Third Stripe

Here's Madison, practicing her form this afternoon in taekwondo class, which for this afternoon was just six students.

Still, they trained their hearts out, and Mr. and Mrs. Edge were great to spend a good deal of time with each student, helping them perfect certain aspects of their form.  Madison is seen here doing the end part of a jump kick.

Mrs. Edge was on hand to give guidance as always, and with this class format, it worked out that each student could get some great one-on-one time.  Madison said she was remembering and taking mental notes about which things she could improve, and making those adjustments.

The end result was a moment of testing, which is a little more intense than usual, as the instructors are the ones doing the one-on-one observations, rather than a larger group doing that testing, or having the assistants doing the observations.  Madison was a little nervous, but she was also shining brightly here - she did very well!

Daddy was taking all kinds of pictures of all the students, sharing them online to let everyone know classes were ongoing.  In fact, tonight the other classes were opening up, as the Zoom classes are starting to phase out.  Soon it will be a recorded class on Facebook.

The end results are the same, and this brown belt will be very special.  We've documented here all the effort at home, and the practices, and the work she's put in to this next belt despite all the ongoing circumstances.  She's really trained hard.

The end result is a third stripe, as she was deemed ready for her final testing next week.  Tuesday she'll have her brown belt decided, probably in this same small classroom setting.  We'll be there to watch, and take pictures too, of course.  It's a special belt, one with a little more heart in it than the others.

It was a long night last night, and we mentioned that yesterday.  The end result was a good deal of sleeping in today.  Madison was working hard today on classwork.  This is her last week of legitimate work, and some of these grades are of much higher value:  summative grades.  So she was doing a lot there, working on an assignment based on "The Outsiders," as well as continuing her studies on Africa, and even doing a research assignment on opossums.

After taekwondo, Madison and I were doing a bit of grocery shopping.  We had Mommy with us on the phone, but the two of us were in there, wearing our masks and filling up the cart with all kinds of supplies.  We found everything we needed, but it took us a bit of time of course.

Mommy was having some issues with this kidney stone, which still has not passed.  It wasn't as bad as last night, but she did preemptively take that prescribed medication just in case.  She slept well tonight - we both did.

Tonight we watched "The Princess Bride" again, just because there are so many memes out there about the Dread Pirate Roberts wearing a mask because it's terribly comfortable and that everyone will be wearing them in the future.  But what a great movie this is.  I saw it three times in theaters when it first came out, that was in October of 1987.  I remember going to the arcade there at Lakeshore Mall before seeing it - we used to drive to Gainesville from Cleveland all the time, just to see a movie, eat somewhere, and maybe go cruising in the evening.  That was the rage at that time.  Talk about socially distant!  People would just drive up and down in front of Lakeshore Mall, going back and forth, playing loud music, or just people watching.  It was one of those things people would do that never made much sense to me.  But I was occasionally with others that liked to go cruising, and so that's what we did from time to time.

It was Taco Tuesday today, and that's one reason for the grocery trip.  We got our supplies, and we were well fed with tacos tonight - the best kind, because Mommy had all these extras on the side to add to our fiesta.

This morning's breakfast included British soldiers, which Mommy has now clearly perfected.  It's a perfect system now, and the end result is a magnificent breakfast treat.

We got our stamps today from the Postal System.  It took forever!  We've been waiting on this order for well over a week, and you'd think stamps from the Postal Service would arrive quicker than that.  But nope.  Perhaps it was because there was a special order in there?  I saw there were some Year of the Rat stamps celebrating Chinese New Year, so I got a sheet of those.  We've been collecting those Chinese New Year stamps each year, and these look great.  We have quite a collection of stamps now, although we don't collect anywhere near as many as we used to.

Another thing we got today were season tickets to the GTA next year.  We spoke with a nice lady on the phone, and even though the college is closed, the employee was calling us back from her home and taking care of our order there.  We're going to see "James and the Giant Peach" in October (with ice cream afterwards!), and then "Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat" in November, followed by "Little Women" in February, and the redo of this year's cancelled "Arabian Nights" in May.  We're looking forward to being in the theater again.  Missing that quite a bit lately!

Tonight we did our nightly routine, this time more comfortably as Mommy wasn't in so much pain.  We finished up our story on Lothal with Ezra Bridger, and even watched the short video that the book clearly references.  The book about Ezra Bridger and Bossk ends right as the "Star Wars Rebels" series begins, a nice bridge between the two.  It's a better book than the cover suggests, one the three of us enjoyed.

We said our prayers tonight, and slept well tonight, a solid sleep that was much-needed after a more difficult night the one before.  Hopefully this will pass for Mommy soon.  We got a lot done today though, as you can see.  Obla di, obla da, life goes on!