Kung Fu test: Passed. Duh.

I am now the proud wearer of a green sash. Finally. The test was, as suspected, very hard for me in the endurance range and otherwise fairly simple. I can interpret my forms easily enough, and even though I messed up my form in one place consistently across doing the damn thing twice (totally psyched myself out to do so of course), but the rest of my form was good enough to make up for it. My fan form I rocked out even with the throwing of the fan to myself in the middle, so all that practice obviously worked. Now the hard part is remembering where I'm supposed to be in the line, that being farther to the left. It's a little weird to be standing on the other side of the room, but I'm sure I'll get over that.

Our new curriculum includes "Small Tiger 32 Step Continuous Fist" or Small Tiger for short, and a thus far unnamed staff form. I don't have a staff yet, but I'll be starting up with that next week. I"m pretty good with staves in general, so hopefully the form will be big and challenging. My only complaint about the weapons forms so far is that they're awfully short, so I'm hoping the staff form is a far cry from the rest of them. Likely not a realistic hope, but a man can dream, no? Regardless, I am enjoying Small Tiger so far, and I've only learned a single section, so I have high hopes for more Tiger goodness. :)

In case you're wondering, my stance on testing has not changed: I still hate testing and I still think testing is little more than an annoyance, but at least I'm going through with them anyway now. And it's four months before I even have to think about testing again! Huzzah.

I can be a real prick sometimes

What makes me a prick this time is not so much what I did, but that I so thoroughly enjoyed what I did. At work there's this guy who seems to know what he's doing, but is either constantly super busy or lazy, so he tends to half-ass a lot of the work he's supposed to be doing for us as high priority. This has ground on just about everyone's nerves quite a bit, and while he's gotten shit for it, I've never had the pleasure. So I found some things that were missing between our work system and a sheet he sent us. He then replied that he couldn't find what I was talking about (meaning he didn't look very hard). After making sure with my manager I wasn't being too much of a dickhead, I happily (I was literally giggling half the time I was doing this) sent back a document with a screen shot from the sheet he sent us and a screen shot from the system that had the missing bit pointed out with a GIGANTIC RED ARROW that there's no way he didn't notice. As a way of example, this is essentially what he saw:

           Minor detail one
-------> Minor detail two

Honestly what I did was actually helpful in that it did point out what he was missing and it started a useful dialogue that found other errors as well, but taking such pleasure at getting to use such a very sarcastic response while disguising it with good intentions was just too much fun for me. Originally I was going to use mspaint to half-assedly draw in red circles which does have a certain flair of its own, but the giant red arrow feature in SnagIt was way better. The giant red arrows really just made my day. Yay sarcasm!

Legal Absinthe?!?

Meet Lucid. This drink, with a wicked cool bottle if you ask me, will be ostensibly authentic absinthe and totally legal in the states. I've always carefully hoarded my absinthe, never really being sure when I would spend the time and effort to get another bottle. If I can just go buy some at the damn liquor store, I'll be a very happy man. I see absinthe parties in my future...