(no subject)
Does anyone else feel as though, when you don't participate in livejournalness for a month or so, it's very very hard to start posting/commenting again? My bloggozoid and commmentezius muscles just go all weak and squishy. Can't think of anything amusing or interesting to say for myself, and can't think of much to say to other people besides "yay you!" or "oh noooo" or "I like the blue fuzzy one better, myself, but you should just go with whichever's got the best personality and the nicest car" and other such mundanities.
Anyway. I know I'll look back and be irked with myself for not posting anything, so here are some small situps and crunches for my flabby bloggozoids, and maybe later I'll try to tighten up the commentezii.
Blues dance = officially my latest hobby and obsession. Almost exactly a year since that very first dance/workshop at Laurel House, and I've finally attended enough events and hung out with enough people that I'm beginning to feel like a part of this community, rather than merely a hanger-on. New friends(?) Nico and Erin have been doing a series of mini-workshops on occasional Saturdays, which I've attended a couple of. We've had... two? three? four? three-and-a-quarter? (depends on how you count it) blues dance events at Laurel this fall, and I get the feeling that Laurel House is going to be a small, perhaps temporary/transitional, but not wholely insignificant planetary body in the fledgling solar system of the Twin Cities blues scene. And, most thrillingly, the weekend of Halloween was the very first ever blues exchange weekend in the Twin Cities, and I was there for every night of it.
Exchange weekends are apparently a lynchpin of the American social dance scene (and maybe international, I dunno). Basically, the movers-and-shakers of a local dance community persuade a bunch of venues to host dance events every afternoon and evening for three or four days, import some hotshot teachers to give classes, round up a dozen or so good djs and a couple of really good bands, and then advertise like hell. A small horde of out-of-state people fly or drive in for the weekend and sleep on the couches and floors of the local dancers. And then you all dance until you drop. Dances can go for 12 hours. It's insane. And amazing. And addictive.
Until recently, the blues dance community of Minnesota was too small for an exchange weekend to be financially viable, but it's apparently grown a lot in the past couple of years, and there were a good 80 or so attendees. Three nights of dancing until 4 or 5 in the morning. Two amazing live bands. A big costume dance out in an unheated barn in the boondocks of Minnesota, where it was so cold that you HAD to dance just to keep warm. Piles of exhausted dancers on couches, sleepily laughing and flirting and cuddling and teasing each other even though two days ago they didn't know each others' names.
(Photo from the semifinals of the pair competition. I danced with Jon, the guy in this picture, several times. For one song, we had an exchange as follows. Jon: [leading me onto the floor] "I have a question for you." Me: "Shoot." Jon: "Do you have a boyfriend?" Me: "Well, I have a girlfriend, yeah. Why?" Jon: "Is she here tonight?" Me: "Nope." Jon: "Then I'm gonna dance this one real slow and dirty. Is that okay?" Me: ".... YES. " And he did. Or rather, we did. It was awesome.)
(Both of the dancers in the foreground above --Susan and Jamison -- are amazing. And I have danced with both of them! [Susan can lead, which makes me adore her even more.] But the blurry one in the back with the blue clipboard is Damon, my particular huge dance crush [and everyone's dance crush, really, because he's a professional blues dancer/historian and is both super-cool and deeply lovable]. I met him at this party at Laurel, and was so happy to see him again. I got to dance with him TWICE. Oh man. Oh man oh man oh man. I fangirl him so madly. And he likes me too, I made him laugh and he told me I was "kind of awesome" and friended me on facebook! Squeeeee! *passes out*)
(Guy in the above photo is Jay, a DJ and ballroom dance instructor from Florida who was our houseguest for the weekend. Girl is Amanda, who is another one of my dancer crushes, the one I dubbed "Hot Hips II" at that same party. She is awesome and hilarious and has so much flair that I'm always faintly surprised that the whole dance floor doesn't go up in flames.)
(Panda Hat = Nico. This was not his Halloween costume, he just wears fuzzy animal hats a lot. He's a dance instructor and a beginning-to-be-actual-friend of mine, and is one of the cutest people I have ever met. Also crazy fun to dance with.)
I made so many new friends! And danced so much I ached all over the next day, but danced in the evening anyway! And improved my dancing so much that no one believed I was a beginner any more! And got to dance with a couple of Geniune Celebrities of the U.S. blues scene! It was amazing! I'm so determined to go to more exchanges! Laney says she'll take me to one in Chicago in February! I wish it was tomorrow!
This is me dancing in my Halloween costume (in the unheated barn) with a very nice kid named Ian who likes to follow me around and give me back massages:
(Please note the oh-so-classy tissue paper earplugs. I got teased a lot for those. I don't care though, it was LOUD.)
And some more photos of my Halloween costume, just for kicks:
(All photos posted so far were taken by Ben Hejkal. Check out his website, he's awesome. I have THREE photos in his 'portraits' gallery! *proud*)
I admit, I don't know exactly what my costume was supposed to be. I found the suit at Goodwill a few months ago, dubbed it my 'slut suit' and had been looking for an occasion to wear it ever since. Added some gloves, sheer seamed stockings, wool hat, black pumps, and some very red lipstick, and the result was... sexy flight attendant? 1940's war propaganda? Alberto Vargas' fantasy of a female Navy lieutenant? Don't really know. I got lots of suggestions, but even more catcalls. Good times.
I miss everyone I met already. We hosted a blues party at Laurel on Saturday, which was massively well-attended, but it only went from 9 until 1 AM and the soundsystem was dreadful and I didn't get to dance with anyone I didn't know already, so it only took the barest edge off of my post-exchange blues lust.
Blues dance. It's amazing, I tell you what.
(^=me having a happy 3 AM lollipop on the last night -- morning, rather -- of the exchange weekend. Photo taken by a very fun lady named Alicia.)
Okay, what else?
I'm weaving an enormous rug for the living room out of recycled fabric. It's a massive undertaking, but somehow I'm already almost halfway done. I love that I have the attention span and follow through for this now. Thank you, ADD meds.
Speaking of attention span and follow through and meds.... I'm still chipping away at the monolithic state health bureaucracy, trying to secure myself some affordable health insurance. The various missteps and travails and endless reams of paperwork that I've slogged through make for a really long boring story that I won't tell here, but suffice it to say that when I finally do get approved (this next week? I hope? Please please please?) I will have earned every penny of the benefits I receive, goddammit.
I'm taking on even more stuff at work. I'm now mostly in charge of soups as well as the specialty baked goods, and I've ended up doing the majority of the work for the last couple of catering projects we've had. I've started coming in mornings instead of afternoons. I get up at 6:30 or so, catch a ride with Dani, she drops me off and gets morning coffee and a goodbye smooch before she goes to work. I have some breakfast, read the news, research some recipes online. Start cooking around 8 AM. Lunch soups and odd jobs are done by 11:30, cake layers are frosted by 1, I'm out the door by 2. It's almost like a real job!
And it might become even realer in the nearish future. My bosses are considering opening another location in Saint Paul -- 'considering' meaning the real estate agent is negotiating for it right now. Most of the food would be prepped here and baked/heated over there. This would mean a solid 10+ hour increase in my job, such that it would actually be full-time. For real. I would be a full-time chef.
I don't know quite how I feel about this. Part of me knows I should be overjoyed. In this economy, to have a full-time job with a substantial amount of creative freedom and schedule flexibility, doing something I enjoy for bosses I respect and like? WOW. .... But then there's the other part that whispers about music and grad school and other cities and other things I would like to pursue, and won't have the time/ money/freedom for if I'm working full-time as a cook.
And then another bit comes back and suggests that maybe I should see this as destiny. Maybe fate wants me to cook for a living. Maybe I should keep working this job for another year, get to the point where I can train an assistant, then scale back my hours and actually go to culinary school and get some sort of professional training/certification, pursue an internship somewhere, and see where it takes me.
But... I don't think I WANT to be a chef. I miss music. I miss artistic and intellectual involvement. Cooking's fun, but it isn't all I want to do, and I would infinitely rather be cooking for friends and family just for fun and doing something else for my living.
At least, I think that's what I want. But I don't know. Help?
Yesterday was National Bundt Cake Day! I made a chocolate-orange bundt cake in celebration.
From http://www.foodandwine.com
Happy belated Bundt Cake Day, everyone!
Phew, that was quite a livejournaling workout.
Anyway. I know I'll look back and be irked with myself for not posting anything, so here are some small situps and crunches for my flabby bloggozoids, and maybe later I'll try to tighten up the commentezii.
Blues dance = officially my latest hobby and obsession. Almost exactly a year since that very first dance/workshop at Laurel House, and I've finally attended enough events and hung out with enough people that I'm beginning to feel like a part of this community, rather than merely a hanger-on. New friends(?) Nico and Erin have been doing a series of mini-workshops on occasional Saturdays, which I've attended a couple of. We've had... two? three? four? three-and-a-quarter? (depends on how you count it) blues dance events at Laurel this fall, and I get the feeling that Laurel House is going to be a small, perhaps temporary/transitional, but not wholely insignificant planetary body in the fledgling solar system of the Twin Cities blues scene. And, most thrillingly, the weekend of Halloween was the very first ever blues exchange weekend in the Twin Cities, and I was there for every night of it.
Exchange weekends are apparently a lynchpin of the American social dance scene (and maybe international, I dunno). Basically, the movers-and-shakers of a local dance community persuade a bunch of venues to host dance events every afternoon and evening for three or four days, import some hotshot teachers to give classes, round up a dozen or so good djs and a couple of really good bands, and then advertise like hell. A small horde of out-of-state people fly or drive in for the weekend and sleep on the couches and floors of the local dancers. And then you all dance until you drop. Dances can go for 12 hours. It's insane. And amazing. And addictive.
Until recently, the blues dance community of Minnesota was too small for an exchange weekend to be financially viable, but it's apparently grown a lot in the past couple of years, and there were a good 80 or so attendees. Three nights of dancing until 4 or 5 in the morning. Two amazing live bands. A big costume dance out in an unheated barn in the boondocks of Minnesota, where it was so cold that you HAD to dance just to keep warm. Piles of exhausted dancers on couches, sleepily laughing and flirting and cuddling and teasing each other even though two days ago they didn't know each others' names.
(Photo from the semifinals of the pair competition. I danced with Jon, the guy in this picture, several times. For one song, we had an exchange as follows. Jon: [leading me onto the floor] "I have a question for you." Me: "Shoot." Jon: "Do you have a boyfriend?" Me: "Well, I have a girlfriend, yeah. Why?" Jon: "Is she here tonight?" Me: "Nope." Jon: "Then I'm gonna dance this one real slow and dirty. Is that okay?" Me: ".... YES. " And he did. Or rather, we did. It was awesome.)
(Both of the dancers in the foreground above --Susan and Jamison -- are amazing. And I have danced with both of them! [Susan can lead, which makes me adore her even more.] But the blurry one in the back with the blue clipboard is Damon, my particular huge dance crush [and everyone's dance crush, really, because he's a professional blues dancer/historian and is both super-cool and deeply lovable]. I met him at this party at Laurel, and was so happy to see him again. I got to dance with him TWICE. Oh man. Oh man oh man oh man. I fangirl him so madly. And he likes me too, I made him laugh and he told me I was "kind of awesome" and friended me on facebook! Squeeeee! *passes out*)
(Guy in the above photo is Jay, a DJ and ballroom dance instructor from Florida who was our houseguest for the weekend. Girl is Amanda, who is another one of my dancer crushes, the one I dubbed "Hot Hips II" at that same party. She is awesome and hilarious and has so much flair that I'm always faintly surprised that the whole dance floor doesn't go up in flames.)
(Panda Hat = Nico. This was not his Halloween costume, he just wears fuzzy animal hats a lot. He's a dance instructor and a beginning-to-be-actual-friend of mine, and is one of the cutest people I have ever met. Also crazy fun to dance with.)
I made so many new friends! And danced so much I ached all over the next day, but danced in the evening anyway! And improved my dancing so much that no one believed I was a beginner any more! And got to dance with a couple of Geniune Celebrities of the U.S. blues scene! It was amazing! I'm so determined to go to more exchanges! Laney says she'll take me to one in Chicago in February! I wish it was tomorrow!
This is me dancing in my Halloween costume (in the unheated barn) with a very nice kid named Ian who likes to follow me around and give me back massages:
(Please note the oh-so-classy tissue paper earplugs. I got teased a lot for those. I don't care though, it was LOUD.)
And some more photos of my Halloween costume, just for kicks:
(All photos posted so far were taken by Ben Hejkal. Check out his website, he's awesome. I have THREE photos in his 'portraits' gallery! *proud*)
I admit, I don't know exactly what my costume was supposed to be. I found the suit at Goodwill a few months ago, dubbed it my 'slut suit' and had been looking for an occasion to wear it ever since. Added some gloves, sheer seamed stockings, wool hat, black pumps, and some very red lipstick, and the result was... sexy flight attendant? 1940's war propaganda? Alberto Vargas' fantasy of a female Navy lieutenant? Don't really know. I got lots of suggestions, but even more catcalls. Good times.
I miss everyone I met already. We hosted a blues party at Laurel on Saturday, which was massively well-attended, but it only went from 9 until 1 AM and the soundsystem was dreadful and I didn't get to dance with anyone I didn't know already, so it only took the barest edge off of my post-exchange blues lust.
Blues dance. It's amazing, I tell you what.
(^=me having a happy 3 AM lollipop on the last night -- morning, rather -- of the exchange weekend. Photo taken by a very fun lady named Alicia.)
Okay, what else?
I'm weaving an enormous rug for the living room out of recycled fabric. It's a massive undertaking, but somehow I'm already almost halfway done. I love that I have the attention span and follow through for this now. Thank you, ADD meds.
Speaking of attention span and follow through and meds.... I'm still chipping away at the monolithic state health bureaucracy, trying to secure myself some affordable health insurance. The various missteps and travails and endless reams of paperwork that I've slogged through make for a really long boring story that I won't tell here, but suffice it to say that when I finally do get approved (this next week? I hope? Please please please?) I will have earned every penny of the benefits I receive, goddammit.
I'm taking on even more stuff at work. I'm now mostly in charge of soups as well as the specialty baked goods, and I've ended up doing the majority of the work for the last couple of catering projects we've had. I've started coming in mornings instead of afternoons. I get up at 6:30 or so, catch a ride with Dani, she drops me off and gets morning coffee and a goodbye smooch before she goes to work. I have some breakfast, read the news, research some recipes online. Start cooking around 8 AM. Lunch soups and odd jobs are done by 11:30, cake layers are frosted by 1, I'm out the door by 2. It's almost like a real job!
And it might become even realer in the nearish future. My bosses are considering opening another location in Saint Paul -- 'considering' meaning the real estate agent is negotiating for it right now. Most of the food would be prepped here and baked/heated over there. This would mean a solid 10+ hour increase in my job, such that it would actually be full-time. For real. I would be a full-time chef.
I don't know quite how I feel about this. Part of me knows I should be overjoyed. In this economy, to have a full-time job with a substantial amount of creative freedom and schedule flexibility, doing something I enjoy for bosses I respect and like? WOW. .... But then there's the other part that whispers about music and grad school and other cities and other things I would like to pursue, and won't have the time/ money/freedom for if I'm working full-time as a cook.
And then another bit comes back and suggests that maybe I should see this as destiny. Maybe fate wants me to cook for a living. Maybe I should keep working this job for another year, get to the point where I can train an assistant, then scale back my hours and actually go to culinary school and get some sort of professional training/certification, pursue an internship somewhere, and see where it takes me.
But... I don't think I WANT to be a chef. I miss music. I miss artistic and intellectual involvement. Cooking's fun, but it isn't all I want to do, and I would infinitely rather be cooking for friends and family just for fun and doing something else for my living.
At least, I think that's what I want. But I don't know. Help?
Yesterday was National Bundt Cake Day! I made a chocolate-orange bundt cake in celebration.
From http://www.foodandwine.com
Happy belated Bundt Cake Day, everyone!
Phew, that was quite a livejournaling workout.