In my all to familiar effort to catch this thing up do date I thought I’d say a thing or two about the time between Nationals and World Team Trials. That puts these things between mid April and the end of May. During this time not much happened and a lot happened all at once.

Later in April, the 24th to be exact, a good buddy of mine had his PhD defense and I tell you what, this guy is good. I’ve always respected the work he does and am glad to know the kid. I think it was a good for me to have witnessed the defense, because when it’s my turn I’ll already have some sort of idea of the process (at least for the defense itself). Long story short, you write a book, give a lecture on your new stuff and then get peppered with questions from your committee members and the peanut gallery. Fun, fun, fun.

After that, there were good times and not so good times, lots of work on and off the mat in prep for trials, and other different events. One of the more interesting events involved the filing of a patent; the details of which are only really interesting to a few people at this point, but hopefully many more down the line. It was an interesting experience to file my first patent. The process is interesting in that you do all your research, pay a good lawyer to help you file, file, and then sit and wait (up to a couple years!) for someone to review it and finally start the dialogue (there’s apparently lots of back and forth communication involved once the process starts) for weather or not you can get it granted. It was entertaining and hopefully it won’t be the last one I work on.

Other than these two events, the time in between the two tournaments was spent finishing up my last semester of classes (ever, I do believe!) and working on improving myself as a wrestler. Something funny about that last part (improving myself) is that while I don’t like to comment about policies that have been implemented at certain places that I frequent, I feel it is necessary to say that removing key pieces of direct support does not improve a situation in which that support is crucial (speaking of past and present times) it only destabilizes it. But hey, champions persevere… right?

So there you have it, not much, and yet quite a bit, occurred in the time between Nationals and Trials.

Good times.

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