It's been 9 years since my last post!

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Sorry about that (not that anyone’s probably reading this anymore). It wasn’t intentional, just life and family and work came between me and writing my thoughts down on this blog. But I’m back now, as fortunately karate didn’t stop for me, even if posting about it did.

So what has happened for me in the martial arts since 2011? I have graded three more times: nidan in 2013, sandan in 2015 and yondan in 2019. I have set myself year-training challenges of 300+ days of training in three different years and was successful twice (pneumonia during one year stopped me in my tracks though). I have been to a number of seminars in silat, my parent school of goju and other styles of goju, a Patrick McCarthy seminar (highly recommended, might I add) and visited briefly a goju dojo in Carlsbad, California (living in Australia, that’s more momentous than it might otherwise seem). I have also become an instructor with our group, assisting with colour belt classes and running black belt classes.

My own personal notes on karate have expanded by more than 80 pages, which is one reason I started doing less on here; and I have co-authored an instructional booklet on Saifa kata with my sensei - another reason I have done less here. I am also plodding my way through an amateur (but hopefully not too amateurish) ‘translation’ of Ohtsuka Tadahiko’s “Goju Kensha Karate-do Kyohan”, mostly using Google Translate, wiktionary and my own minimal grasp of Japanese. I’m 7 years in and almost halfway through; fortunately there are a lot of pictures! When that’s finished, I have his book on the Bubishi and his interpretations of the 48 diagrams to have a go at next.

Most recently I have been working on research and analysis of two ancillary kata to our school - Jitte and Jion. These two kata come to us via my sensei’s sensei’s (that's two sensei's worth of senseis there) training with Higa Yuchoku and have occupied a significant amount of my attention over the last 3-4 years. I imagine that several posts on them will start to fill up this blog.

So unlike my second-last post of 2011, where I promised I would do and say more and then didn’t; I intend to be more frequent in posting, more active in updating and more conscientious of replying to others’ comments to my posts. As to what I will post on, well, the meaning and application of kata; pedagogy in teaching and structure of curriculum (I am a secondary school teacher in my day job); universal concepts (as I see them) from karate; and anything else that is not directly relevant to my personal notes (which are predominantly descriptive and mostly for refreshing my memory and recording applications, kata and 2-person sets).

So thank you for reading, thank you for your patience and here’s to me actually putting some more posts up!

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