I wrote the following on Wednesday:

Well hello, it sure has been awhile since I last posted a real update. I'd like to say that I've been too busy to update, but in reality, I simply haven't made the time. I have been busy (very much so!) but not so busy that I couldn't update. I just didn't. Sorry.

Goodness, where to start? On the 5th we had a reception to celebrate my graduation. That was a blast. We did the whole living room in a tie-dye theme. I tie-dyed a sheet and some pillow cases the day before and we had the sheet over Mom's desk (like a table cloth) and the pillow cases on pillows on the couch. We put the tie-dyed towel on the dresser and put my juggling stuff on that. Everybody wore their tie-dye shirts: even Dad, who is embarrassed to wear tie-dye. (Man, after posting those last couple of sentences, what do you want to be that I get a bunch of tie-dye adds up top?)

We had a pretty good crowd come too. It was a little slow at the start, but as soon as a wedding that lots of our friends were going to let out, we had a huge bunch of people show up. Anna and Gunner, two of my very first gymnastics students, each colored a card for me. That was really touching. Several people from church showed up, my boss came, several people from karate, from the home school group and from our old church. It was supposed to be come and go from 2-6, but several families stayed until 8:30 and we had a blast.

After the reception I spent time getting ready for the ACT. I took it on the 12th. I think I did better in math, but I'm not sure how I did in Science Reasoning. Hopefully I raised my score. ACT finished about 11:40 and I rushed home and we (Anna, Ethan, Joshua and I) rushed into Tulsa to watch what was left of the black belt testing. As fate would have it, we got lost and so we were REALLY late, but we still got to see some cool stuff. But we missed watching the board breaking, which I was really wanting to see. Oh well, you can't have everything. We only had one person from our dojo testing: Alicia. We got there in time to see about the last thirty seconds of her twenty minutes of fighting, but from what I hear she fought very well, in spite of having a mild asthma attack in the middle of it! She always does well under pressure. She won her three on one plural fight and almost won her four on one fight (four points to five). There was a guy there testing for his second degree black belt who actually did win his four on one fight. That was very impressive! We also got to see Mr. H fight for the first time...WOW! His speed and control are just amazing. Totally, completely amazing.

Monday night I finally got up the nerve to ask Jason Murry if I could be on WanKan, our dojo's demonstration team. I was as nervous as all get out. He said that he'd pray about it, and also said that I would need to work on breaking. I asked him what kind (power, speed, trick, etc.) and he said mostly speed and trick breaks, since Mr. Garza already does power breaks. So Tuesday afternoon I went to the hardware store and bought twenty feet of board. I done some cool breaks so far: half supported hammerfist, unsupported high round knife hand (!!), unsupported punch (!!), half supported descending knife hand and half supported palm heal. I've also been working on an unsupported side kick (not making much progress) and an unsupported rising elbow simultaneous with a rear elbow. Hopefully that will be enough to impress him. He's going to Canada and so won't be at class next Monday, so I've got two weeks to try and come up with some more stuff that he might like. After yesterday my right hand is feeling pretty stiff and somewhat tender (I broke 10 boards yesterday!), but once it starts feeling good again I'm going to try and to two boards with a half supported palm heal. Yes, I know it's silly to even think of, but I'm going to try it.

Last Friday I started washing dishes at a restaurant here in town. It's not a fun job, but it's not bad either. It's a job, at least. But it's only two days a week. But they did seem happy with me, so maybe they'll consider giving me more hours.

Monday we started doing summer camps at work. I love summer camps. Most of our upper level team girls are in AR doing some sort of camp thing there, so we've only got one level four and several level 3's this week, plus class kids. The cool thing is that means I get to work with Tammy some, and have learned some interesting things already. It always amazes me how Tammy can pick up on the smallest little things in an instant.

Last week we watched Unbreakable. It was very interesting. I liked it right up to the very end...then it got bad. Samuel Jackson lends an amazing aura of coolness to any character he plays. And the scene with the boy and the pistol was very well done. It was also interesting to see the Biblical name theme...Joseph, the dreamer. David, the great hero of his nation. Elijah...I can't remember the correlation...have to ask Anna. The shots in the opening scene were interesting at first, but after a few minutes you got tired of looking between the seats...they should have cut to a different camera. It was interesting that they managed to have a sky scraper burn to the ground, a plane explode and a train wreck without any big budget effects.