Crazy days.
I’m now officially a green-white belt in To-Shin Do, which means I have 5 belts left (out of 15) until black belt. I’m not super jazzed about the level 3 schedule as I only have 3 opportunities for level 3 classes during weekdays, meaning if I want to get in 4 classes a week, or end up needing to miss a day (like the 6pm class on wednesdays which will always be a hard class to get to), I’m going to need to come in on saturdays. But thems the haps.
While it’s still a little ways out, the black belt is starting to loom. We’ve been talking about what it means to be a black belt this week in class, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts on the matter, none of which I will bore you with here.
I’ve been thinking more about the business of running a dojo, and a lot of ideas have been floating around on the leadership team. The other night I began thinking about something Masaaki Hatsumi said about ninjutsu, which is, “it’s the art of winning”. I’d love to see us advertise the dojo with that phrase. I love the idea that your martial arts work is one building block to winning in life and that it’s helping you develop the skills and attitudes to win in everything you do. I know that sounds a little self-helpy, but it’s something I think is needed.
My project at work has tackled its first major milestone, and it was a lot of work to get there. Roughly speaking, we’re about 1/3 done with the project now, and that makes me happy.
On the flickr front, I’m sadly quite proud to have 2 photos nearing 200 views, and 10 photos over 100. Red Tank Reflections took only 4 days to have over 100 views, and then slowed way down.
My whole “don’t spend money” track is going pretty well, with few exceptions to the rule. One unexpected benefit is that keeping on top of Quicken is much easier given the vastly reduced volume of transactions to record. I’ve also set up a budget in Quick to monitor spending which is a pretty cool feature I’ve never taken advantage of.