Yesterday was my first Thanksgiving away from home. Although I was pretty homesick, I had a lot of fun. With Sifu's sister's family here, we had a lot of laughs to add to the overload of food on the table. There was turkey, ham, mashed potatoes... sticky rice, sushi, peanut soup, etc. In addition to all of this, Sifu's sister brought us some duck from Chinatown, San Francisco. Needless to say, we had way too much to eat of both Western and Eastern foods. Even Xiao Hu had a feast. All of our leftover bones were given to him. I think it was probably the biggest meal he has ever had.

Even though yesterday was a holiday and staying up late was inevitable, we had to wake up for meditation and qigong this morning. Luckily, we did not have any physical training today. Instead, we had to work on our media projects because Craig will be leaving early tomorrow morning. We worked on the Retreat Center's promotional video all day. Mike, Ricardo, and Tom took care of picking out footage and preparing an interview with Sifu while Patrick and I recorded and edited the audio for the voice over. Late in the afternoon, we had finished the audio and the interview and were about to put all the footage together when a problem occurred. Our software did not have the right codec for Craig's camera and we could not view the footage on our computer. So, we started to download it from the internet. However, since our connection speed is super slow, the estimated time of completion ended up being about 12 hours. With half a day to wait, we had to stop working. Luckily, it was dinner time anyways. The only problem now is that we have to stay up until the download finishes and then edit a bit with Craig before he leaves in the morning... I hope we don't have to be up for meditation tomorrow (...very unlikely).

While we waited, Stephane hooked his camera up to my computer to share some of his pictures. Here are a couple since he arrived in September.

Garberville demonstration [10.24.08]


Halloween [10.31.08]

Filming RC promotional video [11.26.08]