Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Happy New Year to all of you!

I know that it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. As some of you know, my wife and I moved into my mother-in-law’s house three years ago. While she is still quite independent, she occasionally needs our assistance. She had to be hospitalized for a week and a half in late October/early November. Since coming home, she has slowly recovered and is nearly at full strength. The combination of classes, private lessons, and increased care of my mother-in-law caused me to sacrifice some activities. Among them is this blog.

That said, I hope to be back on track blogging-wise this year!

Let’s do a quick recap of 2022

First, this year was the 2nd most productive year for private lessons since I moved to Canada in 2007. This is amazing, considering I did not resume teaching live private lessons until mid-March. A combination of an Omicron-related lockdown and extreme cold weather delayed the resumption of private lessons at the beginning of the year. In addition, the traditional summer slowdown dampened the number of private sessions. Despite all that, I had a great year! I am pleased to say that my students made phenomenal progress during the year! All are like kids on Christmas morning when training with me!

Secondly, my right hip continued to deteriorate during the year. I managed to avoid cancelling private lessons due to hip pain. There were a couple of occasions where I came close to cancelling, only for the anti-inflammatory medication to kick in on time. Man, I feel like a geezer at times!

Long story short, I had x-rays and an MRI done on my right hip. Not surprisingly, they both showed severe arthritis of the right hip. I recently met with an orthopedic surgeon to discuss the possibility of a total hip replacement.

“There is no question you need a hip replacement. Just look at the x-ray here. Your left hip is normal. See that gap? That’s normal.“

X-ray of my left hip.
My left hip

“In contrast, look at your right hip. It’s bone on bone. Pretty severe arthritis.” GULP.

X-ray of my right hip.
The bad hip.

“Since you’re a young man, you should recover from the surgery fairly quickly.“

Me: “Wait. Back up a minute. Did you call me a young man?” (followed by laughter in the room)

Jeebus! I’m 58! The surgery date has not been set, but it looks like it will occur in March. I should find out within a week or so. I need to get this done ASAP. There have been occasions where it took me 48 hours to recover from teaching back-to-back private lessons. Yikes.

Next, Durham College asked me to resume teaching Women’s self-defence classes in September. I had not taught there since March 2020. We all know what happened then. It was good to be back on campus teaching young, eager students.

The 1st day of class at Durham College on September 19th!

I also started teaching two weekly classes at the A.B.S Training Centre in Pickering. We currently have 4 or 5 students, and I hope to attract more folks to the wonderful art of Modern Arnis!

Lastly, I have started experimenting with YouTube Shorts. YouTube rolled this feature out during the pandemic to compete with TikTok. I have gotten surprisingly good results with this experiment.

Below is the Shorts playlist for 2022. Check it out!

I briefly dabbled with TikTok but deleted my account. I decided to confine myself to YouTube with long-form videos, Shorts, and live streams. Why would I want to waste time with multiple video platforms?

Anyway, I look forward to blogging more regularly and getting feedback from all of you. Again, Happy New Year to all of you!

Additional Reading