roadtrip!

totally last-minute! david, jesse, and i will be hitting bal night in d.c. tonight, then driving to philly for a workshop with sharon davis and kevin st. lauren, then to nearby pottstown, pennsylvania, to dance to the boilermaker jazz band.

jesse and i survived teaching the intermediate lindy class together last night -- we're kind of a disaster since we approach dancing from such very different perspectives, but i think the final result, complete with last-minute compromises, actually went very well. so everything's sunny, and i need to pack!

oops

oops 1: jesse, nearby dancer shauna, and i attempted to carpool for dancing at william & mary last night. we had a a location written down, but we got there and found... no one. still waiting for word on where the mix-up was. we had a nice time eating appetizers and dessert at a local bistro instead. but it wasn't dancing.

oops 2: 11:00 p.m. is NOT a good time for lesson planning. not if lesson planning involves dancing and if the room currently featuring the most open floorspace happens to be above a school kid's bedroom. hopefully, one oops isn't enough to create a permanently hostile neighbor...

lines

i want better lines.

i'm not really sure how to go about getting 'em. best guesses = grab a private with someone who looks great, and get over it and start using video more to get instant feedback on what i look like. a lot of photos i see of myself these days have this slightly awkward look that makes me cringe a little, and i want to get rid of it. here, i'd say it's mostly just too much turnout and stiff looking arms? and i keep seeing weird amounts of tension around the neck, too. but anyway. yet another set of stuff to work on. (forget looking fat or making weird faces in photos... dancing's given me a whole new set of things to pick at myself for!)

any good tips out there?

btw, this one's from the swing dance competition in williamsburg on saturday. jesse and i came in third. the whole weekend was an awesome time -- if this was a mini-exchange, i can't wait to see vblx. the photo was taken by andy nishida.

mturk

an afternoon piddling on amazon's mturk for a grand total of about $3.50 is enough to convince me that it's not -- at least not yet -- any way to earn a living. but there's something strangely addicting about taking assignments to rewrite sentences for about 4 cents each. not as much fun as project gutenberg's distributed proofreading, but a little more profitable.

local public radio rocks

ok, so weekday evenings aren't really to my taste... but they have pretty fine programming, both local and national, all day while jesse's at work.

the real gem, though, we discovered this weekend. the saturday night fish fry was doing a show on v-discs, cranking out the bob crosby and red norvo. it took a while to pry us out of the car when we got to the dance we were headed to. if you're into that sort of thing, check the webpage -- archives available for listening.

we're online!

and the utility closet (opens from the patio) that the cable guy had to get into to get the data cable hooked up was scarily full of feathers and dust... i wonder how long it'd been since anybody had opened the door. i think it might be enough of a hazard to justify a maintenance call?

scattered

until i get a chance to call and find out why our home internet's still not hooked up, here are a few things:

• CHEX was super-fun. awesome people, lovely location, excellent DJs. geoffrey was the lone knoxvillain who drove over -- still enough to make me a little homesick, and i've officially realized the shim sham's just not going to be the same without him calling it!
  
• i like living near the ocean. it's still pretty obvious who's from the landlocked state.
• this was the weekend without a hairbrush. or a wallet. or phone. i left my purse in a subway restaurant in kenly, nc. fortunately, people are super-nice. i realized my mistake two hours down the road, got david's wife heather (also our lovely hostess for the weekend!) to look up the phone number, and called -- they had the purse and returned it to me on the way back through sunday. i owe big thanks to jesse and david for letting me mooch all weekend while wallet-free.
• the count basie ghost-band's appearance in the neighborhood = good occasion for a mini-exchange up here next weekend (memorial day). come play?
• i'm closer to unpacked. the boxes never end, though.
  

unpacking

all that was in the cube is now, more or less, in the middle of the new apartment's living room. i'm currently slacking at the library for the sake of an internet connection; the power at the apartment's off while the electric company gets it switched to my name. going exploring again is tempting, but it's cold and rainy and i really think i'd just as soon stay indoors for a bit and do some of the important stuff like getting my address changed all over the internets until it's safe to go home. (and, er, some of the not-so-important stuff, like catching up on the discussion boards.)

before everything arrived, i spent most of thursday wandering around downtown norfolk in the rain and avoiding worst of the rain by spending several hours in the chrysler museum. it's very cool; they've made "the cannonball trail," a big path around town cutting near all the historic areas. i managed to walk enough to make my legs pretty sore.

we went to a dance in virginia beach saturday night. it was planned quickly as a fundraiser for local disaster relief (tornadoes tore up the area a few weeks ago) and was up against a monthly richmond dance, so it stayed pretty small, but good fun nonetheless. jesse's signed us up to teach a couple intermediate lessons later this month, so i'm eager to get a better feel for the local scene and where we can fit into it...

homeless in hampton

just temporarily. i got everything packed up and the apartment cleaned up (eternal thanks to judson and shannon, who came over and helped!), turned in the keys on monday and drove up here
yesterday. assuming jesse gets the signature he needs, we should get our apartment tomorrow.

in the meantime, i've just discovered downtown hampton. it's adorable. and it has free public wireless. i think i might like this town.

because i'm five

i was too busy packing to fully participate in the kung fu fest at tyler's last night, but i took a break to see forbidden kingdom with everyone.

on the way out, i noticed that i totally had the little-kid-on-too-much-power-rangers urge to go try out a roundhouse kick on anything in sight.

i resisted.

fun movie, if you like that sort of thing (i do!), but i wish they'd spoken more mandarin -- i can pick out just enough words here and there to really enjoy trying to match up subtitles to audio.

party

one more for the posting blitz -- i looked back at the evite guest list and realized i'd botched it pretty badly... serious, there are customer service e-mail addresses invited, which probably means i left out good friends. so just in case anybody reads here, i'll post it.

party/swing dance tomorrow night (may 3) at the square dance center, 8 p.m.-12 a.m.
because today's my birthday. because i'm moving monday. because it's almost cinco de maio.
because finals are over and i want to see the college crowd who've disappeared the last few weeks. whatever. but if you're in town or find it convenient to get here, please do come. i have jeremy, joey, heather, and keith all spinning, so there ought to be good stuff for a wide variety of musical tastes. (as long as you like swing, anyway...)

tulips and moving boxes: a still life

i was on my way out the door to get a lock for the cube in the last post when i ran into the UPS deliveryman.

i really do have the best boyfriend.

i'd never gotten flowers via UPS before. that part's a little strange.

looking forward to seeing what the purple ones look like when they bloom...

cubed

this is the contraption into which all my earthly possessions (well, except the ones that are still hanging out chez les parents a decade after i went away to college) need to fit by monday.

wish me luck.

forget smart cars...

i want a custer car.