Moving around

I'm being very good and keeping up with my New Year's resolution of being more active.

Dancing
On the dancing front, the past couple of weeks have seen the Annual Dance, at which I danced pretty much everything, and Linda's birthday ceilidh, at which I didn't. Together with Katie we also managed to put together a display dem for Newcastle, with nice music and some interesting dances. Miraculously it seemed to work on the first night of practices, and we almost hit the lines halfway through sixteen bars of poussetting too. This is very encouraging for Newcastle, especially after all the headaches with the SUSCDF dem at the end of last year.

Dancing on Thursdays has been a bit slow on several fronts. The social programmes I write don't tend to work, even though I've made them significantly simpler since the Annual Dance. There seems to be a fair amount of turnover from week to week, so every week there's people who don't actually know what they're doing. The new plan is to write a social programme of four dances with one extra. Maybe that way we can fool the Time Gods into allowing us five dances per evening? Also, my dancing has been very intermittent, usually because of some sort of injury or (like this week) trying not to be ill. This week I had dem class off (no display practice, only technique) so I decided to go to Dunedin instead, where I danced about half because the balls of my feet started hurting. Not good. I have now ordered new dance shoes, including shockproof insoles, from James Senior (because Dancewear doesn't appear to do them), so they should be arriving by the end of the month. I'm hoping they'll hurry up and get them to me by Newcastle – one can always hope.

The Hot Cross Bun
The birthday dance I wrote for Linda, which seemed to go down well both with experienced dancers and with beginnery types. It is an 8x32 Reel, but because of the odd progression (3-1-2) it's not suitable for ‘once and to the bottom’ encores. Then again, it can be done (as we did when we demmed it for Linda) as a 3-by.

1-8. Cross, cast, turn left (4 bars) to face first corners.
9-16. Set to corners and change places right hand. Corners now back-to-back in the middle dance half a reel of four with first couple.
17-24. Corners dance another half reel of four with second corners. This starts with men facing men, ladies facing ladies, and ends with the corners facing first couple again. Set and change places right hand.
25-32. First couple turn left hand (4 bars) to end in 2nd place on the wrong sides. All set and cross.

Athletic endeavours
On the swimming front it's been a solo effort for the past two weeks. Last week that wasn't too surprising seeing as Linda was probably too busy preparing for her party; no idea why no one else was there yesterday. Either way, it meant less faffing around and more swimming lanes. Last week I did 55, and yesterday I did 41 (although it might have been 43, I tend to lose count if I'm not paying too much attention). In both cases, I added another five which I timed, in the never-ending race to qualify for the fast lane. Last week it was 2.45 for five lanes (33 seconds per lane), and yesterday I managed 2.36 (just over 31 seconds per lane). The fast lane is 30 seconds or less per lane. It'll be a while before I can do that without actually racing for it.

It mightn't have been such a good idea to have tried that yesterday, what with me not being very happy with my stomach (or vice versa). So despite the personal best time in the swimming, the rest of the day was not very good and food didn't actually stay in. (You really wanted to know that, didn't you.)

The other athletic endeavours on the frozen version of a pool are going okay as well. Last week Jen and I had a different teacher who tried to teach three levels at the same time, and it went reasonably alright. Today it was just me, but we had our old teacher back, the one who says [arəms] and on the surface doesn't seem to be too convinced we can all do what she wants us to do. She was very good at giving advice this week (maybe she wasn't there last week because she went to that seminar in Sheffield they talked about, and maybe the seminar was about teaching?) and I even got a compliment that my skating was coming along really well. Also, the skate shop was finally open, so I spent more money on footwear.

The disagreement between myself and my stomach had settled by this morning, so that was no longer bugging me. Now just a good night's sleep tonight, and I'll be all set for more activity next week (i.e. the same as last week, plus actually doing some dancing again).