Various Stresses, Mainly

Here are the other two images I wanted to show.

Today, Louise was sick, so I didn't go to her place to hand out ticket. I told her not to worry, that there were other places I could go, but I was bluffing. I had a couple of ideas, but neither fell through, and I didn't have the nerve to go around actively giving them away. Grandma misinterpreted my last post to mean that I was going to hand them out at the farmer's market, which would have been a really good idea, but it was too late by the time I checked my inbox. None of this was anybody's fault, but still, I'm disappointed with how things worked out.

On top of this, my family's having some really tight financial difficulties. This has happened in the past, but this is the first time that I've been standing "at the front" so to speak, to witness and handle things throughout. To be honest, my nerves aren't holding up so well.

I'm going to see my father tomorrow, and he's going to drop by to say hi to my mom and brother before we head off. I don't think it would be disrespectful for me to say this is a little nerve-wracking.

In other news, Mom surpassed last week's profit at the farmer's market again this week. This time, they did make an extra sale, instead of just selling something more expensive. They've got a pricing system down, now, and they're looking at introducing necklaces to their selection.

I went to open practice at karate for the first time this week. I got my sensei to go over the final third of my kata and it went well. Open practice was a whole lot different from a regular lesson. No bowing in ceremony, no lesson, and half child attendance. Even though the class was an hour, while a normal one is an hour and a half, usually there's a bowing in ceremony, some meditation, we do some chanting, we do some exercises, we do some stetches, we learn something that's not strictly a part of the curiculum, and then we get around to practicing the katas, if it is a kata lesson that day. So being able to practice only what I was having difficulty with, and it being not a whole kata, but only a segment of a kata, for a full hour really helped immensely. I also felt that, even though it was a new move, I learned it surprisingly quick.

This was actually partly due to my being instructed by a helpful child who was a belt level above me. It's always strange meeting a child with eyes that are clear and capable of accurate interpretation. That is, she first attempted to teach me the full technique, and when I didn't get it, she turned the technique to smaller pieces, and taught me memory tricks for it. When my sensei later reviewed me, it turned out that her interpretations had been correct.

I'm not surprised that someone so young would be better at a technique, or that they would be able to repeat a lesson taught to them by a teacher to me, but the fact that she was able to adapt her teaching style to suit my own specific difficulties seems surprisingly clear-minded for such an age.