Lesson Learned

Always wear a mouthguard. It turns out that getting kicked in the face can break the caps on your teeth. Who knew?

Outside of unanticipated dental work—though I did tell L. I was looking for a $250 event (hoping to get a new uniform)—I took a first in forms and 3d in weapons. MC essentially punted on the judging between the three of his students, leaving it up to the other judges to do the dirty work. I probably didn't really deserve third. I hate getting 3d in weapons. I think D and I are going to swap pointers on weapons and open-hand in the coming months before our Pittsburgh competition. Reviews on my form were pretty good, but there were some miscues I'll pick up again on film. I'm grateful for them, though—MC told me that one guy said he got chills watching, and several people were extremely complimentary afterward. If only I didn't get my mouth busted (I forgot to put in my mouthguard!!!!! it was even in my uniform) it wouldn't have looked so bad.

The team on the whole did well this weekend, coming out with a respectable 1.67 placements per competitor (good is 1.5, but our averages are higher). It was a smaller tournament, but the competition was probably above average caliber. We broke in a couple newbies.

H didn't really want to spar, but went out and took a game fight to her opponent, who proceeded to whack her in the eye. I was coaching, took a couple moments to calm her down and then told her to cry after the fight was over. She went out and took a few more points before eventually losing that round, but she did well. Brave, brave kid. Her brother took a nasty fall and severely bruised his elbow. Internal contusions and the whole nine, but nothing broken we think. He kept fighting as far as I know, but I didn't get the whole story.

I was asked to judge between three of our guys who tied for first place. That was tough. At the end I think I clocked my pulse around 90–100 bpm. While my resting rate is actually kind of high (last checked around 74), it was definitely a stressful moment, and I kind of wish I was in the position of MC so that I could punt. Of course D was also in the group, and he could've made the same choice.

Anyway, outside of tournaments and snow...


Life has largely been relegated to time working, teaching, training, and occasionally seeing some friends. Early March was a visit with M, B, and E.

L & D flew in from Nairobi and have been visiting my folks for the past few weeks, too, so L and I have spent some time with them. L cooked a pretty fabulous dinner of Dduk Bok-ki with some small assistance from yours truly. E was on Spring Break in her last semester of her Masters at JBU, so she came over, too. We didn't have any time to catch up, unfortunately—duties of hosting and all that—but she did say that some of my photos from Kenya were decorating the room of one of her friend's children. Kind of neat. Only wish I had known about white balance and auto-ISO back then. Many of those photos have a sad.

Gram came over during part of that time, too, and we enjoyed her company. She is one of those people of whom the world is not worthy. I know everyone says this about their relatives, but she really is. Still moving along at 87; coherent but slowing down some. She is smaller than I remember in stature, but bigger in my heart.


L and I have been taking Hebrew at church—it's a congregation member doing the teaching. An interesting language, and has reminded me yet again that I should have done computational linguistics. But I suppose that at least I can say that education didn't ruin my interest in the subject. (Not that any real education has ruined my interest in many things...still waiting to do some Real Graphics Programming sometime in the future.) I can certainly see how the language is plastic in a way that is somewhat unexpected. Constructive states are interesting. What really gets me interested is how older languages tend to compress semantic ranges into fewer words, and how grammatical changes make such a difference in reading.

I'm not sure exactly how to characterize Hebrew. It is a surprisingly logical language despite the numerous exceptions (all languages are littered with them, with the possible exception of Esperanto). Verbs consist of a three-consonant root; the root consonants form phonemes when combined with vowel pointings that are used to either conjugate the verb or to noun it.

So for example, mlḥ is a root connected to kingship, so: mălaḥ is "to rule" (more properly "he ruled"), while mĕlĕḥ is "a king," and mălḥūt is "kingdom." (My romanization here is a bit suspect, but it's consistent. There are 22 characters in the Hebrew alphabet, but several different forms of the letters and numerous vowel pointings, too.)

Other interesting language features: no vowels (they were added in the medieval period by the Masoretes) and no real tense. This latter point is a bit under debate, but generally speaking Hebrew is accepted to be an aspectual language, so that a verb form may speak of the type of action instead of the time it took place. We see this in somewhat vestigal form in the English progressive: "I'm eating bagels" indicates the on-going nature of the action (its aspect), while "I eat bagels" is a little fuzzier (indicating perhaps preference, acceptance, or habit). The lack of tense is a feature shared with Chinese I believe, while the use of direct object markers (words without any real English equivalent) is also a feature of several Eastern languages (at least Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).


Among other things, I also spent some time writing some Python to re-tag most of the sermons that Riverside has online. It was pretty hackish, but at least it's mostly done now, and I can hopefully rely on it to work again in the future. MP3 tags are highly structured and sometimes pretty annoying. Not surprisingly, it seems like no program has been written that really can work with the tags from another program. Except Mutagen's Python bindings. Those are pretty awesome. And that's what I used. It was a solid week's worth of work. Late nights, and I'm only lately recovering.

L also did a good Ministry of Silly Walks walk the other day. I think she could probably get a grant for it.