Sudden Excitements
Forgive me for being a princess laying on the pea, but it's only halfway through Saturday and I've had just about all the excitement I can take.

Aikido very nearly did not happen: it seems that there's a huge gymnastics event taking place, and nearly every available space. Certainly all the dressing rooms, although our dojo space was officially unoccupied until the afternoon. (Didn't stop at least one group of performers from trying to get in to use it as warm-up space...) A massive misfunction of communication, which the sensei managed to at least magic into an agreement from the center (since the failure to inform us seems to be their fault and not ours) to let us in to train. Although dressing room arrangements were, shall we say, impromptu.

There were new people galore, some of whom had not made the attempt to contact the sensei before the class. One of those were definitely forgiven: she's a Japanese woman, on a trip around the world, currently staying with a former colleague, a dojo-mate of ours. Well, no one held a gun to my head to do this, but I felt the best thing was to make sure I was available to her first as a partner, since we weren't sure if her English was much better than my Japanese. In the end, it worked out, especially since all of the aikido terminology is Japanese vocabulary. Still, her host kind of dumped her on me, rather than sticking around so she'd get a couple different people. Big kudos to G., who came to train with us as a three-some at one point. And to the sensei also, since after every demonstration, he'd come to our corner, and our guest would get a special demonstration, with me as the training partner.

I'm going to stick my head under the duvet for a bit. And whimper. Definitely whimper.