Discussions with masters and general shenanigans

Sitting here with the fan on, looking out over the view and drinking tea.

Yesterday was a good day:

Got up, went to Kobudo and sweated going through the kata and working on my power generation.  The kata is now fully in my head and the power generation is getting there.  A lot of it is to do with sinking into the stance and transitioning correctly, as the power comes from the transition.  Sensei Yogi also showed me a kata from his style of karate, Uechi-ryu; the kata was literally a series of grabs and punches/elbows/kicks.   Very straight forward, very effective looking techniques.

From there it was a trip into town to buy lots of tea and then return for shower and nap!

The night was... fairly interesting.  The original plan was to go to Kadena, buy meat for the BBQ, then hit an all you can eat place, then hit Gate 2 Street.  By the time we actually got to Kadena, though, the commissary was closed, so James, Shun and Rodney had a look around the BX.  Rodney could only sign in 2 people so I elected to wander the book store at the bottom of the mall.

You can tell a lot about a place by it's book store and a lot of the books were geared towards middle aged women who were looking for vampire adventure and romance (seriously, lots of vampire romance books, lots of romance books and general escapism).  A bit of sci fi, a strangely organised fiction section, a fair bit of military history stuff and a small political section that had the typical American extremes of the political spectrum, although there was one centrist book.

From there we headed out to an all you can eat place and ate lots.  I could have kept eating but the night was wearing on so we headed on out.  Alas, Paddy Mack's was closed so we ended up in a karaoke bar and, once 12am came round, all the military guys cleared out and we were left to ourselves.  This involved general drinking and merriment with the bar staff and the bouncer and a round on the house.  I was trying to stick purely to whiskey, which was making me mellow, but Rodney went and brought some God awful mixture bucket thing which was.... urgh.  I drank a lot of it though and it did not agree with me.

This morning I didn't feel too bad, but was still a bit drunk and managed to help James and his neighbour to clear away a large chunk of jungle from the land James wants to use for growing bananas.

I may work out later, but tonight is my next Karate grading!  Eeep!