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• Midterms, Tournaments and Rain, oh my!

Midterms, Tournaments and Rain, oh my!

These past few weeks have been pretty turbulent. Let's address my title backwards. Since the beginning of the year the weather has mostly been like this :

Until today that is. Today, we woke up to this:

Not Gene Kelly, that would be too good to be true, although the lamppost outside of our dorm is fairly dance-with-able. Anyway. Yeah, rain. I'm from Seattle so, you know, I know my rain. In my pseudo-professional opinion today is fluctuating between a spring-rain-esque sprinkle and showers. I came back from work only to discover that my roommates had left the window open - a decision I would normally encourage - but today not such a good idea. That said the damage was pretty minimal. As I say, I'm from Seattle so, I'm pretty used to rain, but Los Angeles rain is something else entirely. One who assumes it doesn't rain here is very, very wrong. It's as if Los Angeles' rain holds on until it can't anymore, then unleashes torrents on an off for about two months. So those two months aren't fun, but the rest of the time, the sun-sun-sun thing is pretty true.

Addressing my title's second point, tournaments! Most of Oxy's Karate Class, taught by the legendary Soke Takayuki Kubota and his equally awesome, if somewhat more approachable, ex-student now-shihan Victor Chico, participated in the Kubota Annual All-Star Karate Championship, which took place in Oxy's Rush Gym. The tournament was a great success, and we did very well. I personally had a great time, and I think we all learned a lot about competition and preparation (ie, it's hard).

 

The pictures from this year aren't up yet, but this is some of the people who competed last year. The tournament was a lot of fun!

As to midterms, well, it's that time of year again I guess. Test-wise mine aren't too bad, one a week for the next three weeks. However, I have a cringe-worthy amount of papers to do next week, which I should probably be working on right now...

So yeah! That's a week in the life of this Oxy student! Can't believe the semester's almost half over, but couldn't be happier that the second half is broken up neatly by several acceptably long breaks! Wish me luck on midterms!