Year end musings

Today was my last teaching day of the year. We will be on an abbreviated schedule starting tomorrow Christmas Eve. For now my next class will be New Year's Day 11 am training. I found a great photo of Sonya(mentioned last blog) along with Harry and Elena Anderson. I hope you enjoy it.

Next week I will be heading to Arizona to see Artt Frank, a very close friend of Chet Baker. I just want to meet him(face to face, we've talked a lot over the phone and have e-mailed). Artt played with Chet, Miles, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington to only name a few. So he is definitely a great part of jazz history. And I hope to get a chance to play along with him. Fates willing. According to Andrea Mallis Mercury is in retrograde, so travel and communications can get skewed. And I hope to see a couple of old friends, Harv Moscowitz and Catherine Tornbom, who have re-located to Arizona. And I just realized this is quite a day to mention this, because this is Chet Baker's birthday. He was born 81 years ago in Yale Oklahoma.

I want to mention a couple of things about early next year. For the first time Division 3 will be having its own training. That will be the day before the CAA meeting at the end of February. It will be Saturday before the Sunday meeting and training. And it will be at our dojo as will the meeting. Hey, why not do both? And at the end of January there will be what by all indications a very important workshop for all those interested in Osensei's process. It is on Sunday January 30th at City Aikido in San Francisco and will be led by Robert Nadeau shihan. Nadeau sensei is a direct student of Morihei Ueshiba Osensei. I will be there as well. A lot of times people have no idea how to approach Osensei's stuff. It can be very immense and very difficult to grasp. So people on one end of the spectrum just give up and "just train" without getting a feel for the process the Founder worked. Or on the other end they go way too big way too fast and get lost in the size of Osensei's message. So this workshop will cover how to bridge the gap between the daily living applications of the process and how to expand that on the way to a larger more universal sense. So definitely not to be missed.

I just shot this video today with a new camcorder. The old one gave up the ghost and is one reason I haven't done more aikido videos lately. Thanks to Sean and Andrew for their assistance: