Burrito West Blog

I had a lovely birthday last weekend. It was nice to have it fall on a Saturday. It was very nice of the City of Vancouver to put on a party for me, closing streets and having concerts is a wonderful birthday present. They even lit the Olympic flame for me! Pretty awesome. I slept in until a ridiculous hour, covered in cats, then woke up to find Peter had made pancakes and bacon. Eventually we left the house to check out the street party, enjoyed a Bhangra band for a bit, watched some street hockey on Granville, then headed to the Pan Pacific hotel restaurant for dinner. It was their "Opera Buffet", which is a spread of lovely food (the lamb was pretty amazing) enjoyed while four opera singers entertain you. They even sang my absolute favourite piece of music in the whole world, the Flower Duet from Lakme - so lovely, I was in heaven! Having opera singers sing Happy Birthday to you will sort of spoil you for all future versions of the song, however.

It was a lovely day followed by a lovely birthday brunch with friends the next day. But the absolute best part of my birthday was the fact that it put my Charity:water fundraising campaign up over $1000!! I never imagined I'd raise that much money and I'm very very happy! I survived without the presents and am thrilled that the money that would have been spent on stuff will instead be spent to bring people clean drinking water which will save lives. How awesome is that? Thanks to everyone who contributed!

I really encourage everyone to give up their birthday/christmas/anniversary even for just one year and ask for donations to a charity instead - imagine the impact we could all make! It makes getting older pretty awesome.

It's kind of funny that we ended up at the Snowball Classic DanceSport BC competition last night. Right before I was at our Cuban Salsa class (Peter skipped, being sickly). I find our salsa classes so infuriating, they actually make me kind of angry. I really have been spoiled by our regular studio - they have given a lot of thought to HOW to teach dance, whereas the salsa classes just tend to show you a move and are like "do this". Uh huh. Could we get more specific on the "this" you're referring to? I mean, seriously. This current salsa class seems to be teaching the leads a few moves and the followers nothing. I just get two hours to blindly follow my partners. Dudes, I could do that at a salsa club, I don't need to pay for it.

To contrast - at our regular studio, they have things called "school figures" which are particular dance steps that they test you on and you have to be able to dance them alone, with no partner. This means you have to actually know the step (including how much to rotate). As a follower, it's easy sometimes to not think about it and just.... follow. There was one tango figure which had three rotations/direction changes in it - that school figure took forever for me to learn because I wasn't used to thinking about how much I rotate (I rotate however much my partner rotates me). But our studio makes sure I know it. I can't pass to the next level without showing I know the school figures. Meanwhile, in the salsa class, I couldn't show you any of the steps if my life depended on it, because I'm not being taught them!! I want to be taught them, but that's just not how the class is run. I tend to leave the class very frustrated and annoyed.

So the moral of the story is, if you're thinking of learning to dance - seriously find a good studio and instructors that don't just know how to dance but know how to TEACH dance.... because those are totally different things.

We'll survive the salsa - only one more class to go, then we'll get to dance for real in Cuba. Oh, did I mention we're going to Cuba at the end of February? My first time anywhere tropical!!

Dude, we just got back from an evening of ballroom dance competition (watching, I mean - we're not crazy) and it was nutz. Seriously, these people are intense and amazing.

The outfits are over the top, the dance moves are insane fast, it's all just very impressive to see in person.

A few photos, to try and give a sample of the colours and sparkle and speed. More later, if I find any that are not blurry.

(First photo is the under 21 Standard finalists - that means waltz, foxtrot, paso doble, etc., they were particularly colourful.)

I'm not a resolution-making kind of person - I think it's silly for today-me to make committments that tomorrow-me or next-month-me might want no part of. But I usually start out the year with some general ideas of things I might try to do differently. It's a subtle difference, but one that means I don't feel like a failure when I don't get around to it or I change my mind. :)

This year my thought was to spend less time crafting and to give writing a try again. I used to write all the time, but I hit a wall on a big project and really got stalled. Then I just couldn't find any inspiration for new projects, and even when I set aside time to write, I wouldn't get anywhere. I lost my mojo. So, I moved on to other things - there are fifty million different things to do in life, after all!

Last year I started to think that perhaps I was using too much of my creative energy on my crafting - and I generally had the feeling that crafting was taking over my life more than was perhaps appropriate. This led to two thoughts - 1) that I might try in 2011 to craft less and see if my writing inspiration would return, and 2) that I should probably let go of my floor loom. Of all my crafts, weaving is probably my least favourite (I still like it, but it's at the bottom of a fairly long list)... and it takes up a disproportionate amount of space in our tiny apartment.

I figured I'd tackle item 1 first, since letting go of craft supplies goes against my nature and will be very hard. And item 1 has been going very well! The thing that really got me started with writing again has been a bit of software. One of the reasons I hit a wall in my massive project was because I had plot issues, but the story was so long it was hard to get a handle on it and how to fix it. So this year I googled around for writing software and discovered Scrivener - which used to exist only for Macs, but they've got a beta version for Windows now. I downloaded it, watched the tutorial, and started to think my dreams had come true.

This software is all about organizing (and editing) your writing (fiction or non) - it lets you see just your outline, or your synopsis, or chapter, or scene or the whole thing - whatever you need to see. It's all there, in one file, but you can control what level you're looking at. I imported my massive project and started breaking it down into sections and scenes - that alone helped me understand my plot issues better. Then I started putting in placeholder scenes in the outline, things I needed to fix up the plot - that became much easier when I could see the whole thing and easily rearrange things. I even did the hard thing - deleted scenes that didn't serve the plot. I started to feel organized and on top of things!

I know I sound like a total shill for this software, but it has jump-started my writing again, and on a project I thought was a total lost cause. I still have a loooooooong way to go, but I can see a route to the end, whereas before I was lost, and it's totally thanks to the software. This software would be brilliant for school writing or freelance writing since it can store all your research for easy access and reference. Seriously awesome.

It's been good to be back at it.

Now, anyone in the market for a lovely apartment-sized floor loom?