Why I haven't mentioned belly dancing in a while

Well, see, I bought this townhouse. And I spent all my time either packing, cleaning, painting, unpacking, organizing, reorganizing, re-reorganizing (I did the kitchen cabinets three times and I'm still not happy)....and I kinda stopped going to class. But I did intend to go back, once everything calmed down.

And then my teacher moved to Philadelphia.

Waaaaaaah!

Oh, she didn't leave us in the lurch. She has placed us in another instructor's very capable hands. But this instructor has changed the class times, and they don't suit me. There's a beginner's class at 5:30 on Wednesday, and an advanced class at 4 that same day. I work until 5 on the other end of town.

I realize that this is a flimsy excuse. I think I may just be a little resistant to the idea of a new teacher. I've seen her dance, she's very good, so it's not that I don't trust her. It's more that I don't know her. I probably should start out in beginner again, since she may have a different style, and a different set of criteria for what she considers "advanced." I think I might be able to make that class if I flex my work schedule a little. I wish she had something on weekends, but I understand how she would want her weekend to herself.

Alexa is still out there dancing and teaching, she's just doing it in Philly now. I think it was too hard to make ends meet in our little college town. As I said to a former fellow classmate I bumped into last week, "She's too big for us. Philly's about her size."

Here she is dancing at Rakkasah East 2008 last month:



Until I pluck up the courage to go to someone else's class, I'll probably content myself with dancing along to Shimmy (on FitTV) and dance lessons I find on iTunes.

Photo Sunday -- video version

I wonder if Delilah would do this, or if she'd hide from it.

And then there's this cat, who's so used to his owner's roomba that they put a cat bed on top of it:

Short one today

I'm working on another longer post that I'll publish soon. I need pictures, though, and I don't have them yet. So in the mean time, let me show you a couple of blogs I've bumped into.

First, there's Ezra Pound Cake. It's a recipe blog that I found while surfing around on the NaBloPoMo site. The food looks fantastic! I'm scouting around for recipes 'cause next year Thanksgiving is going to be at my place. I know it's early to start. I don't care. I want the menu set and ready to go by next September, so that come November all I have to do is buy the ingredients and get going. I guess this means I'll be cooking all year, trying to find what I want to serve. Anyway, a lot of the recipes here don't have anything to do with Thanksgiving, and I don't care! She had one a last week for a spiced chocolate bread pudding that used pieces of a chocolate chip kugelhopf from a previous entry. Yum! On both counts. I'm getting fat just thinking about it.

And there's Lunch Bag Art. This one got tweeted to me by someone here in town, someone I met at that Tweetmeet a few weeks back. (Did I ever say how that went? No? It was great! Met folks, made friends, am following & being followed by a bunch of interesting people). This artist draws on brown paper bags on his lunch break, and then takes them home and packs his kids' lunches in them the next day. So far this one is my favorite, and I don't even know what The Dreamland Chronicles are.

I've made a few friends through NaBloPoMo, too. Their blogs are on my blogroll now, and you may have seen them in the comments. That'd be Average Jane, The HotchPotchery, and Square One. Hi gang! [waves]

And that's about it for today. I'm starting to hit the NaBloPoMo wall, I think. Only ten days left, and then I can be quiet. Really, it hasn't been that hard so far. Just when I think I have nothing to post about, something happens and I say aha! There's my post!

Dancing squirrels, anyone?

If the squirrels I'm at war with would do this for me (preferably when the cat is at the window), I'd have no problem letting them mess with my flowerbed:




Heck, they'd deserve it.

I finally found a LOLcat I like

more animals

This points out exactly what bothers me about those things. My cat, if she could speak, wouldn't talk like an idiot. She'd sound like Blanche DuBois.

Trying out Pictobrowser

This is a nifty little widget. Thought I'd try it out and see if I can get it to work on my blog. Apparently I can. If you want to do something similar, just click the "INFO" link and you'll get instructions.

Do-it-yourself snow

The high temperature for today is supposed to be 57°F. That's just wrong. It should be snowing.

So I've decided to make some snow of my own at Popular Front's snowdays site. And then a few moments later I made some more. It's oddly addictive.

Anyone wanna join me? If you do and you want to share your snowflake with the other three people who read this blog, you could post the link for it in my comments box.--the site gives you the opportunity to send yourself (or anyone else) a link to your work.

BookCrossing's latest acquisition

Heading out for an evening in town, first to dinner then to dance class, I grab a book I bought years ago and have been meaning to read: God-Shaped Hole. I start into it as I'm waiting for the bus. About twenty pages in, I'm getting a bad feeling. By the time I get to town, I'm sure that I'm not going to like this book.

It's a first-person story. I don't like the main character. That isn't necessarily the end of the world. Have you ever read a first-person narrative where the character sets him/herself up as the protagonist, but the author gives you some sort of signal not to believe what you're being told? A turn of phrase, a skewed point of view, a fact dropped into the story that the narrator doesn't realize the significance of--it's a literary throat-clearing, a broad wink. I keep waiting for that signal. I'm not getting it. Oh, dear Lord. The author likes this woman. I'm expected to like her as well, and by extension I'm supposed to care about this idiot she's just met and fallen in love with.

I do not want to have dinner with these people. I have no other book with me, and the public library closes at 5 on Sunday. Ten minutes ago.

Thank goodness for Webster's, our local second-hand book store! For two dollars and tax, I buy an Agatha Christie murder mystery I've never heard of before (Towards Zero) and use it to replace the bunch of pretentious, angst-ridden, pseudo-intellectual twerps I was stuck with.

Now I'm starting to feel bad. Maybe I didn't give these people enough of a chance. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood for this book. Maybe I'll pick it up again in a few weeks.

Maybe I'll enter it in BookCrossing and leave the book out somewhere in the hope that whoever stumbles upon it will appreciate it in ways that obviously I cannot.

Footprints of the South Wind

A friend of mine reads for Librivox. Ever heard of it? I hadn't until recently. Volunteers take literature from the public domain, read it aloud, record those readings as mp3 files and ogg's (I think that's the iPod version), and put them on the Internet for anyone to listen to and/or download. Like books on tape, only...not on tape, and not just books.

My friend's been taking part in weekly short poetry readings, and the last one was of a poem called "Early Spring." The South Wind, personified, is doing his best to cheer and warm the Earth. There's a line in it that dovetails nicely with a photo I got yesterday on my way to the bus top:

"Clear flames of Crocus glimmered on
The shining way he went."

Ah, yes. The crocuses are blooming. Maybe now the daffodils will loosen up a little. There are plenty of them about, but not one one them has opened.

Please do go visit Librivox. There's lots of good stuff there.

Flickr Toys

Had a meeting this afternoon that just sucked the life out of me. For an hour and a quarter we had the conversational version of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Sigh. If I hear the word "dialogue" used as a verb one more time, someone's going to get hurt.

To cheer myself up, I decided to take up the challenge that Anna posted over at Self-Winding. I made this magazine cover using a picture of my parents' dog and fd's Flickr Toys. You can make movie posters, calendars, mosaics, all sorts of neat stuff. Go play with 'em. They're fun.