Chugging Along

Not much of tremendous excitement has happened in the past few days.

Yesterday morning, I was dragged to we attended a dollhouse/miniatures show & sale in Frederick, MD. I'm not exactly sure what cuyahogarvr and kent4str were looking for, but I'm willing to humour them, at least up to the point where they start spending money. There were a lot of people milling about at the show... who knew so many people needed to be medicated?

From there, we skipped over to Mt Airy to visit with kent4str's parents for a few hours. They're doing well although Dad is definitely getting the jitters about the calendar: they're usually on their way to Florida for the winter before the first frost hits but they are required to attend a function at West Point in New York State in mid-November so they're sticking around. He kept looking out the window, as though he feared the glaciers would crest the hill any moment now. Oh, well... a touch of fall will just make them appreciate their Florida hideaway even more.

I spent the evening leafing through 35+ year old square dance magazines. I'm surprised how little has changed: there's enormous emphasis, for example, on dancer dress codes and how important it is to indoctrinate new dancers into dressing like clowns as quickly as possible. Ugh. There are, of course, differences: there were several articles about the importance of standardizing call definitions and call lists, as opposed to articles nowadays about how standardization is evil and has destroyed square dancing as we know it.

I'm personally most interested in the dance sequences, looking for ideas and good combinations of calls I can incorporate into my own choreography. Some of the handedness and flow of the sequences are stunningly bad, but not knowing what calls were at the callers disposal at the time of writing, I can't be especially critical. I'm a little pleased that I can spot the bad flow in the first read of some of the sequences... I couldn't do that two years ago so I must be making progress.

In other news, the Harvest Festival Hoedown 2009 contracts were tossed into the mail today after finally cornering a DCLS board member to sign the things. I'll be calling Mainstream for the DC Lambda Squares tonight, then Mainstream/Plus/Advanced for the Chesapeake Squares tomorrow night. Doren McBroom is calling A2/C1 for DCLS this coming Thursday so we'll make a particular effort to zip into downtown DC for that.

I've done a handful of minor technical tasks around the office today, all of which seem to be successful. My Dear Employer has started the annual open enrollment ritual for company benefits... I have three weeks to make my choices, nearly all of which will be straightforward extrapolations of last year's choices.

Chugging Along

Not much of tremendous excitement has happened in the past few days.

Yesterday morning, I was dragged to we attended a dollhouse/miniatures show & sale in Frederick, MD. I'm not exactly sure what cuyahogarvr and kent4str were looking for, but I'm willing to humour them, at least up to the point where they start spending money. There were a lot of people milling about at the show... who knew so many people needed to be medicated?

From there, we skipped over to Mt Airy to visit with kent4str's parents for a few hours. They're doing well although Dad is definitely getting the jitters about the calendar: they're usually on their way to Florida for the winter before the first frost hits but they are required to attend a function at West Point in New York State in mid-November so they're sticking around. He kept looking out the window, as though he feared the glaciers would crest the hill any moment now. Oh, well... a touch of fall will just make them appreciate their Florida hideaway even more.

I spent the evening leafing through 35+ year old square dance magazines. I'm surprised how little has changed: there's enormous emphasis, for example, on dancer dress codes and how important it is to indoctrinate new dancers into dressing like clowns as quickly as possible. Ugh. There are, of course, differences: there were several articles about the importance of standardizing call definitions and call lists, as opposed to articles nowadays about how standardization is evil and has destroyed square dancing as we know it.

I'm personally most interested in the dance sequences, looking for ideas and good combinations of calls I can incorporate into my own choreography. Some of the handedness and flow of the sequences are stunningly bad, but not knowing what calls were at the callers disposal at the time of writing, I can't be especially critical. I'm a little pleased that I can spot the bad flow in the first read of some of the sequences... I couldn't do that two years ago so I must be making progress.

In other news, the Harvest Festival Hoedown 2009 contracts were tossed into the mail today after finally cornering a DCLS board member to sign the things. I'll be calling Mainstream for the DC Lambda Squares tonight, then Mainstream/Plus/Advanced for the Chesapeake Squares tomorrow night. Doren McBroom is calling A2/C1 for DCLS this coming Thursday so we'll make a particular effort to zip into downtown DC for that.

I've done a handful of minor technical tasks around the office today, all of which seem to be successful. My Dear Employer has started the annual open enrollment ritual for company benefits... I have three weeks to make my choices, nearly all of which will be straightforward extrapolations of last year's choices.