It finally happened

After two years of training and a newly-minted blue belt, I finally have reached the point where I'm having trouble with the moves we're doing.

Don't get me wrong, there have been times in the past where some of the moves have been tricky and required a lot of practice before I could do them properly. A lot of moves are very precise. But I have never yet seen a move I'm supposed to be doing and said, "I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to make my body move that way."

Now, at blue belt, we learn two new moves in particular that I think will take a while to get used to: 1. side jump-kicks, and 2. "break falls" (rolling over your shoulder instead of falling to the ground).

I did aikido at Dawson (7-8 years ago) and theoretically used to know how to do the break falls, but I've completely forgotten. As for the side jump-kicks... that's completely new territory for me. I honestly don't know how to make my body do those moves.

Ah well. That's why it's a learning experience. As a corollary, my arm is very sore from the stuff I was subjecting it to yesterday. Hopefully it'll feel better soon!

Braindead moment of the day

I didn't sleep all that much last night, so I made myself tea at the end of lunch (around 2 pm).

Just now, I was feeling really sleepy, and thought to myself, "that's so strange; I made myself tea."

That's when I realized I'd left my tea steeping in the lunch room. For an hour and a half.

So now I'm making myself more tea.

Sigh.

Despite everything...

Despite my brain-dead moment earlier on, I still managed to finish all the files assigned to me at work with a good hour and a half to spare. This is including a half-hour meeting this afternoon and far too many queries to my trainer (I'm sure she's getting sick of me walking over every 5 minutes).

On the other hand, it was only 17.5 minutes of film. Which might be impressive (or at least average) if I were transcribing from scratch, but working with already-created files, it is actually quite slow. In 6.5 hours, I should theoretically be able to do much more than that.

All told, though, I consider it a good start to working on live (non-training) files. I'm much more comfortable with our procedures after working on file #5 than I was before working on file #1.

Now, though, I'm just killing time.