Sunday afternoon, I went to the Shoshin Ryu Region 1 Kata Contest that 2 teams from my jujitsu dojo were competing in. I’m so proud of them – they competed as green belts (they were initiated green belts just before the contest) against brown belts and took away first and second place in the adult division. It was fun to see what the competition is like. They were egging me on to compete for next year.

I took a bunch of photos, but here’s my beef with the digital camera. 1.) The delay between clicking and the actual photo taking is over a second, and by then the move’s already done and I ended up with a bunch of photos of them getting up from a fall, not of them in mid-air. 2.) I put in fresh batteries when I got to the site, and 38 photos later, I was running out of juice and the battery symbol was flashing. 3.) It takes too long for the flash to recover in between shots. Not that the flash works well anyway; it barely illuminates to the middle of the gym.

As I was driving out after the contest, I got a call from my instructor asking me to join the other instructors for an In-N-Out burger. I was craving In-N-Out because I saw a bailiff walk in with it at lunch last week, so how could I resist? I am now so bloated that it looks like I have puffy ciabatta bread dough wrapped around my lower abdomen.