4.16 (May 22)

 Today I decided to go through all my blogs for this year and label them with the date they should've been released on. All my blogs are already labelled with the year of I Ho Chuan followed by the week number/blog number. In years past I used to go by week number, so I would always end on however many weeks were in that I Ho Chuan year. This year I changed it up, and I now go by the blog number. I do my best to keep the blog number in line with the week number, but it quite obviously hasn't been working. The farthest back this goes is blog 4.4. That blog was released on April 6th, while the 4th week of the I Ho Chuan year was February 27th. That blog was a week late. This has only gotten worse as the year progressed on, as this blog is being released on July 23rd, when it should have been on May 22nd. Over 2 months late. I tried to lessen this at the beginning of the Summer when I intended to release a blog a day for a week, and I ended up only doing 4 blogs. Not a great start to getting back on track, but it was still a start. Now that my Summer course is over, I will be able to spend more time thinking about and doing my Kung Fu. This will hopefully lead to more blogs.

4.15 (May 15)

This last week I said I was going to do a blog every day, and I failed pretty poorly. My goal was to post one every day from June 26 until today, July 3. That would've been 8 blogs in total. I did 3, with this one being the fourth. So I did half of my original goal. Not good, but still better than before. I would like to make lots of excuses for why I didn't do what I said I would like "I was busier than I thought I would be" or "nothing came to me that I felt like I could blog about that easily" but like I said, they're excuses. Blogging is something that I've struggled to do consistently for a very long time, and I had hoped that this past week was going to be the event that changed that for me. It wasn't, which sucks. But that just means that I still have more work to do so that I can find a way to make the process of writing a blog easier and more manageable for myself. After all that said, I started off being 10 blogs behind last week, now leaving me 7 blogs behind when counting this week. Still a long way to go, but progress is being made.

4.14 (May 8)

On Wednesday night in the Level 1 Teen/Adults class I was helping one of the students with Lao Gar 1. They were having a very difficult time remembering the sequence of the form, and they could only do parts of the form when following other people. When I looked around, I saw that all the other instructors were focusing on all the little details, but I knew that wasn't going to work in my situation. I knew that I had to focus on the sequence of the techniques, and not the techniques themselves. I found it difficult to not correct all the little mistakes, like what kind of punch or where the hands are supposed to be, but I knew I would get farther if I just let them go for the time being. At the beginning of the class, they couldn't remember how to start the form. By the end, they had all the way up to the second pose right before the Front Thrust Kick. I hope that they will still have at least some of the form remembered by Monday's class, but if not I at least now have a way to work with them on it.