I did not sleep very well last night. Too much coffee, too much to do before school begins again today. A woodworking project, a loom project, and planning for classes made for a busy evening. Discovering the dryer doesn’t work in the middle of a massive laundry project didn’t help either.
Tai chi was great. I’ve been haphazard about doing qi gong routines before tai chi, but I seem to be back into the swing of that now after a long absence; and I re-started push-ups after an absence from those, too. The tai chi form has remained constant day by day, and this has not. 
I’m all too aware that I’ve been slacking off on the drawings, but I’ve been having some technical challenges with that — left a power cord behind, so couldn’t charge the tablet to do the drawings; borrowed a charger but couldn’t get on the internet to move drawings from the tablet to the computer; couldn’t get WordPress to work on the tablet instead of the laptop. Challenges. Some of it is WordPress’s new interface, which is taking some getting used to and was instituted in the middle of last week — but mostly it’s me, and wanting to focus on spending time with my family this past weekend.
Today’s movement is Playing Pipah, back from Day 139 of this year. I’ve done a terrible job of representing this movement, described in this poem:
Rock back on right foot. Then set the left heel
firmly on the floor so the knee is bent,
and the thigh is flexed, and springy as steel.
Yet carry no weight there; for the intent
is for the left leg to kick if it must.
Set hands to hold the pose, right under left:
each hand is open, not closed in a fist,
and muscles stay soft, so both hands can drift.
Double-check your posture from neck to tail,
and flex the core and thighs to lengthen spine,
for the body becomes a mace, or flail,
when the obliques can twist your center line
either left or right. For now, remain still —
gather in chi for the movements you will.
This all seems correct in the poem rather than in the drawing. Figuring out how to represent this stuff is challenging me a great deal, and I feel that my drawing talents are not up to it. I think that my figure is getting more effective, but the ability to represent the postures is falling behind the growing complications thereof.
