pulse

yesterday, i started asking people the following question:

if you were to graph vertical position of your center vs. time as measured in beats when pulsing in your vanilla-est of vanilla lindy hop style, what would the graph look like? (no triple-steps necessary!)

i'm loving the geeky conversations this leads to. honestly, dancing my way past a mirror at a relatively steady velocity with a dry erase marker held at waist level worked well enough to convince me of graph shape... but the details of how the graph ideally lines up with the beats? that quickly leads to getting pretty deep into how to dance with swing music.

hopefully i'll remember to write up some conclusions when i get tired of interrogating people...

jetlag...

got me. i'm otherwise safely back from california, but after the overnight flight monday night, i slept from 9 p.m. until almost 9 a.m. last night -- making me late this morning and not so sure when i'm going to have time to do laundry before heading to enter the blues this weekend.

adventures were had. boyfriend's family and some of the friends were met. dancing was done.

but i'm just taking a quick break from work, so more on all that later.

sing, sing, sing!

thanks to swingdjs, i know that it's the 70th anniversary of benny goodman's famous 1938 carnegie hall concert.

i happen to be DJing our swing dance tonight.

i'm currently trying to decide whether playing the full 12-minute version of "sing, sing, sing" will get me murdered.

(i have to pack for a crazy early flight to L.A. tomorrow, so i wasn't planning to drag out the end of the dance, but this one might be worth sticking around a little into the "off-duty" time after 10 p.m...)

election info

just in case anybody else needs to know, tennessee's presidential primary election is february 5. it's too late to register for that one if you're not already, but necessary forms are here if you want to get it taken care of before november creeps up.

and, while the site for the state division of elections wasn't particularly helpful, knox county explains it all. in tennessee, you can walk into a primary and pick a party, no need to be a card-carrying member. (that was what i set out looking for -- i'm registered as independent!)

not sure that i will vote in the primary; i haven't done my homework yet enough to care very strongly based on issues, and pitting oprah vs. bill clinton hasn't tipped me towards one candidate.

but it's nice to know i can.

spoiled

an example of my mom's charming eccentricity...

on the way out the door yesterday evening, despite the fact that i've just come through and mooched laundry, a weekend's worth of food, a few audiobooks, and a pair of socks (forgot to put a pair on before packing up), mom asks, "do you need anything?"

nope, i don't, not really. after turning down a list ranging from extra blankets to laundry detergent to paper towels, i finally manage to shrug out that i keep forgetting to buy myself a new toothbrush.

i kid you not, she runs upstairs, two minutes later she's back with a brand new toothbrush... and not one of the free-from-the-dentist's-office basics, either; this one has full claims to special bristle action or whatever it is that's hot in toothbrush technology these days.

amazing. mystifying.

thanks, mom.

monster cat

mom's cat ramona, who's normally pretty cute, caught mid-yawn.

everest

odd little coincidence: sir edmund hillary's death was announced on friday. i happened to start an audiobook version of jon krakauer's into thin air the same day; while it's primarily about the 1996 disaster on everest, it provides plenty of historical context by talking about previous expeditions.

between press coverage of the first and six hours on the road with the second, i've suddenly wandered into knowing a lot more about mt. everest than i really meant to. it's fascinating. and thinking about it too much makes me really cold.

oh, and speaking of fascinating... while snooping around nationalgeographic.com looking for everest-related stuff, i ran across a gallery on a dino-mummy. i think dinosaurs and mummies were simultaneously just about the coolest things in the world when i was seven or eight (i came to this conclusion by trying to remember which elementary school library was linked with kids books about them in my head... odd, i have a much clearer mental picture of all three elementary school libraries i went through than i do of any of the classrooms). twenty years later, combining the two ideas is still pretty freakin' awesome. especially the photo with some skin texture poking through soil.

(must not think too much about science as i knew it when i was that age, or i'll get worked up because we're not hanging out on mars yet. we were so supposed to be by now.)