Category Archives: work

A Break, Maybe?  

Dec 9

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I’ve started and scuttled four or five posts this week, and just now figured out that maybe (GASP!) I should take a brief break from the ol’ blorg. I’m not really doing social media right now, either. 

Now is a good time—this week has been jammed with rehearsals and, for me, last-minute learning of choreography for a piece that lost a dancer to illness (I mean, she didn’t die, she’s just out sick; fortunately, this dance is neither long nor difficult, so picking it up in two days has been okay). Next week is the last week of Dance Team for the semester, so we’re doing an improv workshop and team banquet on Friday. I also need to check in with my own wee group of dancers and schedule rehearsals for “Work Song.”

Class updates: Thursday class is on hiatus until after Nutcracker (because BW is Dancing All The Things), Wednesday Class has a sub (who I like very much) until the end of the month because Killer B is also Nutcrackering (IIRC, on Key West!). Saturday class continues with excellent substitutes. I’m going back (finally) tomorrow, though I may just do barre. I chose to call it a day after barre on Wednesday this week, and I think that was the right decision, and while I’m feeling more like normal now, JP’s teaching, and I may or may not have it in me to do his full class. Sunday, I’m back to teaching.

I’ve put Monday class and all Tuesday classes on hold until I get my waterfowls in a linear array, because it’s the only one I feel the least bit flexible about. I’ve been having a rough time getting caught up on stuff that got behind behind at home  while I was sick (in other words, literally everything). That needs to get sorted quickly, and now (before we jump into the fray of “Work Song” rehearsals, Spring Dance Team, and Even Moar ballet) seems like a good time. 

So I am pretty sure I’ll be taking a one-week break, and I might make it two.

But I am, as always,  Not Dead Yet. 

And for all all those celebrating all the various holidays:

So paper. Many joy. Wow

Posted in adulting, balllet, life, modern, performances, teaching, work

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DanceTeam, Yeaaaah! 

Out girls performed on an actual stage for the first time today, and they blew me away. 

Not because they were perfect — they weren’t; nobody is.

But whenever one of them made a mistake, she just kept on trucking like that was exactly what was supposed to happen — so the mistakes disappeared from view.

Likewise, they all broke out of their shells. Apparently the key to getting this bunch out of their own way is to stick them in front of an audience of strangers (and let them bust some hip-hop moves in the hallway before they go on). We’ll remember that! 

The other team that made it to the show(1) was pretty awesome, too. They did a very different piece than ours, which which was cool. They have a couple really, really good movers.

  1. Of the remaining two teams that were registered, one evidently had the wrong address and got hella lost, and the other had a legit flu outbreak, which is not a big shock, since Louahvuhl is more like Flu-ahvuhl right now.

I was also really impressed by the fact that our team wished them luck, cheered for them, and congratulated them, and vice-versa. I can think of at least a few adults who could stand to learn that kind of sportsmanship. 

Anyway, our girls were thrilled, we were thrilled, and nobody went home in tears (not even our dancer who got accidentally elbowed in the nose in the locker room—she got herself together, got back out there, and danced her brains out).

It’s hard to express how proud they made me today. It was awesome to see them rise to this occasion like they did. So, yeah—I think by the time competition season rolls around, they’ll have no problem holding their own. 

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10/10: Do Recommend

Dec 2

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This is evidently what happens when I haven’t been able to dance—or do much of anything else—for more than a week, but I’m finally feeling well enough to do more than play “match 3” games on my tablet and sleep. 

I read.

(Okay, I read anyway; I’m a compulsive reader.)

Specifically, I fall down rabbit holes all over the Internet, then find myself googling related or semi-related things and falling down, I don’t know, jackrabbit holes. The game is afoot, but I’m cozily tucked up in its living room.

Anyway, I just happened upon a Ravishly post titled, “I’m Not A Stay-At-Home-Mom, I’m A Queer Housewife, Thanks.”

I was going to write something about the same basic topic (except, like, I tend to call myself a “homemaker,” because people still be like, “Wait, you’re a boy, you can’t use ‘-wife'” and arguing about it is tiresome, and for all that my cat thinks he’s human and would happily ride around in a baby carrier all day if I got him one, I don’t have kids), but,  y’all, Ravishly’s Katherine DM Clover has pretty much covered it (without even invoking the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which has depressingly little to do with Star Trek: The Next Generation).

So, in short, since this is a dance blog and you may not be super-interested in sociology, I’m not gonna be like OMG GO READ THIS AND THEN WRITE ME A 500-WORD ESSAY AND I EXPECT YOU TO TURN IT IN BY MONDAY, I’m putting it out here, because you might be interested in dance and sociology, and even in the power of language, so why not?

I also enjoyed a post about fancy food, to which I can say: yes, for the love of all that is holy, I’m having a hard enough time mastering Homemaking 101 without delving into the arcane waters of Organic Quinoa Coffee Flour and Martha Stuart Everything (and also, while I’m at it, why is almost everything they print in Real Simple actually really freaking complicated?). 

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Organic Quinoa Coffee Flour is inherently bad — just, like, baby steps, y’all. Baby steps. At least for me. Because I was raised by cats.

Um, I’ll be over here, trying to devise yet another system to keep from getting behing on the household book-keeping.

Posted in adulting, adventures, homemakering, work

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Break (Almost) Week; Reflections on Renversés and Choreography as a Process

Break (Almost) Week; Reflections on Renversés and Choreography as a Process

Nov 21

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Saturday, I spent four hours teaching, several more hours scraping paint, and two hours composing choreography before we went to a party that was actually very fun. Sunday, after acro and Acro Brunch, I spent an hour running choreography, then another hour teaching, and then untold æons (with, so really an hour and change, maybe two) standing on a ladder and painting the house while my hands froze in a chill wind in spite of my gloves(1).

  1. Note to self: wear winter cycling gloves next time. They’re wind-resistant.

As such, I opted to stay in this morning, do housework, and take evening class instead) even though I should really get back to doing Modern Mondays). 

The piece I was working on Saturday evening and a Sunday is essentially a 5-minute long comedic story ballet set to the 2nd movement (adagio cantabile) of Beethoven’s Pathétique. I programmed in a few renversés, and I realized while I worked the piece that not so long ago I wouldn’t have even thought of them. They just wouldn’t have occurred to me. 

BW and JP have really tuned up our renversés this semester, and as such they seem perfectly natural now. I put them in more or less by instinct where the music calls for them and the movement leads to them.

This is, in fact, true of a lot of movements in the classical vocabulary. Many things feel perfectly natural now that wouldn’t have a year ago. 

I think I’ve discussed my tendency to get get to the studio and instantly forget every step I’ve ever learned, then devolve upon programming a bunch of piqué turns and ronds-de-jambe (sometimes while thinking, “How do I get to the jumps?! Ack!”).  I also used to open every adagio piece with essentially the same sequence of développés and adagio turns that open Simon Crane.

Somewhere along the line, that seems to have changed.

This surprised me. Ballet is funny like that. It creeps up on you, and one day you discover that you are far more fluent in its language than you thought.

As a caveat, I must admit that I don’t know if it works this way for people who are genuinely new to dance. I think it might take a little longer in the situation, possibly. For me, the vocabulary was there but largely dormant; I could picture a dance, but when I tried to essentially run dance.exe to execute the dance, it was as if I couldn’t access the necessary files and code.

Taking class again for the better part of three years has apparently done a great deal of hard disk repair, kicking out the bad sectors and improving the connections between the good ones. The dynamic link libraries are once again accessible; the modules of code that create renversés  and cabrioles are no longer in the land of File Not Found (double cabs continue to elude me: goal one for 2017, I guess; double tours are probably goal two). 

When I go to create a piece that’s floating around in my head, I rarely lose the piece anymore. The vision and the finished dance usually match pretty well. I still mostly work phrase by phrase — visualizing, iterating, visualizing, iterating, then moving to the next phrase when the current one one seems solid, then eventually stringing them together into parts and finally stringing the parts together into a dance — but that may simply be my work style.

It also really helps to be able to remember the names of things. Makes writing them down much easier. The downside, though, is that I can now stay up till 1:30 AM listening to music and writing out choreography, knowing that in the morning it will still make sense. Or maybe that’s another upside, because it’s not like choreography didn’t keep me awake before. It just rarely turned out to be particularly intelligible in the cold light of day(2).

  1. Seriously, while working with BB, I have actually said things like: Why did I just write “effacé” there?! Éffacé what?! How? What does that mean? …Did I even mean éffacé? … Wait, I don’t think I meant éffacé.

So I’m pleased to say that this current piece, which I’ll be performing on 9th December if I can convince a couple of people to join me (there’s a second, far less technical dancing part and one brief non-dancing part), is not just a sequence of RDJs and random turns (it has arabesques, penchés, faillis, renversés, double turns, sautés arabesques, tours lent, and some other stuff, not to mention a grand allegro chase scene in the middle). Progress!

In other news, this week will largely be a break week, which means I’ll have time to catch up on household minutiae and start rehearsing “Work Song,” possibly, if everyone is available. After tonight, both dance team and ballet are off until next week. This will be a good week for reconditioning. You guys, I am weak. Between vacation and being sick, I have lost a lot of strength and stamina. 

So it’s back to eating for performance (with, of course, occasional digressions into the realm of pure pleasure) and training for … Erm,  also for performance.

And housework, because adulting never ends. 
Edit: PS – Señor BeastMode would probably like me to remind you that:

Renversé is not a turn.

Posted in balllet, choreography, fitness, work

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Meh-dern Monday

Nov 14

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I am definitely on the mend (the meh-nd?), but not yet well enough for class. I’ve got an inquiry in to my doc’s office to see if they want me to come back in. 

I stayed in this morning, slept late, and had really weird dreams that probably resulted from the fact that I was sleeping with my face shoved into a pillow that was, in turn, hanging off the bed and wedged into the Pile-O-Books that lives on my nightstand. I can’t remember what the dreams were about, but I remember thinking they were weird. 
Anyway. I read in the bath for an hour and change, trying to get the fresh cement in my head to loosen up. It did, to an extent, for a while.

Then I went off to Dance Team, where the girls were pretty awesome. AS and I restructured the rehearsal program and divided the girls up into discrete small groups, and that made a big difference.

I let my group choose a song to work on with no suggestions from me. They chose Adel’s “Rolling In The Deep” (yeay!) and I banged out the first few phrases and got them started. They did a fantastic job staying on task and picking up the opening choreography, including at least one fairly challenging move, so I’ve added some harder stuff to the section they’ll learn learn on Wednesday. 

On Wednesday, I’ll review the technical aspects of the today’s phrases, review today’s phrases, break the new steps down to get them thinking about technique, then teach them the new phrases. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ll do as a group.

Tomorrow, I’m going to have to see if I can find a pharmacy that actually has my decongestant. I’m now out of my previous supply, and the pharmacy I normally use hasn’t been able to fill my prescription, which they’ve had for a week as of tomorrow :/

I am audible enough now that I should be able to call their other locations and check around. I’m hoping one of them will have it, as my insurance only covers two pharmacy chains. I can go somewhere else and pay out of pocket if I have to, though. This isn’t an expensive medication.

In other news, I made Brussels sprouts for for the first time ever tonight. They were good! …Which was nice, because the cooking time recommended on the package was too long,and i was afraid they’d be incredible when I took them out of the oven. 

Anyway, here’s my recipe:

You’ll need:

  • 14 Brussels sprouts (or however many you need; scale other ingredients accordingly!) 
  • 1 – 2 tbsp (15 – 30.ml) olive oil or melted butter 
  • 1 – 2 rashers bacon, cooked and cooled
  • coarse salt to taste

Here’s how you make them:

  1. Preheat your own to 450 – 500 degrees Fahrenheit
  2. Remove loose outer leaves and cut sprouts in lengthwise halves
  3. Chop or crumble bacon 
  4. Toss sprouts in oil/butter to coat
  5. Place sprouts cut-side down on a cookie sheet 
  6. Sprinkle bacon and salt over sprouts
  7. Roast for 15  –  25 minutes*, until cut sides are golden brown 
  8. Remove from oven, flip sprouts cut-side up, cool for a minute or two, and serve.

*The sprouts came in a bag that suggested 30 minutes at 350 — too long at too low a temp, IMO. I did 15 at 500 and 15 at 350; next time, I’ll just do 20 at 500. Sprouts roast beautifully at a high temperature, with a lovely Maillard reaction where they touch the pan.  That’s why I put the flat, cut side down, by the way — more surface area for browning!   

I was preparing dinner to coincide with Denis’ arrival from a late evening at work, and the sprouts were ready a bit early. I ate almost all of my share before he got home. Thought about eating his, but I’m a nice boy. At least I’m eating again! 

I think I’m going to make these again tomorrow, so I’ll try to add pictures.

Posted in adulting, modern, recipe, work

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Things That Are Okay Right Now

On the upside, the meds are working (still no voice, but overall I’m starting to feel less like the sort of gross wad of chewing gum that one encounters on the pavements in various places), my DanceTeam girls worked hard today today even though they couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t demonstrate anything, and I should be able to do Thursday class with BW tomorrow night,or barre at any rate.

Posted on | Aside

Cooking with ADHD: Bread 2.0

Cooking with ADHD: Bread 2.0

Nov 7

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I think I may may have posted my bread recipe at some point in the past, but I’ve updated it a little bit, so here’s the update!

I have a kitchen scale now, so later on I’ll add metric mass values so those of you cooking in Europe can give it a whirl without having to guess. It works fine by the fairly-inexact American volumetric method, though! 

You will need:

  • 3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, plus extra for dusting
  • 4.5 teaspoons highly active dry yeast (I recommend SAF red; also, that’s 1.5 tablespoon, by the way; or if you’re using packets, 2 packets)
  • 1.5 cups hottish (not boiling) water (or 1 cup hottish water and .5 cup milk)
  • 2 tablespoons butter or olive oil (margarine or veg oil will work, too!) 
  • 1-2 tablespoons sugar, brown sugar, honey, or malt syrup (your choice)*
  • 1.5 teaspoons salt *

Ingredients marked * are optional. I like the flavor of bread better with salt (and need tons of salt because my body is crazy), but you can leave it out. The sugar/honey/syrup changes the flavor of the finished bread only a little, but it can help get your yeast going if it’s sluggish. Honey or malt syrup add a little moisture, but not enough to require adjustments (edit: usually).

I think you can also bake bread entirely without fats, but I haven’t tried it, so I’m not sure how it would turn out. 

To make the bread:

  1. Combine water, yeast, and sugar. Stir to blend them, then set aside. 
  2. Combine flour, butter/oil, and salt in a large bowl. 
  3. When the yeast mix gets foamy, pour it into the dry mix (if you’re using butter, the hot water will help it melt).
  4. If you’re using milk, pour it in, too.
  5. Stir with a stirring spoon to everything is fairly well blended (don’t worry — it doesn’t have to be anything like perfect!). 
  6. If you have time, give the ingredients about 5 or 10 minutes to rest. This lets the flour take up the liquids. It also lets you find some awesome podcasts to listen to while you knead (might I recommend the History Chicks?). 
  7. Squish everything together a little with your hands, dust your work surface with flour, and dump your dough right onto it.
  8. If you’re like me, set a timer so you don’t find yourself thinking, “OMG, I have been kneading this dough foreeeeeeeevaaaarrrrrr.” 6 to 8 minutes should do the trick.
  9. Ready … set … knead! Remember, no grouchy TV chefs are here, and even if they are, it’s your kitchen — so knead that dough in whatever way works for you!
  10. Ball up the dough, cover it with a damp cloth, and let it rise for 30 minutes (if you’re in a hurry) to 1 hour (if you’re not). Longer than 1 hour is fine, too. If it’s going to sit all day or overnight, though, maybe stick the dough in the fridge so it doesn’t go completely crazy.
  11. When you’re ready to bake, preheat dat oven — I like a darker, crisper crust, so I set it for 450 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
  12.  Punch down your puffed-up, self-important doughball friend, then shape your baguettes or batards or loaf or rolls or boules or what have you. I often do one baguette and either four submarine rolls or eight dinner rolls. 
  13. If you have time, let your dough rise again (like the Mary-Ellen Carter!) for 15 – 30 minutes. this step is optional, but gets you a pooftier end product. 
  14. Bake for 15 (for dinner rolls) to 30 minutes on or in whatever kind of pizza stone, cookie sheet, loaf pan, and/or baguette pan you’ve got on hand. You can probably even use muffin tins (though I haven’t tried that).
  15. Cool (preferably on a rack) for as long as you can stand it.
  16. The most important part! Enjoy your bread while collecting accolades from your friends and loved ones who will be like, “OMG, this person is amazing!”  (Unless they can’t have gluten. I should learn a good gluten-free recipe, because Celiac is no joke.) 

That’s it! I’ll try to add pictures, and someday, I swear, I really will do a video post about this. 

Edit: Oh, yeah. You can also also combine steps 1 through 4 and just mix everything together right away, as long as you have good yeast. I like to proof mine because it makes me feel like a mad scientist, but it isn’t really entirely necessary. 

When I make pizza dough (exact same recipe!), I usually omit the second rise. 

Posted in adhd, adulting, cooking with adhd, food, homemakering, mitzvot, recipe, work

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Lyra Photos! 

Nov 6

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This gallery contains 10 photos.

My friend Kevin Spalding is a budding photog of the first order. Last Monday, I took a metric shedload of decongestants and pried myself out of bed in order to go dangle from the ceiling with my friend and trainer, CL, and another classmate of ours, AM2, who works in television media and did some did some […]

Gallery |

Posted in aerials, artish, cirque, work.

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What I Do When I Can’t Dance 

Nov 4

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This week I came down with some kind of fever-and-sore throat combo. As such, I spent much of the past few days in bed, asleep, letting my beleaguered and probably overworked immune system do its thing. 

Today I finally felt well enough to crawl out of bed for a few hours, so I cleaned the kitchen and made a giant batch of chicken and dumplings for the family next door, which is wrestling with bad news about about the health of the husband (who is also Dad and Grandpa to a growing clan), and a regular-sized batch of bread for us. 

As an experiment, for for the the bread, I doubled the amount of yeast I normally use (a choice facilitated by the fact that I buy yeast in 2-pound packages; no need to worry about running out of little envelopes here). I’m surprised at how significant an impact it had — my bread is usually good, but this batch is really, really good. The crumb is light and springy, while the crust is thin but very crisp, and the yeastier yeastier flavor evokes the best pizza crusts I’ve tasted. I’ll have to try the same variation the next time I make pizza (FWIW, my bread recipe is, in fact, actually a pizza dough recipe anyway). 

Anyway, it occurred to me to be pleased with myself about a couple of things.

First, I know how to make legit chicken and dumplings from scratch — no packaged stock or anything — and it’s good enough that people request it when potlucks and and so forth roll around. That’s a minor accomplishment on the grand scale of things, of course, but for a raised-by-cats Yankee from a we-don’t-cook WASPy family in the chicken-n-dumplings deprived Northeast, knowing how to make from-scratch chicken and dumplings good enough to be requested even by quasi-Southerners is a pretty cool piece of adulting to master. 
Second, I know how to make good bread — that is, bread good enough that even my culinary friends with serious breadigrees (see what I did there? :P) have pronounced it “good.” I feel it’s worth noting that one of these friends is a Swiss-French pastry chef and the other is the person our local high-end bread bakery turns to in a crisis. They both know their way around good bread. 
I can’t take too much credit for that, of course. 

In fact, good basic bread is roughly the easiest thing in the world to make — mix up like five ingredients, knead for 6 to 8 minutes, cover with a damp cloth and ignore for an hour, shape, cover with a damp cloth and ignore for another 30 minutes or so, and bake at 450 – 500 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 – 30 minutes depending on what you’re ultimately making. You can even ignore it for roughly 30 minutes less, total, if you’re in a hurry and you use highly -active yeast. 
I honestly think the main reason people find basic bread difficult is that it’s hard to believe that something so good can be so easy, so they start tinkering with it. 
Anyway, neither of these skills are going to win me the Nobel Prize in Adulting, but you have to take your self-esteem where you can get it.

Preferably with a grain of salt and some good butter or maybe some hummus and a slice of havarti.

So that was my day today. Now I’m going to go read, write, and try not to eat that entire batch of awesome bread 😛

Posted in adulting, health, life, work

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Modern Monday: In Which I Psych Myself Out

Oct 24

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Modern Class largely went better today.

It was like my body suddenly went, “Ohhhhh, modern dance!  Why didn’t you just say so?!”

And I’m like, “Umm … it’s in the class title, so…?”

Some of this was the direct result of last week’s tiny class in which TB reminded me that I have no idea where my body is and should probably figure out how to find it.

Not that she put it that way — that was all me. TB always begins her corrections about my weird proprioception with, “You’re so hypermobile, which is great, and—”

So today I managed to remember some of the physical sensations that I’m using as cues to tell myself when I’m correctly placed and so forth. That helped.

On the other hand, I totally psyched myself out on the last combination. It was one that we started working with two weeks ago, then didn’t touch on last week. As TB began to demonstrate, my brain went, “Oh, this is knew,” but then when we started to mark it, I suddenly remembered that it was one we’d done before and found that bits of it were still familiar.

…And then, somehow, I completely lost it. At some point, some part of my brain said, “We are never going to remember this,” and I promptly lost the very beginning of the first phrase :/

So, basically, I totally used neuroscience against myself: I told myself I couldn’t possibly remember a combination that I ALREADY KNEW, got nervous, and not only failed to learn it, but started flying in “reaction only” mode, which prevented me from recalling the familiar parts.

Jeez.

Guys?

Take it from me, don’t do that. It’s the dance equivalent of being like, “OMG, I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN HIT THIS TARGET; I SHOULD DEFINITELY SHOOT MYSELF IN THE HAND NOW.”

On the other hand, someone else mentioned that she couldn’t remember the very beginning, and TB replied that always happens to her in ballet class — which just goes to show you that the familiarity of the movement vocabulary matters. I essentially never forget the beginnings of ballet combinations, though sometimes I forget important things in the middle or the end.

So that was modern this week, and now I need to eat lunch, do a bunch of household tasks, go make DanceTeam happen (AM is sick), and then run away to the downtowns for the ballet stuff.

Posted in class notes, ID-10T errors, mistakes, modern, work

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