It was a great day

I know, I know, it was a week ago, but still. Saturday was fun. We had to get up really early, we were meeting the others at 7.15AM. Of course we were the first ones there.... we stopped for breakfast on the way up, thank goodness. I really needed more coffee, I did nothing but yawn!
The tournament was something else. Lots of people dressed all in black and funky uniforms, all kinds of color belts, the forms were often times hilarious looking. You couldn't fight your way out of a paper bag with those, they looked more like dance performances. Gabrielle did well, she placed second in forms. Considering that all three judges wore black uniforms and the girl who took first place wore a black uniform she did awesome!!!
When it came to sparring they were informed that the junior ranks were not allowed to touch the head area (now remember they were wearing headgear), so Gabrielle was just a little freaked out. Her thing is this high spinning inside kick and not being able to do that intimidated her. I could tell she was not herself sparring. Nevertheless she beat 2 girls but got disqualified fighting for first place. She had previously gotten a warning for touching the girls head (with her fist) and then she kicked her in the stomach (which was supposed to be a contact area (allowed) and the girl bent over slightly, so they told her she used excessive force and she was disqualified. Boy was she ever mad! She got over it though, especially when our Sabomnim told her he was proud of her :) It was a fun time though, everybody in our group placed and I got to take pictures :) Perfect! I should have competed, there were hardly any old people...:)


Here she is doing her form

Here is the guy we called the Power Ranger, because he did all this funky stuff like throwing his sword in the air, doing a flip and then catching his sword again on the way down. Totally retarded in a real fight, but it looked good :)

Here she is fighting her last fight. This lady judge in the front is the one who had it in for her. She warned her continuously, oh well...

Here they are, all proud and happy!

So then we had to rush home, because I had the Black Belt Reunion in the evening. I just had time to get changed and put some makeup on. It was really fun seeing some of the kids who quit years ago and now are young adults. The meal was great too. They asked me to take some pictures, of course I didn't have my external flash, so I had to use my regular flash, yuck! I fixed them up the best I could and they were happy anyway. Somebody got me with their camera and I got that photo too :)

A bunch of crazy people!

This page was really popular in the gallery, it's all because of cute Max! He does think he is a little baby!

Another one of those cellphone pictures that Rachel took..

I felt like playing with perspective and had fun extracting Michael for the "I"

Here is that photo again..

I just finished this one, although the pictures are from January of 2009. That's the way I work, I am all over the place...

And this cool spider web was in the backyard the other day, once it finally stopped raining. I thought it looked really neat

the last 365 page for August, now on to September..

The rest of the week went it's usual way, again there was something almost every day and I hardly got anything fun done, but that's life I suppose. I really wish there was more time to do everything. I want to read stuff about photography, how to make a studio, how to use lights and all that cool stuff. I want to have time to look at different blogs, my friends must think I abandoned them... hopefully tomorrow I will be able to go to google reader and check out what everybody has been up to...

Well, that was just a quick update. We'll see how the weekend goes, maybe I'll post again before another week is over (yeah, right)