7/7/07

18 years ago today, at 3:30 AM, I was born. Yay! Yes, today has been one of the best birthdays ever. Everyone sang to me at camp this morning, then I came home to several birthday cards from various family members. My parents just gave me a check because my big birthday present was the trip to France. But I bought myself a 30 GB iPod, so it's all good.
I had a private lesson with Mr. Coleman this afternoon, which was great. We worked on my bo katas for a while and fixed a couple of things, but he didn't have much to correct. Which I take to be a good sign. :P Then we worked on self-defense for the rest of the lesson. Today, we got very theoretical in our discussions. It was interesting, what we covered, but hard to wrap my mind around. Near the end, we worked on the flow of movement from my feet to my hips, not over-turning, and not using my shoulder, for a push. It was very close contact, which was slightly awkward after awhile. I don't know why - I'm normally quite comfortable around Mr. Coleman.
After the lesson, Mr. Coleman asked me to stay to talk about something. So I sat down in the office and he started rummaging around in the filing cabinents. He came up with a testing application and said, "Happy Birthday, I'm promoting you to 4th dan". I was speechless for a few moments, and rightly so, seeing as I'm not due to test until next summer! Mr. Coleman said that he'd just talked to Grandmaster Kim today and he told him to test me as soon as possible. So, I'm testing next Saturday!!! I held it together while I was still in the dojang, but once I got out to the parking lot, I lost it and started crying - tears of disbelief, of course. I got a lot of weird looks on the road because I was grinning like an idiot and kept randomly yelling. Hehe. Oh, and I have to write a paper about teaching. I'm so excited!!!!