Friends - I have returned. On the whole no worse for wear, other than a rather long last day of travel (30 hours awake total, about 24 hours of travel time).
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| Main Dojo - Katsuura Training Center |
How was training? It was good - good to see everyone, good to see our headmaster, good to be back in training, good to be back in Japan.
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| Sunset over Katssura, looking West |
Did I get any corrections? Oh, basically a boatload of things I will need to work on so that the next time I see our headmaster, I will get new corrections to work on (this is the goal, of course - to get new corrections when you see him, not the same corrections).
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| Katsuura - More or less the same view as above |
Did I have any breakthroughs? I did, or at least I perceive that I did. I need to take a little more time and writing and thought to work through them, but I think some progress was made.
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| Traditional Soba - Tokyo |
Did I have a good time otherwise? I did. We got to do a bit more sightseeing than we have in years past, so I have some actually just "pictures" to show you, not lots of pictures of food from the training center and pictures of the training center.
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| Sunrise over Tokyo |
How is the job search going? Slowly pushing along and worthy of a longer post. The short version is that I have multi-person interviews with two companies this week for which your prayers and good thoughts are asked for. If I am understanding things correctly, this is the second part of each of these processes. If successful here, likely there would be a third step involved as an on-site interview. The interview from the week before I left has returned no results and, given the current situation of these interviews, something I am happen to slow roll.
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Yasukuni Shrine - Tokyo
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Did I miss being out of circulation for a week and a half? Not at all. Except for one accidental update, I followed absolutely none of the insanity that passes for the news at the moment. Oddly enough, my life was no worse for not being informed of anything.
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Mos Burger Cheeseburger meal
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Do I have any more clarity than when I left? Yes and no. I am much clearer that
Iaijutsu is a critical thing in my life and something that I need to continue to press into (as if swordsmanship somehow improves anything about the world now). How I am going to do that impinges both on my continuing job search as well as what I might have to do in the event I am no-where without a dojo.
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| Sengaku-ji - Tokyo. View of the main temple. |
Did I miss all of you? Of course I did. Thank you, as always, for your kind management of your conversation. I checked in briefly on comments, but I cannot tell you how much of a relief it is as a blog owner to be able to leave knowing I will not come back to the comments section "on fire", as it were.
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| Graves of the 47 Ronin - Sengaku-ji, Tokyo |
Am I glad I went? Of course. But it is always good to come back home.
