I danced this past weekend at Arthur Murray Fall Freestyles and took a few photos with my partner’s excellent Canon Rebel XTi. Pictures are up at my MobileMe Gallery. I have not had time to edit them much or write about the weekend, but it was fun.
We did some binge dancing last night at the DC Area Arthur Murray Spring Showcase, and here are the photos taken with Erci’s Canon Rebel XT camera.
After one week of being miserably sick, and then a week of slow recovery while still coughing a lot; with weekends doing living history stuff I have been unable dance from April 6th until the 23rd… Yikes. I managed to finally get into the Tyson’s studio on Wednesday night and again last night and I am hitting Centreville’s studio tonight and it is so good to be dancing again. Really, really, really good. I missed it.
I guess I did not realize how important this hobby has become to my happiness. Erci and I started taking lessons at the Arthur Murray studio back in May, 1996. We have not stopped since, and we continue to enjoy it immensely. We dance several places regularly, and we simply love to dance.
At times it has been painful (plantar fasciitis for me; knee, hip, and foot injuries for her). Often it has been frustrating trying to learn something new and not getting it for weeks or sometimes (rarely) even months. It is an expensive hobby the way we do it (costumes, lessons, shoes, events), but it is probably the last thing we’d give up. It is that much fun… it mixes physical, mental, social, and music interests. It just does not get much better than dance.
My favorites change from year to year, but samba and west coast swing are most consistently and frequently my favorite dances. For over a year I have also really loved foxtrot, quickstep, and rumba; but before that it was swing and cha-cha. I used to hate club swing and hustle, but I am finally learning the hustle step correctly and it makes even that dance much more fun. Mambo and salsa have been the biggest challenges for me, I simply can’t identify which beat is the one on many popular mambo and salsa tunes (I can clearly hear beats, but which is which is my problem). An excellent DVD explaining mambo clave beats has helped enormously… I figure I can find the 2 about 35% of the time now instead of 10% of the time… but that still leaves a lot of good salsa music out for me…
I believe that regular dance helps prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease because it makes your brain exercise socially, mentally, and physically all at once. Dancing as probably helped prevent my getting much fatter than I already am. I have certainly met many fantastic people from many walks of life while dancing and at dance events. It is fun being able to dress up once in a while for an event (how many guys my age own their own tuxedo with tails?).
With all the holiday party action, new jobs, and planning/prepping for Yuletide Ball Championships; I am afraid I have been lax in updating. Here is a batch mode update…
This morning I had an unexpected adventure, just as I was finishing breakfast and feeding the fish, I discovered that my 30 gallon marine aquarium was leaking on the kitchen counter and from there down onto the floor! I wiped the water with a towel, waited a moment and it was definitely an ongoing leak and not just a spill.
So I grabbed an old 29 gallon tank from the basement, transferred the water, fish, shrimp, corals and heaters/pumps/lights to the temporary replacement, and made sure the leaky tank stopped leaking (about an inch of live sand and water are still in the tank waiting for more time)… then I headed into work. At work I think we can shrink from 5 active marine tanks to 3 if we need to, but we must keep the big fish separate from the little fish and the little predator away from our shrimp… so 3 tanks is the minimum. Must work this out with Sutragirl.
I have been hitting a learning spurt in my dancing, picking up several new groupings and refining technique at both studios. I hope to dance with Cassandra, Ann, Anne-Marie, and Sutragirl at the Yuletide Ball Championships. It should be great fun.
I am replacing my dual 500MHz G4 Mac desktop and 500MHz G4 Mac cube server at home (both running 10.3.9) with a 20″ iMac and a Mac Mini (both running 10.5.1). That is taking a while to get everything set up properly (jump from 10.3 to 10.5 is non-trivial, but fun), and I am discovering that I do not have enough firewire cables, extra drives for backups, and time…
New job has been a huge learning experience (exactly what I asked for… though perhaps a bit much of it) and I have been learning all about openSuSE 10.3, HP Blade c7000s, i-LO server management, PXEboot/tftp/dhcp install servers, YaST, and relearning Solaris, BEA WebLogic, and NFS… Plate is full… and after the holiday break it will be time for MySQL replication servers, MediaWiki, Oracle, and Progress. Folks at the new job are awesome, and everyone tries to do everything… Damned Astaro VPN is not letting me in, but that’s because we cannot save a new configuration with my userid in the PPTP allow file… sigh. It’s fun working on a team of five with three Prius owners on the team!
Children of Hurin is helping me stay in touch with Fantasy/SciFi at night… and the writer’s strike has given me a chance to catch up to almost current on the few remaining decent TV shows…
Dance-O-Rama with the Tysons/Vienna Arthur Murray school was terrific fun. Erci and I went with a group of 22 from our studio and danced until our feet were sore and danced a whole lot more. Blue Martini in Bally’s continues to serve excellent martinis, and it was probably a good thing (if mildly disappointing) that they closed at 2:30 Sunday morning (we might have stayed and drank even more, ouch).
I am mostly very happy with my dances, though I need to work on my groupings and presentation a whole lot more, and focus intensely on mambo as a dance (I totally blew that dance). Bolero and Viennese went particularly well for me (due to recent focusing and lots of practice), and I wish I had entered more heats. I have bruises from a slip and fall in the bath tub in our room, and Erci is bruised and sore from a bad tumble down some steps at the hotel. We both have sore feet from lots of dancing, but we are wimps compared to Mr Bond, who did over 100 heats, well over. Our studio was remarkable in that we had over 2/3 of our group were male dance students. Rumba/Cha formation, a slight variation on the one we did earlier in the year at Freestyles went very well though with seven couples instead of the original fourteen. The bus ride up and back with the Silver Spring and Gaithersburg studios was nearly as much fun as the dance event itself!
Big thank you to aenloo for taking care of Bailey while we were away, he was well fed and affectionate when we got home.
Sorry it has been a while since my last update. There has not been much to write about. I have been busy at work wrapping up projects so they can be handed over cleanly. Been busy at home cleaning house and at the dance studios getting ready for Fall Showcase (last weekend) and Atlantic City Dance-O-Rama (end of November) then Yuletide (New Year’s Eve).
Arthur Murray Fall Showcase was fun. It was at the Sheraton this time, which meant an overly warm, cramped room for the latin/rhythm routines (I like Westfields better). Our friends Cindy and Anne-Marie came to watch and it was fun sharing observations with them. Erci did a fantastic Viennese Waltz with Dan Calle, and a very lively Mambo with Bryant Phillips. My Bolero with Marisa Jo Frank went very well, though I did at least one error right at the final pose/dip and probably need to work on emphasis and arm styling more. There were a lot of very memorable routines.
We cut out early to attend Dan and Jeff’s 10th anniversary party, where we had fantastic Malbec with lamb. Erci and I crashed there rather than drive back sleepy, and we had a nice breakfast with them as well (though I had a hangover).
Since so many great people were canned in AOL’s irrational corporate action on Tuesday, we’ve been in a bit of shock at work, and remaining management is scrambling to figure out how to do the job with far less man-power (unlike previous layoffs, this one was random and hit many of the prime workers). I took two days off to be with Erci (she was layed off) and collect my wits. Frankly, I am not sure I want to work there anymore, as it is no longer the company I started working for in 1995.
We made lemonaide out of lemons and headed for Schuyler, VA to visit Bob and Liz, tour their new house, and the one under construction. Very nice digs they will have when it is finished. They took us into lovely downtown Charlottesville where we walked around, and had an excellent dinner at Zocalo. They have a “lemonaide” made with Maker’s Mark, blackberries, chilli, and lemonaide that is a fiesta on the tongue. Yum!
The leaves are beginning to turn and the drive up and back along U.S. Highway 29 was beautiful. I got my tires replaced on the Prius (how can tires go bad in only 23,000 miles?!?) and I had some dance lessons while Erci continued some out-processing/training/career counseling she gets as part of the layoff package
Saturday Erci drove us up to Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia to stay at the posh Rittenhouse Hotel for a couple of nights. We’ll be visiting with Tasha (she took us to a restaurant Jim recommended).
This hotel is posh. We were welcomed with champaign and strawberries. Our suite is like a small apartment. They brought fresh fruit when they turned down the bedding while we walked around the square. The bedding is very nice, and there is a spa we probably will not have time to enjoy, but the idea is pleasant enough. The alarm clock/radio is also a dock for iPods, and you can play your iPod through the thing if you prefer. The TV has a DVD player.
When we walked in the square, we passed a bunch of people practicing with plastic light sabres. The little bit of Western martial arts training I have has ruined the fun of seeing this sort of thing because now I can’t help but see flaws in the fighting styles I witness.
The Mexican restaurant, Cantina Los Caballitos, is very, very yummy (Thanks Jim!). We ordered too much because it all sounded so good, and Tasha got stuck with some take-home left-overs. Fabulous conversation outside on a perfect night with just a slight breeze.
Sunday morning Tasha picked us up and took us to a Zen tea ceremony, liturgy chanting (Heart Sutra) and Dharma discussion in New Jersey at Pine Wind Zen Center. It was very different from our normal Soka Gakkai meetings, but interesting. The discussion was excellent, and focused on extending the compassion parents have for children to other human beings. We had much to talk about on the way back to Philadelphia.
Erci had to study for her MBA class a little, and Tasha had to do some child-care duties, so I was left to walk over to Philadelphia’s beautiful Rodin Museum on my own, which turned out to be splendid as I had plenty of time to contemplate the sculptures that inspired me, and was also free to rush by the ones I was not interested in. There were several that inspired me, including: “The Man with the Broken Nose,” “The Hand of God,” “Shame (Absolution),” and “Kneeling Fauness.” The thing that continues to strike me about Rodin’s work is the hands. So alive, so expressive, so much energy and tension. Amazing. Awesome. Wow…
Wow, just wow. If you are at all interested in dance, you need to get to a local showing of the live traveling show “So You Think You Can Dance” with the top dancers from the TV show of the same name. We saw a lot of the same routines we saw during the competition on TV, but the dancers have had time to refine the routines and polish their performances. Also they added a few new routines. The show was fantastic.
Thank you Erci, for scoring tickets and making us go to Philadelphia to see the show!
Monday was a vacation day for me, and we came back from Philadelphia, and then I caught a couple dance lessons and an episode of season 1 Heroes.
Last night I had lots of fun dancing Salsa-Rueda with Michele’s class at The Ballroom Studio in Centreville. We had two guys more than we had girls, but it was still loads of fun. I also had two excellent lessons with MJ and Dan at Tyson’s Corners Arthur Murray, one solo and one with Erci. Monday I had an afternoon lesson with Missy at Arthur Murray, and a couples lesson with MJ. I think I am almost ready for freestyles.
Tuesday night was another volunteer night with the Bruce Roemmelt for Delegate campaign, and work has been a pressure cooker lately with all the server moves from Reston, though our team is nearly finished with that (yay). Have I mentioned what an awesome team I work with?
Fall Freestyles, Arthur Murray dance competitions are at Sheraton in Tyson’s Corners this coming Friday night and Saturday. We’ll be there. We are ready for Quickstep, not so ready for West Coast Swing…
