Miz Evie's Grub and Flop House

Cass is up in Livermore for the week, visiting the Fletchers and editing their Gold Rush movie (the one the barn dance was filmed for last year). So I drove out there yesterday to visit everyone, play some music, and see some of the movie clips. Unfortunately, due to some bizarre computer problems, they pretty much have to start over and redo all the scenes they already had, but they think they can get the whole thing roughed out at least by the end of the week. I'm really looking forward to seeing the final version. I got to watch a few more clips that I hadn't seen before and it was hilarious.

A Domain to Call My Own

I've been thinking that it might be fun to get my own domain name. Unfortunately "graham" isn't available anywhere (.com, .net, .org, etc.). I could get "gwaldon" or "grahamwaldon" .anything, but those aren't really that interesting. Something like whistledance.net might be cool -- that has a nice ring to it. I don't want to bother trying to work in anything about "page of stuph," because that was literally just a dummy title I chose when I created this site, and I never got around to thinking up anything better. So I'm still considering. Anybody have other suggestions?

All Gone

I decided it was time to put my hair into summer-mode today. Luckily, the experience wasn't nearly as traumatic as it was the first time I buzzed it all off almost two years ago, though it still elicited a surprised look from the barber. (Better, of course, than the outright laughter of the lady who cut it before.) It was kind of fun to let my hair get a bit longer for a while, but having it really short can be nice in a different sort of way. This may just have to be a seasonal thing. Here I am:

Before: After:

April Un-Fool's Day

The Friday Night Waltz last night didn't turn out to be a silly-song, April Fool's dance after all. I was kind of bummed, because Joan had mentioned doing that and I had been sending her lots of silly songs to dance to. Oh well. It was just a normal FNW, but luckily that still means it was a lots of fun. It's been moved to the same church as the contra dance, and I think we have a three-month trial period there before we find out if we can stay. Hopefully we will; it's a good spot.

Also not an April Fool's Joke: Gmail. It's real, in spite of Google releasing it on April 1st. I wore my new shirt (yes, of course we have Gmail shirts already) to the dance last night and found that it resulted in me meeting a lot more guys than I usually do at a dance. It was also a good way to find other dancers who I hadn't realized were also Googlers.

Step-Step-Tap-Step-Coaster-Step

West Coast Swing tonight was actually pretty fun, though Richard says we aren't allowed to make any judgments on whether we like it or not until at least the end of the next class. And it is a bit weird, compared to everything else I'm used to. But I liked how he eased us into it at the start of the class. He had us all do a bit of basic, no-triples, six-count swing, which we all knew. Then he evolved that one piece at a time from step-step-rock-step into the step-step-tap-step-coaster-step of the sugar push. It was pretty cool how that worked, though I don't remember all the intermediate stages.

So I got ahold of the sugar push pretty well, but then we went on to the whip, which is just a little too similar to a Lindy Hop swingout to keep it very clear in my mind. It seemed to me that the main difference was that the follows walked forward instead of sugar-footing, and the leads stayed pretty much in one place. Also, it was more slotted. If there are more differences (it seems like there should be) then I haven't figured them out yet. It was all I could do just to keep from slipping into outright Lindy. But it was a good start to the class. I think this could be a fun dance to learn.

I was also glad to be back in one of Richard's classes again. The last time was probably Waltz Week in June, and the last Thursday night series I took was a year ago, I think. There was a very happy familiarity to being there. There's also a very pleasing number of people I enjoy dancing with in that class -- enough that it will be hard to manage to dance with them all. Too bad we don't have time for more partner changes.