relax
Now that the holidays and various appointments are done, I feel like I am finally on a vacation--all the crazy of last week was all stuff I *wanted* to do, but that didn't stop it from being stressful to the point of eye-twitchiness and nightly teeth-grinding. Luckily one of the various appointments was a massage, which helped muchly. And a hair appointment, which helped in its own way. I tried clothes-shopping at the Back Bay Filenes Basement and Marshall's afterwards, but did not like any of the clothes I saw. Back to H&M sometime this week, I think.
Christmas eve and day were very nice--I liked/wanted everything I got as gifts and I felt like I did good with the gifts I got for people. M was flabbergasted by his laptop :-) One of my best gifts was the Diana Tarkhan instructional DVD, from M. I've just done one of the two choreographies on it, and I love it. The one I did was called Samia and was intended as an homage to the Golden Era of Egyptian film. It made me grin while dancing because it was so much fun. Diana's style is light and playful and full of joy. A good consequence of both this DVD and Randa's is that I'm getting more comfortable with taking my feet off the ground (and I suppose now I have the foot and ankle strength as well), something that I've always thought was lacking in my dancing. No Dina DVDs for xmas, but I used some gift money to get those and the Montreal performance DVD, so they'll be arriving soon.
Darq was fun, I would definitely go again. It's too bad they can't stay open until 2, though, 10-1 seems very short. I guess they can't open any earlier because of the dinner crowd. The dance floor is rather oddly central; it was reminiscent of the goth club nights at Toast, with the dance floor right up alongside the bar so that you end up with no clear border between dance floor and people standing at the bar and a lot of through traffic. But the Thai restaurant decor actually worked rather well for a goth night, and you really can't go wrong with being able to order sushi whenever you want during the evening. Music was a bit too EBM and industrial for my general tastes but I danced anyway and it felt good.
Last night we watched some old silent Wizard of Oz movies. It was rather strange. They seemed to come from a studio that L. Frank Baum owned or operated, but they took a lot of liberties with the storylines, some to the point where you wouldn't have thought it had anything to do with Oz at all until a random character popped up. And then other plot elements repeated from film to film, so they all seemed like one basic film with variations in detail. My favorite part in all of them was an actor named Fred Woodward who played the mule Nickodemus (not in books, if I remember correctly--definitely not in the first few books anyway) and several of the other animals. His physical comedy was brilliant, as was his ability to make his human shape really look like the animal's form, from mule to kangaroo to crow. Nickodemus was apparently so popular he got a few movies of his own. If I can find them, I'll watch them. Costuming was excellent in all of them, especially one evil witch's batwinged dress and the wardrobe of the Queen of nearby Iz.
Today I have eight million things on my to-do list, but that's okay. The sun is out and I feel productive. If I get three things done I'll be happy with that.
Christmas eve and day were very nice--I liked/wanted everything I got as gifts and I felt like I did good with the gifts I got for people. M was flabbergasted by his laptop :-) One of my best gifts was the Diana Tarkhan instructional DVD, from M. I've just done one of the two choreographies on it, and I love it. The one I did was called Samia and was intended as an homage to the Golden Era of Egyptian film. It made me grin while dancing because it was so much fun. Diana's style is light and playful and full of joy. A good consequence of both this DVD and Randa's is that I'm getting more comfortable with taking my feet off the ground (and I suppose now I have the foot and ankle strength as well), something that I've always thought was lacking in my dancing. No Dina DVDs for xmas, but I used some gift money to get those and the Montreal performance DVD, so they'll be arriving soon.
Darq was fun, I would definitely go again. It's too bad they can't stay open until 2, though, 10-1 seems very short. I guess they can't open any earlier because of the dinner crowd. The dance floor is rather oddly central; it was reminiscent of the goth club nights at Toast, with the dance floor right up alongside the bar so that you end up with no clear border between dance floor and people standing at the bar and a lot of through traffic. But the Thai restaurant decor actually worked rather well for a goth night, and you really can't go wrong with being able to order sushi whenever you want during the evening. Music was a bit too EBM and industrial for my general tastes but I danced anyway and it felt good.
Last night we watched some old silent Wizard of Oz movies. It was rather strange. They seemed to come from a studio that L. Frank Baum owned or operated, but they took a lot of liberties with the storylines, some to the point where you wouldn't have thought it had anything to do with Oz at all until a random character popped up. And then other plot elements repeated from film to film, so they all seemed like one basic film with variations in detail. My favorite part in all of them was an actor named Fred Woodward who played the mule Nickodemus (not in books, if I remember correctly--definitely not in the first few books anyway) and several of the other animals. His physical comedy was brilliant, as was his ability to make his human shape really look like the animal's form, from mule to kangaroo to crow. Nickodemus was apparently so popular he got a few movies of his own. If I can find them, I'll watch them. Costuming was excellent in all of them, especially one evil witch's batwinged dress and the wardrobe of the Queen of nearby Iz.
Today I have eight million things on my to-do list, but that's okay. The sun is out and I feel productive. If I get three things done I'll be happy with that.