminar as well, the 24-move.

By this time we were all getting hungry, so we left the room to head back downstairs and meet Katie when she finished up her seminar to grab some lunch. We ran into the guys from Oklahoma and some friends they’d made, a guy from Baltimore (if I remember correctly) who studies taiji at a Shaolin-do school and a couple of ladies from Florida who study Choy Lay Fut and Liu He Ba Fa, so a whole big group of us walked over to Bennigan’s.

After lunch, Billy was signed up for a seminar to learn a simplified version of Tong Bei Quan, a Shaolin form. Jason and I were pretty tired of just standing around while everybody else got to learn new stuff, so we decided to throw in with Billy and take a class from a Shaolin monk. How often do you get to do that? It meant we needed to buy an extra seminar ticket to still make all the classes we’d planned, but we figured it was worth it and we turned out to be right.

The seminar was taught by Shi Yan Feng, who was scheduled to teach a Damo Straight Sword class in 2004 but had to cancel at the last minute. I’m glad I took the opportunity to work with him this time. I got to take a Shaolin class from another monk, Shi Xing Wei, while Deirdra and I were in Las Vegas for the wedding, so I had an idea of what to expect, but I didn’t know anything about the actual form we’d be learning. He started by teaching us the applications for several of the individual sections and had us partner up to practice them, then quickly moved on to teach us the form itself.

It was probably only twenty five moves or so, depending on how you count it, but the basic foundations are slightly different from Lung Shou Pai so there was a great many little corrections that I had to make on nearly every move. It was a hard workout, drilling over and over just to burn in the gross movements in only ninety minutes. By the end of it, I was drenched in sweat, but I felt pleased because Yan Feng and his students who helped teach us praised my technique and the speed at which I learned several times.

After Tong Bei Quan, Billy stayed for Shi Yan Feng’s next seminar on Shaolin Eagle Form while Jason and I met up with Katie. She’d decided to take a class on Taiji Sticky Hands and we went outside to show each other the stuff we’d learned. After half an hour in the heat, we had to seek refuge inside again. By now the atmosphere in the seminar room was pretty relaxed and there were plenty of spectators, so we found some seats to watch the end of the class on Eagle.

Next for me was a seminar with Gene Ching of Kungfu Magazine that focused on writing about martial arts and writing as compared to martial arts. I have a ton of notes from this seminar that I still haven’t gone back and reviewed, but it was fascinating and thought-provoking.

Right after that I had two back-to-back seminars with John Wang on Shuai Chiao.  The first covered entry, the methods used to close the distance with an opponent in order to grapple and control him.  We covered six different entries based on how you want to engage.  The second seminar covered a principle called Butterfly Hands, a set of techniques used to counter an opponent’s attacks and tie up his arms so you can throw him.  It was all really fantastic stuff, and my only regret is that we didn’t get any of it on video.  Billy’s been emailing with Mr. Wang, though, and he may have a line on a DVD.

Four seminars in one day was exhausting, so we headed back to the room.  After a quick shower, I realized I was starving.  It was nearly eleven and I hadn’t eaten since lunch .  On top of that, we’d done hours of heavy exercise.  I convinced Billy and Jason to ride with me to get some food and we drove around until we found a McDonalds, about the only thing open.  Rather than eating there, we grabbed our food to go and took it back to eat in the hotel lobby.  The only other people still moving was a group of about fifteen Chinese guys ranging from middle-aged to frickin-ancient.  They were laughing and talking and showed no signs that they were planning on going to bed anytime soon, though I’m fairly certain that most of them were scheduled to appear in the Masters Demo the following morning.  I’m sure the bourbon and scotch they were drinking out of hotel paper cups probably helped them sleep, though.  We would’ve tried to eavesdrop, but none of us speak Chinese anyway so it wouldn’t have done us much good.

Finally we went back upstairs to crash.  The first day was great, but we still had another day and a half of competitions and seminars ahead of us.

To go along with the new webhost and the new Wordpress version, I’ve added new comment- and trackback-spam catcher plugins to help filter out the trash that’s been collecting.  While I wasn’t looking, the old spam-collection stuff had racked up sixty-five thousand spams.  Hopefully the new trackback-spam verification and the javascript comment-spam checker will weed out some of those.

I’ve also set up OpenID.  I thought it was pretty lame that you have to register and create an account on every single site on the internet just to drop in a comment, so when OpenID came along I was pretty enthusiastic about it.

OpenID works on a system of trusted authorities.  Rather than every site having to redo the job of keeping track of your username and password and profile and all that, you just login using your OpenID url, which is probably the URL for your Livejournal or your AOL profile or your Technorati account.  Then the site asks Livejournal (or whoever your provider is) if you are who you say you are.  You may have to login over there and then get redirected back here.  If you’re already logged in, it just happens in the background.

You may already have an OpenID whether you realize it or not: Since SixApart was pretty much behind the OpenID concept, LiveJournal and Vox both provide OpenID logins, and so do a ton of the other LJ spinoffs like DeadJournal.  So do AOL, Yahoo, Technorati, Smugmug, and all the blogs hosted by Wordpress.com.  I didn’t have an account at any of those, so I got my own OpenID through MyOpenID.com and I use my url here as my OpenID login, though I could’ve gone through a zillion other providers.

Of course, if you don’t want to bother with any of that, you can still just register here to comment.  But why would you?

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.