Vacation Eve

We leave at an obscenely early time tomorrow morning to start our vacation. By leave I mean we are being picked up tomorrow long before dawn is even a thought. The good news is when we hit our final destination, it will be sunny and warm and the ocean will be nearby.

I kind of have mixed feelings about travel. I’m kind of becoming a homebody as I get older. If they ever invented the transporter technology from Star Trek, I might feel differently because the whole process of getting from point A to point B is kind of a pain.

And, I always feel a little guilty about dropping the dogs at the kennel. This is especially true now that they are much older. I know the kennel is top notch and they’ll take good care of my pair but it isn’t home.

Much to talk about besides vacation. Yesterday was a busy day. My Friday trainer was going to be out of town today so we rescheduled our workout for yesterday. And Thursday was also another dance day. So that’s where we’ll start.

Yesterday’s lesson was mainly about Cha-Cha. JoNY wanted to work on the new steps OwnerGuy showed us and to link them together and then link them with the rest of pattern. For right now, he wants to put the new stuff at the beginning which is good in one way because it puts some flashier stuff right at the start. It is bad in a way because there is heck of lot of syncopation in those parts and it would be easy to get off timing.

Actually, the beginning piece is the grapevine which isn’t particularly difficult. It leads into the in and out triple progressives which OwnerGuy has fixed so that step’s OK as long as we get the right connection. Moving out of that step and into the syncopated breaks is a challenge. We took out the turn because it was just too difficult for her to turn and me to pick her up in time to start the madness that is the syncopated 5th position breaks. We did that part to a slow cha-cha and it was still a flurry of feet and legs and it was bordering on the edge of going out of control.

The transition to the old pattern was pretty easy. Part of the old pattern got carved out to make room for the new steps so we had to through in a cross lead to stitch the open part left by the removal of the puzzle. That went better than the syncopated stuff. We both agreed OwnerGuy was insane but then he showed up and just kind of shrugged at us.

We finished up with the Bolero and the parts OwnerGuy added. Because we mostly had the footwork down, he started focusing on the connection. After the snap spin, I bring her across and I need to get it set up so we stretch away from each other and keep that through the rest of the pattern.

Then it was on to group class taught by the new guy who did a Waltz pattern I’m familiar with – spiral turn. It was another big class with 18 people on the floor. Amazingly, the boy/girl ratio was perfect. Most of the people were couples which explains a lot of it. At one point, the ladies wanted the new guy to show them their part again and he asked for a volunteer from the gentlemen to lead him through the steps. I’m not always a good volunteer but it seems like a lot of the ladies just called for me to be the male dance dummy so I did that. The class was fun and it is about the only time I get to dance with a lot of the newer student. Most of the couples we have tend to be exclusive at parties.

Yesterday was, of course, Valentine’s Day. Now I probably sound like a terrible spouse since I was spending it at a dance party rather than having a nice dinner with my spouse. But we would typically do dinner on the weekend and we are leaving tomorrow for vacation so I didn’t feel so bad. I did buy flowers back in early February so she’d have the maximum time to enjoy them before we leave. If I had purchased flowers on the actual Valentine’s Day, she would have had 1 day to look at them and then we’d be gone for a week and they’d be dead when she returned.

The party itself was a lot of fun. I’ve had to skip the last two because of weather related issues so it was nice to stick around and just dance.

I mentioned my workout earlier in the day. I was trying to go over that in my mind and I can’t come up with the specific piece of equipment that caused the problem. I know I was doing a lot of things involving pulling cables with weights attached. Afterwards, I noticed that the skin on the inside of most of my fingers was dry and cracking a bit. It got a little more irritated during all the dancing. I’ve seen finger less gloves for exercise but that would be no help for this situation. Ah well, first world problems and all. I’ll be in a warm and humid environment all next week which will be much better for my hands.

The one bit of bad news is that I got an email right before I left work today. It is a meeting between me, my boss and HR to discuss my team. Because this needs to be done “ASAP”, they set it up for Monday when I return. The text in the email said something about how hard it was to find a time when we were all free. I was tempted to get snarky and say “sorry that my vacation time is interfering with your layoff plans” but I didn’t. I knew it was coming but it will be a quick return to reality once I get back from vacation.

So that was my day. I may or may not be able to find time and topics to discuss while I’m gone so if we go dark for a few days, you’ll know why.