Well, this has been a fun week. Allow me to summarise.

Monday

    Informed that 75% of my current job (accounts/customers/vendors/you name it) was being         given to someone else.

   Offered a supervisory position in the purchasing dept, a job I neither sought nor desired.

   Well, gee I guess since 3/4 of my job is going away if I want to keep working I will have to accept and gosh thanks for having such faith in me and giving me such an important position, Fuck....

  Tues-Friday - training on my new job. Realizing that I am no longer running my own show and the job I had for eight years and which I had taken great pride in was now being handed off to be run by other people.

Also, now I have to depend on other people to do there jobs so I can do mine, a situation I have always loathed.

I have basically gone thru the stages of someone who has found out they have a terminal illness, you know anger, denial, blah, blah.

I literally woke up that same night and kept thinking it was just a dream (nope) and my heart rate was thru the roof.

Gotten past that stage but I am keeping the anger (it's mine and you can't have it!)

The moral of the story is...... I dunno.

Taking ownership of something in the sense that you care about it and want it to do well, to grow and succeed are good things but always have a fall back, some other passion or interest (hell hobby) Never forget that you really don't own it, it's not yours and never has been and the people who do own it really it don't care about you and will cheerfully screw you over when it's convenient for them to do so.

The best  part of getting metaphorically bent over the old desk is having to endure the people
telling you they think you can do the job and they think it's a good fit for you. Yeah, hey if I wanted it I would have applied for it.

I have always looked down on the burnouts, the shirkers, and those that don't care. Hey, it's called work for a reason I would always say. Now I see a little bit of how they got that way and i realize they were as much made by the companies they worked for as by there own personalities.

Why care when caring only gets you hurt?

Oh and to top it off I got rear ended about an hour ago. Some idiot stopped to drop off a passenger in the no stopping lane and when I braked i got hit.

The vans okay so I think I will keep an eye on it for a few days and then tell the other driver not to worry about it. It's not really her fault in the sense that yes she should have seen I was stopped but the person in front should never had done what they did and if they hadn't there would have been no accident.

I will head back to work on Monday and get rolling at my new position. I will do my best to keep my head in the game and i will remind myself that the people I am working with didn't have any say in what happened to me and they just want someone they can depend on to help them do there jobs.

I have been with my employer for going on twenty years ( I started in 89 ) and you do get "stuck" you become dependent on a steady pay check and benefits and frankly you get scared to leave because you know how bad things can be with no income.

I will miss my old job. I had put in long hours under difficult people in previous positions and I am now realizing how good I had it the last few years.

I don't mind working hard or long hours but I have to admit I am out of practice at that sort of thing and that to be honest is another reason I was upset about this change. In addition I think the big source of anger was the feeling that I had been belittled as I was told more or less that in the opinion of some people I was now finally doing enough work to justify my salary.

Gee, i guess I shouldn't count on a pay increase to go with my new position.

Have I worked ridiculously long hours the last few years? No.

Have I been successful and grown a business the proceeds of which more then covered what i was being paid? Yes.


Well enough about me, how was your week?

BTW
My back hurts.

I am bummed. I came down with a bad case of the flu (flu shots this year in U.S. targeted the wrong strains so getting one didn't do much good.)

I have had to pull out of the group that carries the big dragon for the Chinese New Year parade in S.F.

Sigh, wish I could have made it this year.

We finished up our last two demos one in San Rafael and the other on Solano Ave in Albany, CA.

Both went well and we gave  the audience good shows. We were tight on space in both locations and both places had hard floors but the advanced team still pulled out all the stops when doing aerials and inside falls (ouch).

Vids of the performance from Solano are up on youtube.

Now we all start prepping for CMAT 2008

We performed for the employees in the banquet hall as part of the Chinese New Year celebration and employee appreciation day.

It went very well. We did not have much time to prepare but everyone gave 100% during the performance and our choreography worked out well in the space  we had in the middle of the room.

We will get some photos and vids up on the website wushuwest.com and I'll see if I can get some copies for here.

Putting together classes from the 21st and the 23rd.

10-21-2007

Good class. Not many people but after warm ups and stretching Peter led us in Southern basics workout with a lot of focus on low stances.

Johnny was working on some of the Southern basics he has learned in China and I made a note to myself to ask him to teach them to me.

After stance work Peter worked with the new students on a beginner form and Connor, Johnny and I worked on lines from our forms.

I decided to change the opening of my pu dao form and was going over the new moves and changing things around to see what flowed better.

10-23-2007

Got to class about 5:20 and Peter was already putting the beginner class thru a tough warm up. It was a hot day and even hotter inside because the windows and doors were still closed. I opened up a couple of windows soon after I got there. I like it hot but it was a little to hot.

Peter ran the class thru the following. I sat out as I had not warmed up yet.

Multiple runs down and back with push ups at the end.

Crab walks down and back then frog leaps down and back.

I can't remember the rest but he did about 4 or 5 different running drills with the class and they were really sweating.

Then 200 reps jump rope and some low stance punching drills.

After stretching I worked with Zaria while Peter took the rest of the class thru kicking drills. I had about 15 minutes at the end of class to work with two new students on the beginner set.
One guy had been at Cal Wush so he picked it up pretty fast.

After that I did some running drills at the end of class and then a few minutes later the advance class started.

We did the usual light stretching and jogging to warm up then we did a few games of sharks and minnows. The highlight of that one was Cary standing there as Kelly (Kelli?) ran by him and didn't seem to notice. Melvin was the other shark and complained that Cary counted as more handicap than help. We did a few minutes of Wushu tag to finish the warm up then went to stretching.

After stretching we quickly went thru the basic kicks then went thru some body turns, sweeps, etc then went to sections. Peter had left for the night so Melvin took over with some suggestions for what to do for excercises and then we went into jumping kicks front, inside, outside (new) which we had not practiced in awhile.

I walked on the new opening for my form and Mike looked at it and said it looked pretty good. I'll ask someone to videotape it on Sunday and put it up for Mark to check out.

My original opening felt very stiff and I think the new looks one better and I cover a lot more ground in the opening. Everybody worked on sections and the Cal Wushu team prepped with sections of forms they are getting ready for collegiate's. Kelly did a bunch of aerials that a friend recorded for some project her friend is working on.

Overall it was good class and everyone was very self motivated and worked hard.

*****Panagrams are sentences or phrases that use every letter in the alphabet at least once.****

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

This is undoubtedly the best known pangram. It contains all 26 letters of the alphabet (as it must do in order to be a pangram) and is 35 letters long. That means that is not particularly economical with 9 surplus letters.

A keen eye will spot that the word the occurs twice, and so one of them can be considered to be composed entirely of surplus letters. Removal of either the renders the sentence less grammatically correct which is undesirable. However, either of them may be exchanged for the much shorter indefinite article, a, thus saving on 2 letters:

The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.

This is 33 letters in length. That can be beaten with the following, which has just 32 letters:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Perfect Pangrams (exactly 26 letters) have been composed, but none makes good sense, being rather more a string of obscure words than a sentence.

Listed below you will find a number of English pangrams arranged in descending order of length (the number of letters used is shown in red). No pangrams over twice the length of the alphabet (i.e. 52 letters) have been included.

• (50) We promptly judged antique ivory buckles for the next prize.
• (49) How razorback jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts.
• (48) Sixty zippers were quickly picked from the woven jute bag.
• (46) Crazy Fredrick bought many very exquisite opal jewels.
• (36) Jump by vow of quick, lazy strength in Oxford.
• (33) The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
• (32) Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
• (30) How quickly daft jumping zebras vex.
• (29) Sphinx of black quartz: judge my vow.
• (29) Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim.
• (28) Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex bud.