Regionals
I'm in Anaheim, CA for the USADance Southwest Regionals, a competition Steve and I are doing less for the competition than for the fact that it qualifies us for the US Nationals to be held in August.
Despite my utter lack of enthusiasm for coming to this comp during the past week, stuff seemed to click today, and we made a respectable showing -- 4th in both novice and prechamp standard, which meant that our Prechamp final was quite a bit better than our Novice final -- we beat 2 of the 3 couples who were marked higher than us in Novice, 4th of 8 couples in Novice Latin, and 7th of 8 in Prechamp. Given how much more time we spend on our standard than our latin, not bad. (and there were distinct improvements in the Latin over the last time we competed. For instance, I was not dropped in any of our dips today. =)) The standard really felt good, with the exception of some nagging problems that have been rough spots in practice recently. But, as they have been rough spots in practice, it's not surprise that they were also rough spots on the competitive floor. Still running into endurance issues, but this will, I think, get better as we are more diligent about dancing rounds in our practices. Feeling definite improvements since Stanford, which makes me happy.
Also got to play with my new toy, a Fuji finepix F30. I didn't play so much with the various scene modes -- that I am reserving for Hearst Castle tomorrow, but I experimented with the picture stabilization and rapid shooting mode -- I think the pictures people managed to capture of me dancing today are some of the better ones that have been taken, save those taken by professional photographers. It holds the promise of taking really beautiful pictures, once I've done some playing. And it is small and compact and pretty and has a long battery life and so on, which puts it miles ahead of other cameras I've had.
Life, still, is good.