For some much better Big Dance pictures, check out Brian Lee's album. I wish I could take photos like that. Someday I'll have to go and actually learn something about photography.

Well that was a fairly busy weekend I just had. Let's see what I can catch up on.

Big Dance was a lot of fun. Most of my photos didn't come out too well, but I posted a few of them anyway. There were some amazing performances this year. Some of the highlights were Big Air II (dancers flying through the air), a martial arts tango (two guys and Katie), and Swingtime (Go Kari! :-). Tina and I competed in the role-reversal swing competition but got tapped out right before the finals. Phooey. I also entered the polka relay race with Quetzal, where we had to use one of those large, noodle pool toys as a baton, but we couldn't use our hands. Our team got third place in that. Those noodles pretty soon led to all sorts of craziness. I spent one tango with Rebecca wrestling a noodle from Ben and Tracy who were going around whacking people with it. That was a moderately traumatizing dance. But there were a lot of good dances too, and I had a very good time. I was sure ready for bed by the time I got home at 7 am, though.

So I slept a few hours Saturday morning and then went to the Bridge Fair with Lacey and Hugo and Mom and Tina. And then I pretty much just collapsed in the evening, so that was that.

Yesterday we went up to Rossmoor for Mother's Day get-togethers. I didn't even bring my camera there, so I can't show you all how adorable Gia (my little step-niece) was. But it was fun to see everybody and Hugo got to meet a lot of our family all at once, so that was nice.

Okay, Big Dance is starting in about an hour. Lacey got here safe and sound, and she's napping right now in preparation. We'll see if she makes it until dawn. I figure I'll probably do it. Yay dancing!

I spent a couple hours tonight going through Project Read's old computer junk that's been stashed on shelves and under desks for a long time. I was just generally clearing things out and organizing but it was like a small archaeological expedition. There was some really old, useless stuff in there. Manuals for software we don't have, equipment that we can't connect to any of our computers, and even things I couldn't really identify. It was kind of interesting, though. And now we have several boxes of stuff to get donated or, more likely, recycled. The stuff we could ever conceivably use now takes up about one shelf.

In about a week and a half I'm going to teach my first computer workshop. So I've been preparing for that a bit, and I've got bilingual handouts and everything (though Georgina will probably do any on-the-spot translating that's needed). It's a little hard to anticipate what it will be like, though, since we don't really know who's going to show up. I'm figuring on having this lesson be absolute basics -- as in "this is how you turn it on," "this is a mouse, it doesn't bite," etc. -- since we know there are plenty of people who need that. But if a lot of people show up already knowing the basics, I need to be prepared to teach more. That shouldn't be too hard, though. And then after this lesson, we'll decide if we need to do more like it or move on to more intermediate things, like word processing or using the internet.

I'm looking forward to teaching the class. Being the computer lab volunteer (and now, part-time staff) has kept me a little more involved with the computers than the actual students. I knew that when I took the job, of course. The tutors are the ones who spend the most time actually teaching and I do a lot of computer and software setup and maintenance. It's been good, though, because I feel like I've really done a lot to make everything more manageable -- we don't have as many problems as we used to, and it will be easier to maintain even after I'm gone. But it is nice to do some teaching, too.

Speaking of teaching, though -- it's harder in Spanish. Thelma always helps me practice my Spanish when she's in here, but today I was trying to explain things about Microsoft Word and saving files. That's not the sort of thing I learned in highschool :-)

I just saw a list of money-saving changes the library is considering. It's scary how bad things are getting, budget-wise. They're already pretty minimally staffed here and now more jobs are going to be going away. The library might even start closing at 5 pm on some weekdays, as well as all day one day a week. The director is staffing the reference desk and Project Read people might have to start shelving books. They're already charging for DVD checkouts, like I mentioned before. Sad.