I got tossed around by Sensei at class tonight. Not in a thrashing kind of way, more in the "Look, here's all the fun things you can do to someone using this technique" way--specifically, once you've dragged someone around the mat a little bit and have them pinned and immobilized, you can tickle them. I laughed while he was throwing me, which isn't a great habit to get into when taking ukemi for instructors: part of one's job as uke for an instructor is to enable the maximum focus to be on them, not you.

Still working towards my test in June. Still not at the level we'd like me to be at. I mean, I'd pass, and that's an excellent baseline, but I wouldn't be super happy with the test, and the guy training me would be even less happy with it. I'm making progress, but I'm not sure what happens if the four weeks pass and I haven't made that little leap upward; in this case it seems to ultimately be up to our instructor.

Well, whatever. I certainly have enough else to keep me busy. I have one free weekend between now and July, for example.

Work is ramping up to bit of a busy time, getting a bunch of major changes ready for the release that's supposed to be feature-complete next month. But it's fun: we were sitting around drinking last week and started chatting about one of our various problems. A co-worker said, "Are we talking about work again? We're talking about work again. Dammit." I said, "Of course we're talking about work. We always talk about work, because work is interesting and engaging." The main challenge with this job is to not work so much, to maintain a good life balance (mine is heavily tilted towards aikido for the rest of the month) and not get sucked in to all the interesting problems that get the brain all fired up.