Packing

Today will be a prep day.  Packing.  Laundry.  Going over lists.  Just a few.  Nothing in the next two weeks requires armor or special equipment, but I should bring the knee brace and the wraps.

Catch an all-night flight tonight, then ten days or so in Boston, Plymouth and Providence.  I love two of the groups I'll be working with.  George Mattson is one of the Grand Old Men and it is always fascinating to watch this group of people that he has created.  Strong, serious, talented and each individual very different, and George cherishes the differences.  The Summerfest is always a blast.

Raffi Derderien is good.  I've only taken a couple of classes with him and been very impressed, but a long time ago I quit watching instructors.  If I want to know about the instructor, I watch the students.  I love hanging with Raffi's students.  Smart, quick, skilled and they laugh and think and question and change.

This will be my first time at Raffi's summer camp and I'm a little excited.

Somewhere in the middle I'll meet with four of my favorite self-defense instructors in the area.  Jeff Burger is a fighter, an obsessive martial artist and hasn't always been one of the good guys.  His perspective is invaluable.  Erik Kondo is one of the most dangerous men you will ever knock out of a wheelchair. He knows the real problems of self-defense from a perspective most martial artists can't grasp.  Bill Giovannucci is a Uechi guy who thinks deep and makes me grateful for good armor.  Jake Steinmann is a PDR instructor who thinks, experiments and uses words like pedagogically.  Want to bring your game up?  Surround yourself with people smarter than you.  Works for me.

The goal is to get these few good men to look over the Logic of Violence concept, evaluate, tweak, and possibly help with one of the sticking points in presentation.

There will also be an evening workshop with YMAA.  It will be my first time at their facility, but with luck I'll see Nick Yang again, and that's always a good time.  Nick asked me to go over SD law, which is pretty a standard by now, but also recovering under overwhelming force.  I haven't considered teaching that as a separate thing before.  It's just sort of one of the background facts of SD: hard, fast, close, surprise.  It will be good to separate it out, I think.

So pack, prep, clean up the house a little.  Say goodbyes, fly.  Should arrive in Boston in time for a breakfast cannoli and a nice coffee in the North End.