Early Struggles

We are two weeks in to the Year of the Dragon and so far it has not been smooth sailing. I am away for work right now and I typically work 12 to 14 hour days everyday until the project is done. On top of this, I am staying in a camp that has limited facilities and not a limited space. My struggle is finding space and/or time to do anything right now. I am still able to do most of the core requirements but not anything with my weapons or a couple of my personal requirements. I knew this going into this year and so it is not a suprise to me.

I also found out that next week I may be there only Tuesday and Thursday possibly and then I will be gone again for at least two weeks. That will give me limited time to get some quality practice time in but I plan to take full advantage of it. I know specifically what I will be working on and when I plan to do it.

Although I am not able to be there in person, I will continue to be there online whenever I am able to. I have also been reading everyones blogs to help stay connected with the team. Hopefully I will see some of you next weeek and if not then in two to three (or maybe four) weeks after that.

Why Join

I was looking at my work schedule for this coming year and it is going to be very busy. I will be start with the GNWT project on May 16th and it will continue into mid to late October. With this schedule I will be gone for 2 to 3 weeks at a time and home for one or two in between. Before this, I will have some projects in Whitehorse, Yellowknife and a couple others including possibly Greenland.

With all this in front of me, I decided this was a good year to join the I Ho Chuan team. Why would I do that? That is a very good question and one that I found really easy to answer. One of my most successful years on the team was when I was away for work a lot during Covid. It kept me engaged and focused on my goals so I figured with another busy year coming up, this will be a great way to stay engaged and help keep me on the right path.

You may not see me a lot in the next few months but I will try to be online as much as possible. This may be hit or miss as well as some of the places I go, do not have a very stable internet connection. However, being a part of the team will allow me to focus on my journey wherever I happen to be.

My weapon choice this year is the Chinese Horse Bench which will be interesting to practice while away and I am also going to work on a spear form from 2016 again.

Crazy End/Start of the Year

It has been a crazy end to the year and it looks like it will continue for a while. I have been doing some extra work when I have been home and it looks to continue until possibly June or later. This means you will not see me at the Kwoon very much over these next few months.

I will continue to connect via Zoom as much as possible and I will be there in person when I am able to. I remeber back to my grading year and how most of my training was done outside the Kwoon and this is a great opportunity to take what I did back then and improve on it.

See you soonish......, maybe?

No Sun. Bad Mood.

We are in full winter mode up here now (high today was -22) and it is already affectig my mood. We are also down to under 7 hours of daylight a day and we lose 10 more minutes everyday. It's not just the weather but also that and we still have a lot of restrictions up here to hopefully keep Covid free. This means that the gym is still closed and has been for 3 months now, so I am limited by what I can do in my room with just body weight.

l also injured my shoulder last time I was home so that is not helping either. I'm not sure how, but it is very weak right now and I am unable to do certain things like push ups.

It seems like a lot of reasons not to train but it is actually the opposite of that. I have just modified my training to adapt to my current situation. It is a nice distraction and it helps improve my mood. Nothing like some good old fashioned sweat to make you feel better. It's just to bad its not from the sun.

Life in The North

I wanted to share with you guys a picture of my ocean view. Sifu Cosgrove has nothing on me.

I bet you all wish you could step out of your office and have the view that I do. Right?????

Seriously though it has been a somewhat stressful couple of weeks with the situation at work here. To add to this, the weather has started to turn and has already caused the cancellation of 2 flights this week. Im not sure why I think a about these things because there is nothing I can do to change these facts but sometimes I wish I could.

The training is also down because the gym is closed and we are encouraged to stay in our rooms when we are not working unless it is for meals or the washroons. I am grateful for the livestream classes as it helps me stay engaged and focused on my training even when I can't physically train.

Work Chaos

I didn't really want to write about this but after my first week back I felt it was necessary.

The week before I came back to site, they had a fatality at site here. It was not someone I knew pesonally but I had seen him and talked to him here and there. This really affected me because it was a helicopter incident and I have been on the same helicopter in the past. Thinking about that scared me a little because you really don't know what can happen in life

Once I got here, I started on a big project of shipping waste off site on sea lift. We were working 16 hour days at a minimum for the first 8 days. Hence I was not at any of the classes via Zoom. After than many days you tend to get touchy and you feel angry, irritated and stressed. It was a week of not much happening aftyer work and even for the next 2 days after

If that was not enough, we now have a Covid outbreak on site. there have been 7 positive cases so far and 100 close contacts identified. What this means is all these people are or will be flown out as off today and the remaining ones of us will be tested daily for the next 5 days to confirm we are all good.

A lot of things happening but I am still happy because I am alive and healthy. And I have family and friends that I get to see when I am home or through Zoom when I am not.

See you all soon

Goodbye.

I have been trying to figure out the best way to blog about this but have not come up with a great way to word it so i will just put it out there.

My attendaence and activity level in Kung Fu has been been down the last couple of weeks and it's because of where my mind is at. The day before I came home, I found out my grandmother passed away. So on Thursday I went to her wake and it was a very powerful and emotional experience.

I feel like I need to give some backstory her. My grandfather lost his wife when my mom was 14. He met and married a woman from the Alexis First Nation and moved there when my mom was 21. When I was 9, I spent my entire summer on the Reserve at their place. To say I stuck out was an undersatement, but I was never treated differently and I experienced so many great things. I continued to do this until I was 13.

Jump ahead a few years, we moved to a house that borders the reserve so we could be closer to my Grandfather. I continued to see my friends and spend a lot of time there. As the years went on, my Grandfather passed and i started to lose contact with everyone. I would still see them as my mom gained 2 sisters (my aunts) and hence some neices and nephews but it was not as often.

The wake was a powerful experience because of what they do. The traditional drumming and singing was an emotional experience because you could hear feel the sorrow in the music. The ceremony itself with the peace pipe and the circle was something my brother and I were allowed to take part in. Even though it was a relationship through marriage, we are treated no differently than blood relatives. I will miss her and what she has done to make my life better.