I have mastered The El Paso

Well maybe not mastered, but I woke up still remembering the steps, and that’s pretty good.

Jhim took me to dinner for my birthday last night and took me to Remington’s for line dance lessons. Dinner was great at Meyhane, nice Turkish meze place with great food and good wine, and we shared great conversation. I guess I’m still surprised sometimes that people find me the least bit interesting, but more and more lately I haven’t had any trouble keeping up my end of chats with people.

Line dancing was.. interesting, we got there just before it started, so I didn’t even get any liquid courage in me. Now I love to dance, however I have a little problem with quickly discerning right and left, it’s a tiny bit of dyslexia that comes from my father’s side of the family. I still do the hand thing to figure out that “L” is left. I can pick up dances from watching pretty well, and this instructor was very good and funny, however it was difficult to process both the visual and aural of watching him and his partner do the dance and listening to him call out left, right, etc. So it took me a little while to get into it on my own. It was easier with a partner, apparently the El Paso is one of the only couples line dances, seemed like a cross between line dance and two-step to me.

I’m actually a little grateful that the a/c wasn’t working as well as it could, since I had a decoy reason for sweating so much. There are beginner dancers and there are true beginners… I’m the latter when it comes to country dances. I understand the basic steps, just putting them together can completely confound me. By the time he added the second variation, a turn and backwards shuffle, I pretty much had it down. It was a fun night, but I learned that allowing someone shorter than me to lead, with shorter arms means I’m going to get bumped a lot on turns. And some of those guys were definitely enjoying themselves a bit much on the 4-count sway, then again the instructor did say “if you want, you can grind during the sway”… at least I got their names first. 😉

Tonight I need to do a big thank you post, probably with pictures for the gifts. I didn’t have anyone doing a gift book at the party, so I can’t mail out individual cards to people, but I got some wonderful things from my friends and some stuff just has to be seen. Jhim gave me a gorgeous candelabra, which makes one more piece of art I own that I’m afraid to set out, but I did promise that I’d use it. And others have said that gifts are on the way, so I declare my birthday-time to last until the final gift arrives. Sort of a conceptual form of time where the actual day can be extended into the past and future surrounding the actual birthdate, which is why people don’t find it odd to have parties the preceding or following weekend AND do something special on their actual day.

In other news, Marjorie got her software update, so I can transfer files to my computers for dvd/vcd burning and watching in other rooms. Now if she would only learn a bit more.. recording Happy Tree Friends is good, recording some show about tales from probation in Rhode Island? Very bad. Time for another internet session setting up favorites.