Pretty Damn Fine Day

So, I went to my third aikido class in three days this morning--4.5 hours total!--and lived to tell the tale.  (I go when I can, and there are a lot of "can't" class days coming up.  Call it preloading.)  The funny thing is that I ended up staying at the dojo until almost 11PM after last night's class eating takeout Thai food and hanging out with the other four people who were at class, and three of them were also there at 8:30 this morning!  That's dedication for you.  I'm still lousy at this style, but I'm becoming slightly *less* lousy...there is hope.  It's hard for me (after nearly four years of taekwondo) to wrap my head around a discipline in which muscling anything is by definition doing it wrong, but I'm persevering. Water grinding down rock and all that.

Then, at 11, little Miss Petunia had her first ever Saturday (i.e. high) taekwondo belt test, and passed with flying colors.  I was just sitting quietly off to the side watching at first, but then was invited to help (holding targets and attacking for self-defenses and such) which I've done before and is cool enough.  To my huge surprise, however, the head of the program ceded an entire chunk of the testing to me: I had to choose techniques for the students to perform and give them (and the other instructors) all necessary directions for that segment of the test material.  It's all part of the instructor training thing but MAN it was a rush to be given that honor (!!!!!!) and I managed to acquit myself respectably.

After buying her small ninja-ness a big ice cream cone and feeding her lunch, we met up with some friends of mine to pick up a couple of caches. They've been married almost 50 years: he turned 70 this past spring; she's a few years younger.  Wonderful people.  I met him at a caching event about 18 months ago and have subsequently spent a lot of time with her as well.  He's not much into puzzles and I solved a nasty one from his neck of the woods yesterday, so we met up to look for it and then he tagged along to help me find some others in the area that he'd already found. Very much the old-school gentleman; he's externally gruff but completely marshmallow-hearted (a former Marine) and his wife is one of the single nicest women I've ever met. She and Petunia had a mutual admiration society going within five seconds of meeting and they had every bit as much fun looking at flowers and birds as we did hunting caches!  They invited us back to their house for tea and cookies afterward and it was really a lovely afternoon.

When we got home, the two of us played in the pool for a while, cleaned up, and then went to the neighborhood family-run pizza place for dinner.  The boys and Himself were out of town at a soccer tourney all day and got home shortly after we did.

Just a day in the life.  Not a huge life or an important one, but a happy one, and a happy day. I'm a lucky woman.