Week Odds and Ends

Just a little recap to end the week.

Sometime later this year, the studio is planning a new event which is kind of a replacement for the Showstoppers that would typically take place in May. Long story short, there are lots of things that happen around here in May so they’ve moved the Showcase to June. That has a ripple effect with other events. OwnerGuy explained all this to me but I don’t want to get into the weeds. Besides, he likes the idea of this new event (which he borrowed from another studio) so that’s what we are doing. I like that he’s open to shaking things up and looking to other places for ideas.

Anyway, it means there will be an opportunity to do another new routine which may then end up being ready for the Showcase in June. Because I’ve already got a Tango and a Rumba, I decided to go with one of the “other” dances and I’m going to try a Hustle. Why? Well I did Hustle in the past and kind of let it fall away. But they play a crap ton of Hustles at studio parties which may start up again in February so I figured it wasn’t a bad idea to get back into it.

I did another group class last night and this may become a thing. As I said, there is a lady who has been bitten badly by the dance bug and she attends everything. So I know I’ll have a partner and group classes are always better when everyone has a partner. It brings up a few memories of long ago (and not so long ago) because she likes to ask me if she’s doing it “right”. Dance is always about “right” and “wrong”. There are some obvious things like heel and toe leads but there are just as many places where you have options. Specifically, she asked me last night if she was taking too big of a turn. I told her that it was my job to watch her and end up where she did so there was no “right” answer. Given the struggles I’ve had with this concept, it was a little ironic that I ended up saying something like that.

Things may have cooled off a bit at the studio. We did have three couples for group class but I’m not seeing as many people on lessons. Still, they look to be hiring another female instructor so maybe there are people coming at different times. That is good to see.

At some point, I’m going to do another deep dive on the Corona numbers. The end of year disruption was a bit bigger than I counted on. We got a big dump of numbers the first week in January although that was mostly positive results so it made the percentage of positive tests go up. This week has kind of been a catch up for all tests so we see things start to go down a bit.

Roughly speaking, a lot of states saw dips in the number of cases over the last two weeks of the year and have now rebounded to pre-Christmas levels. Some states have started to drop again – these are the ones where the wave peaked in mid November. Other places continue to set new highs. It may take another week to really sort things out but in my normal data updates this weekend, we’ll have two full weeks of January which should allow for some type of summary.

A couple of things of note. The one site I use took down their front page graph of hospitalizations and went back to cases. And, the news media had several stories about deaths reaching new highs which is clearly not a good thing but I still maintain that deaths reflect more about where we were than where we are and much of that increase is because California was spiking right around Christmas. The numbers from there are still high and we likely will continue to see high number of deaths but I still feel we are closer to the end of this wave than the beginning.

Hard to believe that this weekend marks the mid point of January which is the longest, darkest and coldest month of the year. We are not quite a month past Christmas which means we haven’t yet hit what is typically the coldest time of the year and, while the light is starting to come back, the changes are really too subtle to notice. Still, for us, this hasn’t been a bad winter (unless you love cold and snow). Snow is way down and temperatures have been about average to maybe a bit above with no long cold spells so far. I suspect winter still has a few punches to throw but it hasn’t been bad so far.

I guess that’s all the assorted news from here. I’ll leave with a quote that seems relevant. The whole pandemic thing has just caused a lot of people to live with a significant amount of fear and stress. Some of that is justified and some is just caused by the endless stream of doom and gloom coming from our media. The challenge for 2021 is that so many of us need to learn to live again.