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bjarvisI haven't written much in the past few days so here's a quick recap...
Thursday was extremely busy at work. Since I was planning to take Friday off, I had to get two days of work done in a single day, and since my tasks had dependencies on other teams, you can imagine my frustration. Despite the delays, I did manage to get the core list of tasks completed although my work day stretched towards 10 hours.
From the office, I headed directly to BWI to collect![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cuyahogarvr who was flying in from Cleveland. From BWI, we headed directly down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway into downtown DC for advanced & challenge square dancing, called by justetthon. Our collective exhaustion at the pace of the past week and the knowledge there were still some activities to be completed that night caused us to leave early though, around 8:30 PM.
After a quick stop for some food supplies for our weekend away in Pennsylvania, we headed for home and crashed fairly quickly.
I was delighted Friday morning to see that the night shift had successfully completed all of the annoying tasks I had handed them for Thursday night. After catching up on e-mail and packing our bags, we were on the road to the Independence Squares' square dance fly-in by 11 AM.
Traffic was fairly light and construction delays were minimal so we arrived around 4:30 PM, checked in and unpacked.kent4str and cuyahogarvr napped while I reviewed my A1 material I would be using for my 7-7:30 PM block. Having not a clue how experienced (or how many) the dancers would be, I queued up three tips each starting gently and gradually ramping up to harder material before closing with a guaranteed successful figure (read: trivially easy). It occurred to me on the trip that I'd better have an entire stack of material exclusively composed of simple figures, just in case the floor level was stuck in low gear.
I had one square starting at 7 PM sharp. The easy material went well enough but some of the mainstream calls broke them; OK, they were lefty calls, but still they were only mainstream. Noted. I skipped the material I considered hard entirely.
The second tip had two squares, thanks to Sandy Bryant jumping in at the last minute to complete the second square. Again, the easy stuff was smooth but there was additional cuing and assistance required for the medium material. I skipped the hard stuff and went back to my simple figure stack.
The third tip had three squares (see a pattern?) and because time was tight and I wanted a big finish, I used excusively the easy stack I had generated only a couple of hours before. Complete success! One square had some minor difficulty with the calls from the Plus list (primarily chase right and linear cycle, even though they were from standard positions), but I think the entire floor swept though the lot with the desired wind-in-your-face effect. Certainly I was much more confident onstage in the last tip. I'm considering the experience a success.
After my calling block, the three of us grabbed Jay W to head to A&W for a quick dinner before returning. I didn't dance at all in the remaining couple of hours but I did record a few of the C1 tips from Anne Uebelacker and Glenn Matthews for study purposes.
We headed back to our room very soon after dancing and I slept better than I have in weeks.
I'm planning to attend the 10 AM Plus workshop and the 11 AM C1 workshop. The former is largely to study the style of the workshop; we may be conducting these at home fairly soon. The latter is purely to get my C1 up to speed: watching the C1 figures last night, I'm clearly not the same league as most other C1 dancers.
The rest of the day, we'll wing it. :-)
Thursday was extremely busy at work. Since I was planning to take Friday off, I had to get two days of work done in a single day, and since my tasks had dependencies on other teams, you can imagine my frustration. Despite the delays, I did manage to get the core list of tasks completed although my work day stretched towards 10 hours.
From the office, I headed directly to BWI to collect
cuyahogarvr who was flying in from Cleveland. From BWI, we headed directly down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway into downtown DC for advanced & challenge square dancing, called by justetthon. Our collective exhaustion at the pace of the past week and the knowledge there were still some activities to be completed that night caused us to leave early though, around 8:30 PM.After a quick stop for some food supplies for our weekend away in Pennsylvania, we headed for home and crashed fairly quickly.
I was delighted Friday morning to see that the night shift had successfully completed all of the annoying tasks I had handed them for Thursday night. After catching up on e-mail and packing our bags, we were on the road to the Independence Squares' square dance fly-in by 11 AM.
Traffic was fairly light and construction delays were minimal so we arrived around 4:30 PM, checked in and unpacked.
kent4str and cuyahogarvr napped while I reviewed my A1 material I would be using for my 7-7:30 PM block. Having not a clue how experienced (or how many) the dancers would be, I queued up three tips each starting gently and gradually ramping up to harder material before closing with a guaranteed successful figure (read: trivially easy). It occurred to me on the trip that I'd better have an entire stack of material exclusively composed of simple figures, just in case the floor level was stuck in low gear.I had one square starting at 7 PM sharp. The easy material went well enough but some of the mainstream calls broke them; OK, they were lefty calls, but still they were only mainstream. Noted. I skipped the material I considered hard entirely.
The second tip had two squares, thanks to Sandy Bryant jumping in at the last minute to complete the second square. Again, the easy stuff was smooth but there was additional cuing and assistance required for the medium material. I skipped the hard stuff and went back to my simple figure stack.
The third tip had three squares (see a pattern?) and because time was tight and I wanted a big finish, I used excusively the easy stack I had generated only a couple of hours before. Complete success! One square had some minor difficulty with the calls from the Plus list (primarily chase right and linear cycle, even though they were from standard positions), but I think the entire floor swept though the lot with the desired wind-in-your-face effect. Certainly I was much more confident onstage in the last tip. I'm considering the experience a success.
After my calling block, the three of us grabbed Jay W to head to A&W for a quick dinner before returning. I didn't dance at all in the remaining couple of hours but I did record a few of the C1 tips from Anne Uebelacker and Glenn Matthews for study purposes.
We headed back to our room very soon after dancing and I slept better than I have in weeks.
I'm planning to attend the 10 AM Plus workshop and the 11 AM C1 workshop. The former is largely to study the style of the workshop; we may be conducting these at home fairly soon. The latter is purely to get my C1 up to speed: watching the C1 figures last night, I'm clearly not the same league as most other C1 dancers.
The rest of the day, we'll wing it. :-)
