Month: May 2017

Dance recital 2017

The difficulty of balancing the baby and the phone-as-recording device:

Recital #3 happened.  The intermediate tap class of the Peninsula Park Community Center danced to “Time to Blow” which is an instrumental piece from That Thing You Do soundtrack.  I love the song and our dance fit perfectly with the music.

This dance recital suffered from my most hated thing: poor planning.  If you could open up that program to read it, you would not find a list of the numbers being performed in the proper order, you would find a hand-written list of every class and participant in the Peninsula Park Community Center’s dance program.

Was the order of performance going to be the same as the class listings?  Who knew?  Things grew more complicated when they begin calling people by number, and not by song title or class name.  “Number one, please go to the stage, number two, please meet to the left of the stage.”  What number were we?  If we were going in program order, that made us number 11.  But were we going in program order?

This isn’t my first time at this particular ranch, and I don’t understand why this dance recital was set up in this fashion when the previous two have followed the normal order of things.  I don’t understand why the program didn’t list the titles of the songs in order.  I don’t understand why they were calling people by number only, not song or class title.

It turned out we were number five, which we discovered when the woman said, “Number five is ‘Time to Blow'” Is there no one in the audience who is dancing to this number?

We were not ready.  We did not have our shoes on.  We did not know we were going.  Apparently, when people “checked in” (something that has not happened the previous two years) the woman wrote a number on people’s program.  But no one “checked me in” when I, or anyone else in the class, grabbed a program, so how were we to know?

I dislike participating in activities that I could have organized better.

Once we got on stage, it was a fine performance to a good song.

I’m hoping for better organization next year.

Three sentence movie reviews: Adult World

It’s a post-college transition movie with a female lead!*  She’s insufferable, which made this movie not much fun to watch.**  It was also odd, with many things that didn’t quite work,*** but I found Evan Peters’**** performance enjoyable, and again: post-college transition with a female lead.

Cost: Free from library
Where watched: at home.

*Win and win!  Post-college transitions are the mostly-unexplored time period in our landscape.
**Although I do feel for a character who, when frustrated, yells, “I got straight A’s!”  Yep.  Learning that good grades don’t necessarily get you anything is tough.
***Armando Riesco’s Rubia character, I either needed more of her story, or less.  What was there was frustrating.  Rat Billing’s ultimately mean move of publishing Amy’s poetry kind of came from left field.  Undeveloped female friendship between Amy and college friend.
****”…And I was wondering who he was, and he was in Kick-Ass and then played Quicksilver in X-Men” I told Matt as I was summing up the movie.
“Aaron Taylor-Johnson?”
“Um, I don’t think that’s his name.”
“He’s the guy in Kick-Ass and he played Quicksilver in the Avengers”
IMDB was consulted. It turns out Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Evan Peters were both in Kick-Ass and both played Quicksilver, one in X-Men, one in the Avengers.  Amazing! (More amazing than this movie.)

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2014/adult_world.html

My 100 Days Post #8. Week 3 review, Week 4 plan

Here is the week 3 plan [and here is how I did]

5/15 Monday–Swim [Walked instead of swam.  Metronome @43]
5/16 Tuesday–Walk in the morning, tap dance [No walk, yes tap dance]
5/17 Wednesday–Swim, Square dance [Walked instead of swam. No square dance]
5/18 Thursday–Walk in the morning [yes, metronome 43]
5/19 Friday–Swim [nothing]
5/20 Saturday–AM yoga [nothing]
5/21 Sunday–walk to meet a friend for an event we have planned. [nothing]

Meditate:
According to the new plan and my calendar I should meditate in the morning on Monday, Thursday and Friday.  I should be able to meditate in the evening on Tuesday and Wednesday. Weekends I will meditate when I feel kind of exhausted.

[It turns out I don’t really feel comfortable meditating on the train.  So that won’t be a solution. Meditation was fairly successful this week, because I wasn’t doing much else]

Food habits:
I’m experimenting with getting 800 grams of produce per day.  Let’s see if that ends up to be triggering in any way.  Also I need to put my food books on hold at the library.  I can’t afford to buy my own copies right now.

[I did put the food books on hold.  There is a long wait.  The produce thing worked well on the weekend, when I’m eating all meals at home, but not so much on the weekdays, when I’m dragging my food around to work and such.]

Soooooooo.

What happened this week is that I got sick.  I lost my voice on Monday and Tuesday and I had a cough.  It wasn’t the kind of cough where I could swim. Then, instead of getting better as the week went on, I got worse.  I had pink eye on the weekend, and some stomach issues.  I write this from the end of week 4, when my cough became a killer cough and the stomach issues stuck around.

The Saturday and Sunday of Week 3 had me hanging out on the couch for most of the weekend.  I cancelled plans.  I put off going to the store.  This turned out to be a good thing, because I lost my appetite on Sunday and it didn’t come back for the rest of the week.

This gave me a lot of time to think.  I’ve been feeling overly busy in the last month or so, in a way I don’t like and don’t want to be sustainable.  I’m worried about the summer, when I’m taking an online class that supposedly will take me 13 hours of work per week.  I find that those estimates tend to be generous, but even at half the amount, that’s still 6.5 extra hours to find.

I looked for things to drop from my schedule.  I had the happy realization that on busy weeks, I don’t need to cook five or six separate and different meals.  I can make one or two things and eat them all week.  I don’t need new kinds of food every day.

And maybe, I thought, I need to ratchet back the blog. Maybe it needs to be book and movie reviews only this summer.  That seemed like a good plan.  The next day I remembered this project.

There was a time in my life when I would gut through with stuff like this.  I said I was going to do it, and by gum, it was going to get done, no matter how complicated my life was because of it.

But I’m older now, and I have left that tension behind me.  This is not going to be my 100 Days summer.  I’m setting aside this project for now, or possibly forever.  If I do pick it up again, I would rather do it in the cold and dark winter, than the glorious summer.  And I would like to come at it from an angle of motivation.  John Green must have partially been motivated by the fact that people with cameras were going to be at his gym, so he had better be there too.  I don’t have that particular motivation.  So how do I get myself going on days I don’t want to?

This has been a good trail month.  I’m glad I built it in.

Three sentence movie reviews: Kingsman The Secret Service

There were things I really liked about this movie: the style of the Kingsmen,* many of the action scenes were thrilling, the characters were compelling, and the villain’s evil plot sounded like a feasible evil villain’s plot.  There could have been a little more action for the women in the film.** Unfortunately, the violence in this film–both stylish and humorously rendered–left a bad taste in my mouth.

Cost: free from library
Where watched: at home with Matt

*Those training suits the potential Kingsmen wore were awesome! (picture clipped from here )  

**Gazelle does  a lot, it’s true, but Sophie Cookson’s character was wasted

(I watched this twice in one day.  I watched it on my own and then re-watched it with Matt.  I had a bad cold, and didn’t feel like moving from the couch.)
(This was also a pre-watch because Channing Tatum is in the sequel, and I felt I needed to catch up.)

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2015/kingsman_the_secret_service.html
(I did not choose the other versions of the posters which feature a back view of Gazelle, legs spread wide framing Colin Firth/Samuel L. Jackson/Eggsy/the pug.  I get that they are an homage to the famous James Bond poster, but if that was the ass of Sofia Boutella then it had been digitally shrunk so small as to render it unrecognizable.  Homage to misogyny is still misogyny)

Three sentence movie reviews: The Age of Adeline

I enjoy movies about women, and thus I enjoyed this movie about Adaline, a woman who hasn’t aged since the 1930s, something that complicates her life.  How would it be to move through this world and not be able to establish any lasting relationships owing to the fact you must assume a new identity every decade, so as to avoid detection.  It’s a clever story, and one with a few good twists.

Cost: free from library
Where watched: at home while painting toes green.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2015/age_of_adaline.html
I love this poster, as did the peanut gallery on impawards.com

Three sentence movie reviews: Hidden Figures

This was fun.  And when a movie can make systematic discrimination (both race AND gender) fun, it’s a winner.  I could have done with less cut-away “funny” comments by Glen Powell as John Glenn.

Cost: $1.50 via Redbox
Where watched: at home with Matt.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2016/hidden_figures.html

My 100 days post #7. Week 2 review, week 3 plan

Week 2 plan [and what happened]

Basically, I have rough transitions when I come back from vacation.  Because I get up very early (4:45 in my normal routine) I never want to maintain that when I go on vacation.  Then it’s tough to slide back into the routine when I return.

5/8 Monday–Swim [Didn’t swim.  Slept in. Did walk before work.]
5/9 Tuesday–Walk before work; tap dance [yes and yes]
5/10 Wednesday–Swim; square dance [No swim.  Slept in again. Had bad attitude  Did walk across the bridge, did square dance.]
5/11 Thursday–Walk before work [Did it]
5/12 Friday–Swim [The triumphant return to the pool!]
5/13 Saturday–Yoga; square dance [The other occupant in the house is sick and woke me up with his coughing.  I was awake for a long time, so slept in and skipped yoga.  I did go to the square dance.]
5/14 Sunday–Walk that is more than an hour in duration. [Also awoken due to coughing by another, also slept in, also did not go on a walk of any duration.]

Total planned activities:  10
Total activities done: 8
Number of activities subbed: 2

Meditate:
Wednesday and Thursday might be tough due to after-work commitments.  Will aim for the other days.  [I did meditate on Monday and Tuesday.  I did not meditate on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  Saturday I did, though.  What happens on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night was that I came home from work, and had the choice of eating, or meditation.  I could not do both.  There was no time.  I will be proactive and meditate on the train in the morning on days that have quick transitions.  I didn’t meditate on Sunday, because weekends have no routine and tend to be busy, so the meditation gets forgotten.  Weekends are going to be an area of focus during 100 days, I can tell.]

Food habits:
Continue to track food habits.
Last week I noticed the following things (that were not at all new for me to notice) 1. I eat while cooking, which I don’t really like doing, but also don’t like stopping.  2. I sometime don’t eat dinner because I’m “not hungry” and then eat snacks instead.

This week I noticed I never have a food plan for the weekend.  I’d like to have a slight bit more structure built into my weekends around food.

The plan for the week of 5/15

As mentioned, the boyfriend has had a cough and a cold.  As of Sunday night I’ve got some laryngitis stuff going on.  I’m hoping that’s the extent of illness that will invade my body, but there’s a chance this plan will go south.  Though I hope not.  It’s a really busy week.

5/15 Monday–Swim
5/16 Tuesday–Walk in the morning, tap dance
5/17 Wednesday–Swim, Square dance
5/18 Thursday–Walk in the morning
5/19 Friday–Swim
5/20 Saturday–AM yoga
5/21 Sunday–walk to meet a friend for an event we have planned.

Meditate:
According to the new plan and my calendar I should meditate in the morning on Monday, Thursday and Friday.  I should be able to meditate in the evening on Tuesday and Wednesday. Weekends I will meditate when I feel kind of exhausted.

Food habits:
I’m experimenting with getting 800 grams of produce per day.  Let’s see if that ends up to be triggering in any way.  Also I need to put my food books on hold at the library.  I can’t afford to buy my own copies right now.

Best snack for Family Book Group

The bar code is obscuring the full title, but we read I am Princess X for Family Book Group. Danielle came up with this most excellent snack item.

She also posted many images of Princess X around the room, sneaking them into normal displays.  This was very fitting to the story, and was a delightful bonus.

Librarians are so fun.