Friday, June 8, 2012

Preparing for a nice weekend

Top on to-do list: PURCHASE CEDAR SACHETS.

There has been no further sign of Mr. Moth, but suffice it to say that I've turned into Someone Who Is Already Type A And Has Now Morphed Into Someone Downright Paranoid and Annoying. I have my yarn under lock and key, but I were to ever find anything...*living* in the yarn itself, I would faint dead away. And we really don't want that to happen, do we?

Anyway, in other news, Anne can now climb the stairs. As you can imagine, this is just a fantastic development for us, no?

*martyr-like sign*

She's been able to get her little leg hiked up a stair for awhile now, but she never showed much interest in climbing the full staircase, and we did nothing to encourage her in this regard. But then her grandparents taught her how, and now we're all suffering because of it. Every time she does it, she gets FASTER. So we have to put a chair at the bottom to prevent her from climbing all the time, and so she stands at the bottom and sobs.

Wonderful.

Hopefully, she'll lose interest in this new project pretty quickly.

But Mike and I are going to dinner Saturday night, *without the children,* so that'll be nice. You know. Uninterrupted. Can hear yourself think. Not picking up thrown Cheerios off the floor for half the meal. Not that I don't enjoy going out as a family, that has it's own...charm. But date nights are sacred. And Mike and I are celebrating...

Me getting tenure. :)

Mostly, this is a relief. I mean, I'm happy, I never took it for granted. But I'm simply ready to move on to the next step and just enjoy the job security. If I hadn't gotten it, could I just have kept showing up and collecting a paycheck, sort of like that guy on Office Space? Likely not. As big a bureaucracy as a state-run university of this size is, I'm thinking they would "fix that glitch."

So, there's that. And I'm belly dancing like a madwoman. It's going well. I'm feeling as comfortable (as I can, I suppose) with my mostly improvised solo. I have a beginning arranged, with a veil entrance and cute fling away, then mostly improvisation broken up by some planned accents. Although, at this point, I've run through the music so many times that I often remember some steps I've done in previous incarnations, so if I can't think of anything better, I just do that. :) It gives me some comfort. I do feel more relaxed. I can't "forget" anything. Sometimes I even don't remember to do the planned accents, I just do something else, and although those accents aren't quite as BAM! as the planned ones, they're still fine, and at least my face doesn't reflect the dreaded "Oh God, I forgot what to do!!" expression. Doesn't exactly put the audience at east to have a clearly panicked dancer in front of them. So, that's going decently well.

We had sword practice last night, and I need to work on that routine plus my little solo part in it. It's just a trio of us, so we each have 6-7 counts of 8 to dance solo to. I'll mostly improvise, but I have a few planned movements . Since we have to place the swords on our heads while dancing, I've adopted a winning strategy:

(1) As I raise the sword up I tell myself: "It's going to stay on." The Power of Positive Thinking.

(2) As I place it on my head, I rub it back and forth a few times on the balancing point to "screw it in." I may go bald in that spot, but as long as I don't humiliate myself by having the sword fall, I don't care.

So far, so good. If I feel that the sword isn't quite perfect, I've broken down my resolve to never touch the sword and instead just tweak it withing the first 30 seconds or so of balancing. No reason to suffer for the rest of the song and have my eyebrows look all scrunchy and worried. It's better to feel confident that it's on there real good.

And then there's the group cane number. I'm still worried that someone may lose an eye or break a window, but it's coming along. We'll get there.

I'm starting a 54 day rosary novena on Monday, so I'll be reporting in then. :)

1 comment:

  1. Oh dear, Annamarie has been crawling the stairs for the past month. She's so fast too! Just hear one little hand hit the stairs and by the time you're over there she's already half way up! We've tried stairs, she's determined and crawls through the legs!

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