Once Upon a Time in Ithaca: Old School

I finally decided that I've had enough of half-heartedly working through dead patterns on chairs and doing footwork drills in the living room, so I decided to take it back and do it Old School. (If you're wondering, I fell out of contact with the local FMA guy, but I'll pick it up again as soon as the paychecks start rolling in.)

I forget which of the Old Masters--I want to say Punong Guro Edgar Sulite (Datu_B, check me on my facts if I'm wrong)--was trained like this: His father would hang a single stick, held in the middle by a piece of string, off of a tree. The object was to hit the stick, and just have to deal with all the different ways it would bounce and spin around. Not necessarily the safest thing to do.

Needless to say, I said "Screw it."



I worked that for about twenty minutes before I realized that I was just hanging out on the outside. I played around with it, and came up with this configuration:



Now, I worked this facing the tree (my "opponent") as my frame of reference, the idea being to have to stay inside those boundaries, which I could modify as I saw fit. Then, things started getting fun for the next fifty minutes.

Now, I realize that all I've done is reinvented the wheel (one of my biggest pet peeves), but since this is the first time I've actually tried this, I learned quite a few things right away. (And, no rolling your eyes and going "Duh!")

• Somehow I managed to figure out that how much more effective it is to keep hitting, as opposed to hitting and waiting for a "counterstrike" to deflect and attacking again. I suppose this means I've finally made the connection that deflection isn't necessarily a "passive" act, so to speak.
  
• When in doubt, "candlestick."
  
• If you keep the angle of the stick to your wrist at 90° it's easier to do that.
  
• When I could pull them off, gunting movements with the double stick are nice.
  
• The strangest thing, I managed to work in every deflection (depending on how high or low I hung the stick) except my favorite, the reverse umbrella. And, I tried, believe me. Oh well, guess I'll always suck at that move ;).

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. I gotta go do some chores... can't train and blog all day ;).