I'm still not used to this new blogger format. I sign in and it takes me a few minutes just to figure out how to write a new post. I'm sure there are all sorts of wonderful features that I am not using and know nothing about. I just want to log on, write my post, and log off although I admit it does seem like uploading pictures goes a lot more smoothly now.

This has been a weird week. We've been preparing for a tournament that starts the day after tomorrow and we also had a performance to do yesterday. The performance was especially lame, we practiced about 15 seconds of Tai chi for a few days in a row and then on the day of the performance there were so many photographers on the stage that we couldn't even do it. Big waste of time but it didn't take much physical or mental juice so all in all, no big deal.

The tournament is kind of a mandatory thing but it is free so I'm happy about that. Shifu just told us that we should each enter and do one weapon form and one empty hand form.....so we did. I'm doing dragon sword and ba gua zhang. I picked them because I enjoy practicing them a lot and I wanted to be better at them. They're not the forms I feel most confident with, in fact ba gua is just the opposite, but after a week of intensive practice and a little feedback I'm really improving. Essentially we've just been doing the forms in front of each other all day every day and pretty much everything else is taking a back seat to that. It's working, I think we'll do well, but it gets pretty boring after a while. We're not physically tired, the training is much easier than what we're used to, but mentally it is tiring. I'm glad the tournament is starting soon. It'll just be nice to do something different for a while.

On another note, we made the medicine for our meditation retreat but still no word on when we're going to start.

Next week I should have some photos or video from the competition.