it's all so fa...st
vegas was great, though as far as i was concerned, it could have been in detroit for all the extracurricular that went on... ie NONE. i got to know the hotel pretty well, and that's about it. but it's over now, and i thought i had a chance to breathe out, but it turns out my internal calendar is all discombobulated, and i'm off to atlanta next week before i breathe back in. whoosh.

the team did wicked awesome, i'm so proud of their effort and enthusiasm. i've said it before and i'll say it again: i consider myself damn lucky to have been hooked up w/the ryuei ryu fools, and if they weren't so successful, i probably wouldn't be doing karate at this point. it's fun to be notorious. our group of 19 walked outta there with 12 gold medals, 5 silver, and 3 bronze >> out of 720 competitors!! geez, it blows my mind. for details on the who and what, click here.

there was one scandal to report on: the girl who won the green belt division last year was back again in green this year. tough for joann and amber in green-ville. and the girl won again this year, smokin' everyone in kata and kumite. the issue i have is that she then put on a brown belt and proceeded to win the brown belt kata division too. not usually allowed, but apparently special permission was granted...
she's an awesome karate-ka, and absolutely deserved to win my division. she probably should have even gone into black belt land. but i think it's POOR sportsmanship to run through all the green belts just because she could. i feel really bad for the green belts, and feel really sorry for this girl on a different level, because obviously there's something in her that needs to be triple-gold validated. bummer.