Chen Style Tai Chi (太極拳) term 2

This Sunday, our 2nd term starts for Chen Tai Chi. Hopefully we will learn some of the names of the moves we are doing - I like the class taught by Sifu May, but I wish we knew what the steps were called so we could refer to them properly.

Ji Hong Tai Chi had an open house last week. Kathy and I were part of the demonstration routine for the Chen 1 class, to show what you could accomplish in just 1 term. There were also demonstrations for the Yang style beginner class, and advanced demonstrations for Chen and Yang - they looked very nice and we were very encouraged about what we can accomplish in the future.

At first we were wondering if people were going to show up on such a cold day, but they did, in surprisingly large numbers. There were so many people that the benches and chairs were not enough to seat them all. It's nice for the school but I wonder how they are going to manage all the potential signups.

One nice thing about Ji Hong is that the people taking the classes are all relatively young for tai chi people, average age is about 35 I think. Compared to some places where the average age is perhaps 70, Ji Hong feels like a pretty energetic Tai Chi place. (My opinion of course)

Allen.

Bread FAIL

I made a batch of standard french roll dough and brought it over to my mother's place to bake, figuring I'd show her how I can bake bread. Wow, it went badly. First, the dough sitting in the car for the 2nd rise did so over 4 hours in cold temperatures, and I didn't let it warm up to room temperature. I just cut it like usual and formed the baugette shapes. The oven at my mom's seems to be hotter, so I over baked it too. The end result were some weird twisted burnt shapes that exploded along the side. I was pretty annoyed about it. The end result is - don't change variables and expect the end result not to change too.

Allen.

what the heck happened?

eeeewwwwww =(

Kill me now... oh, you did, thank you

Even my yeast starter experiments looked better than that - here is the latest one for comparison: