Where to begin?

I'm back and somewhat recovered from the spring seminar with Henry Copeland at Starkville, MS. As always, it was great to see everyone and Henry's instruction was awesome. We worked on Gokata and randori and I got to ask Henry a couple of my jodo questions that I had for him.

Gokata is interesting because it brings up the two-wrist grab (ryotedori) and hooking strike (yokomenuchi) defenses that we don't often play with (we almost exclusively deal with straight strikes and single-wrist grabs up to about shodan). A couple of the later Gokata techniques are kokyunage - basically just brushing uke off so that tori can run. These two throws are now officially part of my personal set of the coolest, most aiki-like things in all of aikido.

I thought my randori was particularly bad this weekend - don't know if it was an off day or if I just especially suck and playing with new folks highlighted my suckitudinous randori.

The jodo was really remarkable. We worked on makiotoshi, kuritsuke, and kurihanashi. Henry simplified some of this stuff for me and validated some of the ideas I had about these things. Who'da thunk it - my thinking seems to be closer to right on jodo than on aiki randori.

I'll have some pics to post later...