It’s been one of the more stressful weeks ever. Monday was the nadir: I found myself in the morning giving one of the more badly received presentations I’ve ever done (it basically degraded into questions about stupid political issues for no very good reason); I then spent the rest of the day until nearly 11 at night preparing a Linux machine to ship to LA and running into all sorts of hardware and software incompatibilities which forced me to reinstall the OS about a dozen times and swap components between other computers. The rest of the work week wasn’t as bad, it was a lot of last minute testing and preparation for the conference.
And then today was the Taekwondo belt promotion test, which I didn’t feel prepared for, having missed two of the last three classes of the session and more than half of the classes before that. However, with some last minute studying and an open workout on Thursday during which I picked a fellow student’s brains, I think I did pretty well. Only a couple of minor glitches during the forms, managed to get the combinations mostly correct, and I even pulled off all five one step sparring exercises. And boy, did I yell. Only one major gaffe right at the end when one of the women black belts on the panel asked us a question (this after we had to perform 20 squat side kicks, each leg, so you can imagine how out of breath and mentally scattered I was): “What were the names of your former instructors, and why did you start Taekwondo?” I barely muddled my way through that (could barely remember my name, let alone their names, said something lame about why I started), and then made the mistake of addressing her as “sir”. Oh dear. I’ve done this before, although not during an exam, and I was warned that it’s a maiming offense – but noone made a big deal out of it today. Whew. Hopefully, in a month, I’ll have a green belt, and better yet, I’ll be able to attend the 6:30 class and stop having to miss the more inconvenient 5:00 class!
But now, the week is over, and I leave for LA tomorrow! I actually find myself looking forward to it, despite myself. I’ll be there all week doing demos during the day (and partying by night!) – if you happen to be there yourself, drop by the Pixar booth on the exhibition floor and say hi! I might even give you a poster!
