Good news / bad news

Bad news: All I wanted last night was a good night's sleep. So of course my body decided to wake me up at 5:15, severely congested and mildly asthmatic. And of course I couldn't fall back to sleep for over an hour.

Good news: At least it seems that the congestion and asthma have passed. Now all I need to worry about is sleep deprivation.

Interview over

So, I've had my interview with the local Big Boss. It took about an hour, but it seems to have gone well. At this point, the managers discuss all the candidates at their meeting on Wednesday. If they decide to go forward, they then check my references. If all goes well from that, we figure out a start date. Yay!

Theoretically, the probation period (ie: before I can get sick days and a pay raise) is 90 days, but with people who have already been working (as I have), that period might be shorter or just ignored.

In other good work news, everyone in the company got a free smoothie of our choice from Liquid Nutrition. Yum.

Life lessons from the dojo

I have a personal goal for myself that every time I go to the dojo, I'll take away some lesson. Sometimes it's karate-specific, but often it's something that can be applied to life in general, not just martial arts. I thought I'd share.

Today's lesson: It's easy to forget (but easier to learn the second time 'round)

I was gone from the dojo for slightly over a month, and -- bad Julie! -- I haven't been practising at home. Consequently, when I got back to the dojo today, I wasn't in peak form. In fact, I realized that I'd forgotten a whole lot in just a month! Some things that I'd learned a few times before my hiatus had slipped my mind completely, others were just in the dusty trunks of unused memories. It takes a whole lot of repetition to put something into long-term memory, and without that repetition, it's really easy to forget.

The good news is that it's easier to relearn something than to learn it for the first time. The first time I learn a new series of movements, it might take two or three classes just to see them all, and then I'm in danger of forgetting them very quickly. Once I've learned them and forgotten them, though, it might take only a half-hour to bring it back into active memory. Certainly I won't be as good as I would have been if I'd been practising the whole time, but at least I don't have to take the same amount of time to re-learn as I did to learn.

Today's takeaway: don't worry too much if you've forgotten something. It's easy to forget, but the relearning process will probably go faster than you think.