Thursday

If even for the blink of an eye you can control two of the other guy’s limbs with one of yours, either with angle or timing or some sort of clinch, then the opponent is in grave danger. - Josh Waitzkin, “The Art Of Learning”




(Kitsune to CC and D)
Are we on for Thursday at 6?

(CC)
Looks like D will be here…I will be visiting a friend at a hospital but will try and be back in time for the tail end

(K to D)
Confirm/deny?

(D)
you really don't like to waste time with socially pleasant extraneous words do you!?!

confirm

(K)
Tigers like to just get to the Point. If not all Five of them.




127.0
Some evil person has been stocking the cookie jar in the communal kitchen with Halloween candy for the past couple of weeks.


Thursday FOD: Touch Bridge

JoE wanted to work on the Tai Chi long form, so we did that for a while. Then more Kiu Two, which again took the bulk of the time. He had a cool armbar app for the salute, of all things. JoE loves those armbars.

He wanted to work a Wing Chun drill of CC's, and we bumbled around trying to remember exactly how it went. Next time I see CC (if I ever do- geez that man is flaky about meeting... he's bailed again for tonight), I'll need to review that.

A little sparring- again not too great on my end, although once again I avoided most of his copious takedown attempts.

Last time I sparred him, though, I had let him GET MY BACK AND TAKE ME DOWN- **TWICE**... he did the same darn thing today (only once, though). I need to not let him do that again- I'm still not quite sure how it happened, so if he *does* get that on me again, I need to call a time-out and reconstruct exactly what he is doing and what I ought to be doing in order to stop him.

I did get front mount on him and hold it for quite some time, although he was doing a pretty good job defending his neck. He normally does not have any trouble tossing me off front mount (few people do), but today I prevented this by constantly shifting my weight around- sometimes sliding almost off into a side control, then back on again (while constantly attacking the throat). He was only able to get me off him in the end with a hair grab (OOOOOH how I hate those!!)





I asked D to work on the Green Dragon form- Plum Blossom Fist (who makes up these names???!? I wonder how many of these bizarre form names can be traced back to poor translation skills).

First arm-circle: make sure the back of the rt hand SLAPS, and pull left hand all the way to centerline.

Elbow strikes- fold arms more, so that elbows are overlapping

Second arm-circle: end with a snap.

Both arm-circle parts: note that these are cat stances and not Seven Stars. For some reason I keep wanting to do Seven Stars.

New part, after the 2nd arm-circle.....

Little hop to the right (south), Black Crane guard to north (Rt palm at left jaw, left palm outward at left thigh).

Left side kick north to knee level. Rechamber. Do not set foot down.

Bring both straight arms down, circle to your rt, then over head, As you give a little 180 degree hop to face west. Hands continue circle in a karate-chop motion to north (rt one on top and in front), continuing to your knees as you bend a little, facing west. Now arms circle around to your left, overhead, face north again and end in karate guard position facing north. Left hand is on top and in front, you are in a north-facing cat with rt toe in front. This entire arm-circling sequence is continuous and flowing.

Scissor step rt foot to west in front of left. High blocks to west, elbows leading. Left, then right.

End by pulling rt Mantis hook back to rt shoulder, step west with left foot and turn north in a high horse. left palm-up knfe hand strikes to north neck height. The power comes from the torque in the turn and Mantis-hook pull.

Now into the previously learned hop-and-turn-and-kneel section.


Those elbow circle-block things are going to need a lot more work- I am still a bit confused. I want to be doing low palm-heels as I pull out of each one, but apparently you don't.

We practiced the Kneeling-with-Leopard-fist guard section as well, and D keeps harping on me that my flow is not continuous enough (thus the energy is not recycling, and I'm chopping the power off of all the strikes). Also (as always) my shoulders (all of me, in fact, but especially my shoulders) are too tense. Part of this is a mental block- when I loosen up these big arm-circle things, it makes me feel that if I was actually hitting anyone, it would be like those chicken-flap hits that women who've had no self defense traning always do. I wish I could see CN do these- it would probably help a lot. Anyway, after he'd had me rep it about a bazillion times and I'd loosened up to where it felt distressingly flappy-armed, I watched him do it and said, "It looks almost like Monkey." He didn't seem to like that observation much, but it did. The two slappy strikes at the end of the two arm-circles at the beginning of the form also look Monkey-like. So I did the section as I would interpret Monkey doing it. D said it looked much better. Well okay then. Dragon + Monkey. There's one ugly deformed nuclear-fallout baby for ya. But I'll experiment with it.

That section- as well as the part with the Mantis hook- is confusing my brain because it's transitioning large vertical circling to large horizontal circling and back again. That seems Dragony, but my body and brain aren't assimilating it very well at the moment, so I don't think I've done anything like that in any of my other forms (Dragon or otherwise).

We did some sticky hands, played with the Wing Chun drill (we couldn't figure out out either... will have to ask CC).

D's going to be out of town for most of this month. He seems to want to bolt the rest of Hurricane Hands as soon as he gets back. I hope he's not planning to blow town for good before he teaches me the rest of Plum Blossom Fist. Unfortunately, I can't really hold the remainder of HH hostage, because D learns new form material about 10x faster than I do.