Solstice

The winter solstices is here and so are we which means the world didn't end, shocking. More serious note I am very sore today, the other day I was feeling particularly good and had a pretty decent training session but am feeling the time off today.  I have been slacking on working out as of late aside from all the walking I get at work. I am working in a small cafe now which will be helpful while I am attending class. The biggest part of my life the last couple weeks was getting into the classes I needed to apply for the program I want in September. Now that I have got all my classes worked out and my schedule mostly finalized and my student funding taken care of it would be nice to be able to relax until my classes start and enjoy the holidays but I have to get two portfolios created by the end of January. It's weird that the more that I pile onto my plate and the less time I feel I have the more motivated I am to train. Anyways I should be off I have an early morning shift tomorrow morning followed by portfolio building.

Back to school Mr. Madison

Today I took the first step towards academic mastery. That might be a bold statement but I did apply for school today. Struggling to find work as a graphic designer, coupled with attending lectures on both landscape and architecture have made me really question what it is that I am doing and what I am wanting to do. I still love the look of a beautiful piece of design and think that design is still vitally important to our society in some aspects, and I am not entirely quitting it but I am moving on to something I find more rewarding. I am interested in architectures influence over peoples moods and can impact learning especially in institutional settings. If all goes to plan by the end of the next 4-5 years I will have finished a masters of architecture.

 Sihing Craig Janzen

walking and food

Since moving to Vancouver I have been able to drastically cut down how much I use my car. The city has a great public transit system that can get me pretty much where I need to go and I also put in a lot of kilometers on foot. The downside is that it rains. Almost everyday for the last month or so it has rained, which I know is not as bad as the snow. So when the rain let up for a couple days we took advantage of it and headed down to the beach too look for materials for a project I am working on. I took the photo above of the sun setting.

While on the subject of being inside I have been baking lately making my own bagels, flat bread to go with homemade hummus and pizza dough to go with our homemade sauce. I find baking, actually cooking in general to be very meditative which is nice because it balances out the stresses of job hunting. Another bonus is that by creating my meals from scratch I am more aware and have more control of the ingredients in the food that I eat.

Craig Janzen
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Round trip

After a whirlwind trip this weekend I am home again and back to the grind, not that my trip was really a restful vacation. Aside from the usual not enough time to do what I want/need or see everyone I did make time to get to the kwoon. It was a great reminder of how the kwoon really does become a second home and how the people there are part of your family. Thank you to everyone for asking how things were going and genuinely caring about how things are going for me. It was also great to get in a few rounds of sparring.

The drive home was a bit of an adventure with everything from rain, snow, ice, fog and lots of trucks. Fortunately it is still pretty early in the season so I made it home in good time and after driving through the night was able to nap for a couple hours before going to my interview.

All in all a pretty hectic past five days. It seems something some things don't seem to change for me.

Craig Janzen
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

where am I

This past two months have been really tough for me. My expectations of how things would work out where in retrospect unrealistic. I figured getting a job would be no problem I have a good resume a good portfolio how hard can it be. Then I figured once I get a job I can join up for classes again and things would carry on with hardly a beat skipped. I relearned something over the last two months. Accepting just being good is accepting a life of mediocrity. In my career field there is a lot of competition so being average means you don't stick out. With this in mind I have been creating new projects as well as finishing old projects that desperately need my attention. This time I am taking a more critical eye to my work.

I have also been thinking about my training or lack there of lately and it sucks to me. Kung Fu has been a constant in my life for the eight years give or take. Still knowing the positive effects it has on me I still make excuses to not train regularly if I am not in the kwoon. I tend to think of myself as alone all the way out here and that is not true I still can engage with team members through their blogs and through kwoon talk. I have actively made myself absent from the kwoon. The one thing I have been still doing is my push ups but even that is not enough. I have to re-establish my tracking system as well as revisit my forms which have been mostly gathering dust the past months. 

Craig Janzen

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

in all honesty

First off I would like to apologize to all my team members for my lack of participation in the UBBT and for my extremely long absence from the school. I have lost sight and focus of what the UBBT is and what it means to me and my life. Instead of using it as a tool I turned I focused solely on the numbers and it turned more into a burden. With that as my frame of mind my motivation began to dwindle, but I had class at least to keep me engaged.

Then class ended and since I had not been keeping up with blogging both writing my own and reading others blogs I had very little to anchor me to kung fu. It was really easy to wrap myself up in my life and use it as an excuse of being to busy to train. Mostly this perspective came from me being aware that I was wasting time and opportunity. I knew that I was not going to be grading for black belt and that also fueled by distance from everything. I felt defeated but once again that is because I had approached the UBBT with the wrong attitude to start with. 

The past seven months have been hit or miss mostly misses for me but I can't dwell on my failures only reflect on why I failed, learn from that and move on. I have five more months in the UBBT but I have my whole life to either choose a path of mediocrity or  one of mastery.

Sihing Craig Janzen

The results are in

MRI results are in and I have torn the meniscus in my right knee. A long narrow tear that the doctor said has the potential of healing itself. He put me on the supplement chondroiton which has something to do with preventing cartilage deterioration.

Today is also feels a bit weird since it will probably be my last classes at Silent River before I take off for the coast. I've already talked to Sifu Edge about training with her when I move.

Anyways time to start the day I still have a lot of things that still need to be done.

Craig Janzen
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

All work and no play makes me a dull boy

Summers here, well maybe not technically, but the weather is like summer. This is awesome except that I have been stuck inside at a computer for most of it. Summer being our busiest time at work means that I have been working far too many evenings and weekends and far too much kung fu. We just finished our biggest issue of the year so things should hopefully start slowing down, which is good because lately the only sun I get is through our sky light.

On Leaving

In just less then two months I move to Vancouver and I have been having some trepidations about the whole deal. I don't have a place to live yet only a couple places I have seen on the internet but nothing concrete. Also I have no job lined up yet. When I say trepidations I really mean that I was stressing big time about this especially because every time I look at the calendar another week has gone by without me noticing. I have been thinking about this lately and have realized that moving right now will be the best thing for me. It is going to force me out of the my comfort zone and push myself to well be better. Currently I feel unchallenged and unmotivated by job but I frequently make excuses to not leave and get a better job. It is kind of a hard realization, made even worse when factoring in that I am working on mastery with my kung fu,  but am just floating along and maintaining being average in my career. I had become complacent and content, knowing I had security and freedom to do just as much as a I needed to get by. Like I said I am being forced out of my comfort zone and am grateful for the opportunities that it is going to present.

My diet is killing me

I have been feeling pretty off lately. Mornings I really don't want to get out of bed I just feel really drained. I am pretty sure that it is a combination of weather my diet and my sleeping habits. Now that the weather is nicer I have been getting out so that should work it self on its own. My diet is the thing that I have to fix. I went from getting up and making fruit smoothies every morning to not eating until almost 2-3 pm. Also I have been eating very unbalanced lately. Lots of noodles but not a lot of fruits and vegetables. As a result my energy level has been taking a plummet.

The cards we're dealt

This week has been the week of news that will definitely create some challenges with my training. First bit of news was that Chelsey got into her master's program. Super awesome for her but that means I am moving to Vancouver. I am not sure on the logistics of this %100 but I will most likely have to leave by August.

Then this morning I went to the doctors to get my knee checked out and he believes that I have torn part of my cartilage in my right knee. I have an MRI scheduled for the soonest they can get me in, which is who knows when. This is hard because I am not good at resting, I am not good at taking things easy and I like doing things. I am not careful and I don't take care of myself that well so this is a major shock to my lifestyle and I don;t really know what to do. I am also frustrated with myself for getting hurt in the first place.

untitled

Had good classes on Friday. Saw an increase in my numbers for the bag work. I've been working on keeping control of my breathing and quieting my mind. My numbers are still low and I have a lot of work ahead of me to get them up. 

My second class I added onto my stick form I am creating so it is coming along slowly. It is challenging working on stick in my apartment without breaking to much stuff or scaring my cat. If it wasn't for the extra time in the kwoon I would probably have to practice in the snow.

it's been a long week

A bit late on this post but it has been a really long week. Starting on Tuesday Night I waited in the hospital with Chelsey as her grandma passed away. The Funeral was on Saturday so there was lots of stuff that needed to be done, Me and Chels spent the week scanning hundreds of photos and putting together a slideshow which was really cool seeing how appreciated it was by the family. It's inspiring to see how much a family pulls together in times of need and how many little acts of kindness they do for each other without thinking about it. Even being aware of what I was doing for people I still probably missed a whole bunch of that I could count. Anyways now that it is Sunday the cold I had been fighting off all week has hit me like a ton of bricks so it is time to rest.

not to good of a week for numbers

Not much to report this week. It's been a not so good week for my numbers with Chelsey being down and me not going to the extra classes. I've really come to depend on the Monday/Wednesday classes for that burst of extra training and as a place to do my forms. I finally got a starting point with my stick form that I am working on in Friday's class, so now I have something to build off of.

Craig Janzen
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Silent River Kung Fu

Working hard

This past month has been the hardest I have worked on Kung Fu probably ever. Aside from being sick or the odd commitment I have been at the kwoon 4-5 times a week as well as training at home. Last sihing class I learned that I am going to not only have to train harder but also destroy the limits that I arbitrarily set up for what I am able to push my body into doing. Also on friday I really started playing with the weapon I plan on working with this year, the stick. I know have a bruise the size of my palm on my right arm.  So far for the first month I am into a pretty good routine where I am doing alright with my numbers and logging some serious training hours.

Craig Janzen
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Silent River Kung Fu

pushing further

Had a great day today snowboarding. It was good weather, I was with good people, and I achieved a personal goal while riding today. It took all day and my legs are burning still but I successfully landed a 360 off a kicker and it was a clean landing too. All day I practiced getting the mechanics of the spin down by popping 3's off of the banked walls, which for me is a whole lot easier to do because of the momentum. As well I ran through the trick in my mind picturing exactly how to set up and spin. After several failed attempts and many trips sliding down the mountain in a cloud of powder I finally just did it.

Landing this is no different then what is needed to achieve any of my other goals. Determination, perseverance, and the drive to go further and be better then I was the day before. is an attitude that I have carried throughout my life.

Craig Janzen
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Silent River Kung Fu

Back to the lab again

I've been spending a lot of time back in the white/yellow belt class as of late. I car pool with a friend of mine who recently started kung fu and I help out in class while I am there often teaching small groups of students. I've come to realize something from this and that is that I have forgotten a lot of stuff since that class. Not going to the beginner classes has been an opportunity to keep up on my basics that I had been missing out on for a long time. As well attending I had been missing out on opportunities to work on teaching and leadership skills.

Side note the Chinese New Years celebration is coming up with weekend and I have taken on filming it this year which I am pretty excited for.

Living in cars

Since the start of the new year I have put on a total of 2341.6 km on my car. Needless to say I feel like I have been living in my car lately. Aside from work everything I need to get to is a minimum round trip of about 100km. Fortunately even though I am car bound I still can achieve a lot while commuting by being creative. I can go over forms in my mind as well as work on learning mandarin. Though I wish I didn't have to spend so much of time in the car I have been forced to make it work for my life.

Good endings for new beginings

Last week I was presented a great opportunity to end my year in the UBBT with an act of kindness. My girlfriends aunt and uncle were helping friends of theirs renovate and move into a new house they had bought in a very short amount of time. One month to be precise, well 17 days if you include Christmas. Long story short Chelsey and I were called upon to help move the family over night when the wife spiral fractured her ankle. Even though it meant I missed out on going snowboarding and was moving boxed and furniture until about 2 am, the sense of gratitude from the family was worth it and it was really great way to end off my year.