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Merry Tuesday - July Martial Arts Weekend

[caption id="attachment_4711" align="alignright" width="300"]merry_monday Image created using Bit Strips.[/caption]

I know I'm a day late. My weekend was fantastic and I needed time to recover.

The weekend was spent in the Greater Toronto Area, specifically Oshawa and Etobicoke. It was filled with the merriment that comes with visiting good friends. And we worked hard. The focal point of the trip was an iaido seminar with my idol, Hatakenaka Sensei. She came over from Japan to provide technical corrections and personal insights.

But I took much more from her talks than technical points. We had Q&A sessions where we got to ask questions about who she is as a person and I learned that she and I have some things in common (tenacity, goal-oriented). She is proud of her accomplishments without being boastful and has high standards. She tries to do her part to bring peace to the world through martial arts. I hope to make the world a better place through my writing. I learned so much about why I love my martial art and feel inspired to train harder. I came out of the weekend liking her even more. She is a real life Wonder Woman and I hope to be more like her one day.

It was so wonderful not needing to bring so much food with me. I mainly packed bread.

Several of my friends had made me gluten free treats to celebrate my birthday! I have wonderful friends :)

We also drove out to a store that sells Kawartha Dairy ice cream. It was delicious!

I also played some Pokémon Go. I'm leveling much slower than my friends, but I'm rather busy with writing and iaido, so I don't mind. We found Centennial Park, which had tons of Pokéstops but it was hard to get to them all as the picnic areas were crawling with people. There was a Pikachu *somewhere* but we couldn't find it :(

I'm excited to get back to the dojo tonight and apply the lessons.

I have a short story that needs to get finished before August 1st, so I'll be pretty busy with that over the next while. I got a little bit of writing done on the weekend but need to add about 8000 more words. It's for a Hallowe'en anthology.

Well, I'm off to get ready for work.

Ciao,
R~
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