Hanging out in Sicksville

Sorry about the lack of a Beauty Blogging for Bellydancers column today, or really, any blog content at all this week. I came down with a cold after ballet class on Monday night and I have not felt particularly clear-headed all week. Any attempt to write a blog post would have ended up reading something like "Colds are dumb and so are undercutters. BAM!"

Anyway, I am feeling mostly better but I also have a raging case of what I call "sick face." You know how it is... nose all red and chapped, skin somewhat lackluster, maybe some dark circles under the eyes. It would take a whole lot of concealer to make me feel comfortable showing my face on the internet today! I really hope that I am looking better tomorrow since I will be performing with Skirt Full of Fire and Fire & Gold at the Fall Plaza Intensive Show!

Sickness aside, I am getting pretty excited for the Autumn months! There's a lot coming up... Vegas next week, then I go finally get my tattoo completed, then in October we have Tucson Meet Yourself and I have two weddings and (hopefully) a Beats Antique concert to go to! November will round things out with the All Souls Procession and Desert Shakedown. And that's just the stuff that I already know about. There's sure to be more great things in store.

Under the Weather

This picture really makes me giggle.

 

Why are you seeing a picture of a dancing dryad instead of a cosmetics review? Well, this week has been a bit of a rollercoaster emotionally and physically, and has ended with me fighting off a minor health issue. So while I have a ton of new products waiting to be reviewed, I am not feeling particularly presentable at the moment.

 

I have a performance Saturday night down in Bisbee, so let's hope that next week's Beauty Blogging for Bellydancers isn't titled "Products to cover up your sick-face and make you look remotely human for the stage."

 

Speaking of Bisbee, check back here on Monday for my review/recap of the Beat the Heat Bellydance Retreat. I'm looking forward to a weekend of dance, fun, friends, and even a little time with my husband. 

Hello out there!

Well, I have been spectacularly bad about blogging! I didn't realize that it had been well over a month since I updated. Time to dust off my communication skills and get back into the habit of regular updates.

So. Hello! I hope I still have readers out there someplace.

I've been quite busy while I've been quiet. The troupes were invited up to Mijana's in Tempe again, which required learning a lot of new choreos, developing a new solo, and sewing a new bra. There was lots and lots of practicing, of course.

Then I had laryngitis for the first time in my life, which was not fun. I had to text or IM my husband any time I wanted to talk to him, and I had to forgo all dance classes and troupe practices due to being contagious.

Then I went on vacation to Seattle, which was absolutely fun! I had never been to the Pacific Northwest before, so it was very exciting to see a new-to-me part of the world, and of course it was great to get away from Tucson's August heat and enjoy perfect weather in Washington. We chose Seattle because Dead Can Dance and Niyaz were both on tour and happened to have concerts there on the same weekend. What an epic experience! I cannot even begin to describe how amazing it was to hear some of my favorite singers live. We had front row seats for Niyaz, but it didn't matter for me because I spent most of the show dancing in the aisle. That evening was made particularly perfect by meeting up with a FB (now real life) friend and her SO for Persian food before hand and staying up late talking afterwards.

An unexpected bonus to our trip was that Tempest, a dancer who I really admire, had just recently moved to Seattle! I didn't get to attend her class because it was the night I got into town, but she did invite me to a world dance festival in Bothell (which I decided was pronounced Bot-hell), where I got to see her dance to live music by Nathaniel Johnstone. Awesome! We got to hang out and talk with them, and they are really nice people. Hopefully they'll bring their workshops to AZ soon! I saw a lot of other belly dancers and a bit of flamenco as well, and did a little shopping too (NEW BELT!). The Seattle-area dance community seemed well-rounded and everyone I encountered was friendly (actually, that goes for non-dance people too. I suspect there is something in the water there that makes people extra-nice).

Now I am back home, catching back up on all I missed. Tomorrow there are new classes to take, and a belly dance baby shower to attend (and dance at!), and then it's back into the swing of Monday rehearsal and after-practice drinks with the girls. I love my life.

Phooey

Well, here I am, sick again. I had to skip class last night and tonight. I'm frustrated, especially since I've had to miss a lot of Fonda's classes this year, but I'd rather stay home than be "that person" who spreads sickness to the rest of the class.

I just hope that I'm better by the weekend, so I can go to Jolie's community class to make up for last night, and go to troupe practice on Sunday!

My lungs!

I'm going to do away with the "Day X" of practice now, since I've completed my year of practice.

Today was my first dance class since getting sick on the 22nd. I'm still a little sick, still coughing mostly. So doing an intense choreo was maybe not the best way to get back into class! But I'm happy I went to class, because it was nice to kick the year off with Jolie and Brooke and challenge myself.

I'm still trying to decide what my goals are for 2012, and I'm reconsidering a lot of what I'm doing as a dancer, and trying to decide what my overarching goal for my dance career is, and what I'm doing with myself. You know, all that existential angst stuff. But enough of that. I'm going to go buy myself a shiny thing!

I've been sick

Days 356-360 of "practice."

I apologize for the long silence. I have been down with my worst cold so far this year. It figures that the one weekend when I have no dance plans and my husband is done with school for the year and has no major work projects is the weekend that I would spend sick in bed.

A quick rundown of the days I've missed blogging:
Thursday: Woke up feeling poorly, blamed it on dehydration. Went to holiday party in Phoenix, had a wonderful time. Practiced chest isolations and belly rolls while driving home. Felt pretty rundown by the time I got home and had to admit I was probably sick.
Friday: Woke up feeling horrible, spent maybe 2-3 hours total out of bed. Did a few isolations in bed but mostly dozed in and out while struggling to read a science book.
Saturday: Much the same as Friday, but with a few more hours out of bed and at some point I switched to a steampunk novel.
Sunday: Merry Christmas to me. Still sick. Felt well enough to dance in my chair while beading, though.
Monday: Yep, still sick. Did glute isolations while reading before bed. Hey, when I started this year of practice I had no idea that I could isolate my glutes. PROGRESS!
Today: Still sick but hopefully I can get in some sort of gentle dancing or maybe zill practice.

Luckily BreakOut is closed this week so I didn't have any classes to miss (and poor Jolie is sick, too, as are several other local dancers, because it is a BELLY DANCE PLAGUE!), but Fonda said she would have class at The Dance Loft tomorrow so I really hope that I feel well enough to do that.

Still going to do my best to continue daily practice even though I have fallen way short of my original New Years goal of 30 mins a day. Honestly, I have always done poorly at keeping to daily goals so I am really proud of myself for sticking to this one and only missing it when I am ridiculously sick.

This 'n' that.

Days 342 and 343 of practice.

I did practice yesterday, but it wasn't much and then I fell asleep before I could blog. I was feeling a little sick so I stayed home from class in case I was contagious.

Today I am still not sure if I am well or sick. I have that feeling that you feel when you have a cold coming -- just a little sore throat, just a little run down. But I've had it for two days. So maybe it's just the weather getting me down. So I decided to have a full-fledged practice anyway. Did some zills, did some shimmies, ran my solo TWICE because I have to perform it in 9 days :) Getting better with the moves but I keep forgetting to work on the emotion/character. Maybe I should put a note on my mirror to remind me.

Also today I signed up for the Amy Sigil workshops here in Tucson at the end of January. I'm excited for them!

Back to classes

Day 312 of practice.

Well, my cough is stubbornly lingering but I went to Jolie's classes anyway. I just stretched my way through the workout warmup part of it, with the teacher's blessing because she doesn't want me to DIE in her class. Although I think that might be good advertising for her: "Did you hear about the teacher whose classes were SO hardcore that one of her students fell over dead from the warmup?"

Had some fun with movement and shimmy layering. It felt good to be in class again, with friends and learning new things.

Coughing my brains out

Days 307-310 of practice, sorta.

Well, my year of dance kind of fell apart with this sickness. I flat out did not practice on Thursday and Friday. I was so sick, and in such a bad mood from being sick, that it just didn't happen. But you know what, I'm okay with that. I've been doing this for over 300 days and I only missed one before, also when I was sick. So I think I've proven that I can practice every day. I'm going to continue onward, having acknowledged the fact that sometimes I am physically and/or mentally incapable of doing anything that truly resembles dancing. From now on, sick days will be for non-physical dance journey enrichment -- maybe I'll spend the day watching videos on YouTube, or sorting through new music, or reading a belly dance magazine or on-line articles.

Anyway, the weekend was full of dance. I went to the Plaza de Anaya Intensive, featuring Elizabeth Strong and Silvia Salamanca. I couldn't fully participate, due to low energy and coughing fits, but even sitting on the sidelines and taking notes when I got too tired was fun and inspiring. Plus the show pretty much knocked my socks off! Other fun parts of the weekend were carpooling with Jolie and getting to know her better, spending the weekend with my great friend Jen, and being paired up with awesome fellow Tucsonan Gina and my beading belly dance friend SaraBeth for an exercise in upper Egyptian group dancing :) All that and I got a badass femme fatale hairclip from local vendor extraordinaire Kyla, as well as DVDs from both instructors so I can pick up more of their style when my health improves.

Now I'm left with a horrendous cough but a strong desire to dance (especially since my husband found more awesome music tonight), so I'm facing a week of going to my dance classes but dancing at partial capacity -- Jolie has already given me permission to skip the torturous crunches, push-ups and hip bridges during her warm-ups, probably because she's had to listen to me cough all weekend :)

Derailed

Days 305 and 306 of practice.

Not a lot of practice going on here these past two days, other than the stretches Jolie told me to do every morning. Yesterday afternoon I started feeling run-down and within a few hours I had a sore throat, a cough, and no energy. That has continued through today and it SUCKS! I have so much that I want to practice and no energy to do it -- not to mention that it's hard to dance through a coughing fit.

I HAVE to be better for this weekend -- it's the Fall Plaza Intensive and I am already signed up for two days of workshops with Elizabeth Strong and Silvia Salamanca! Plus I have a ticket for the show. And then I have the All Souls Procession Sunday evening -- two miles of belly dancing through a parade! If I absolutely have to, I can skip All Souls or just be there as a spectator, but there is no way I am missing out on the Intensive. I've been looking forward to it for MONTHS!

Paying the price

Day 233 of practice.

Well, I knew I wouldn't emerge from yesterday unscathed. I've got an ugly-sounding cough, and between the coughing and yesterday's dancing, my abs are already protesting. But whatever. I regret nothing! I had a wonderful time, and I really needed to get out and dance and meet more of the local community.

I do need to take it easy so that I can make class on Weds and Thursday, though. With that in mind, today's practice was floreos, hip slides, and rib slides. The slides felt really good, they're so much fun and it's good to stretch out the ol' obliques.

No class for me :(

Day 230 of practice. I think.

How many vitamins do I have to take to get rid of this cold? UGH. I'd just better be over it by Saturday, so I can enjoy the workshops and hafla that I'm already signed up for. I mean, they're actually in Tucson for once, I barely have to drive at all. It would be ridiculous to miss out on them. Plus I really, really want to actually see some dance friends. It's been weeks.

Practice today was more easy hand isolations, but I also broke out my veil and found that I can still use it. My thumb is healed up enough that I don't even need a bandage. I guess all of the vitamins went to that instead of fighting the cold? Who knows. But playing with my veil made me happy and helped me feel more dancerly.

Time for more sleep! Healing sleep!

More of the same

Still sick. Still unhappy about it. This is so frustrating. I have zero energy and I feel like crud. This makes 4 weeks in a row that I've missed my Wednesday night class! I really hope I feel better tomorrow so I can go up to Plaza de Anaya. At least I won't be letting Dawn down if I can't, since she has a meeting down here and won't be going up either way.

Practice remains gentle, easy isolations. Actual dancing is beyond me right now :(

Frig. I'm sick

As if 2 weeks of vacation didn't throw me off enough, it turns out I've brought back my least-favorite sort of souvenir... an airplane cold! There should be a law against sick people flying. Or maybe I should just give up and wear a mask.

This sucks especially hard because I'm supposed to take workshops and perform on Saturday. Oh yes, and I'm supposed to do a veil piece, but I snapped one of my thumbnails down to the nailbed, so I need to figure out if I can even use a veil with my thumb all wrapped up in a bandage.

In short, this week can bite me, and I am going to go back to doing gentle finger waves as my daily practice and bombarding my body with vitamins and tea.

Under the weather but awesome

Day 97 of practice.

You would expect that since today is Thursday, I would be posting about a lovely night of Plaza de Anaya dance classes. But no. Instead I feel like I'm coming down with something, so I stayed home and dosed up on vitamins, drank a million glasses of water, and sulked because I missed out on cupcakes in rhythm class. CUPCAKES!!! It's really important to me that I not get sick, because I have Mira Betz workshops this weekend! Not only have I been looking forward to them for months and months, but I already paid for the workshops and a ticket to the accompanying show, and it's all non-refundable, so I will be both sad and out of some money if I can't go. But mostly sad!

Anyway, my plan was to have a full-length but gentle practice session at home, work on my solo, do some Anaya Tribal moves, and play around with a song that I love and will probably dance to the next time The Dance Loft has a hafla (that being the only place that lets a solo girl like me dance to a song over 5 minutes).

So I warmed up, and that went well; and I worked on my solo, and while I missed a couple musical cues, I also found some good moves for a couple of spots I was unsure on; then my song came on and I was just ON. I went from gentle, fun moves to just relax, to really throwing myself into the music, complete with hair tosses and floorwork. Floorwork! Without knee pads! On tile! In shorts! I even tried that classic Cleopatra pose with an undulation, which probably looked ridiculous because I've never done it before, but what the hell. I was in my living room and the dogs were the only ones watching, and they clearly think all dance is ridiculous. The point is, in the moment I felt awesome.

Of course, then the song ended and I said "Wait a second, I'm supposed to be taking it easy, what was that all about?" and I felt a little overheated and beat up, so I decided to turn off my music, cool down, and I'll round out my practice with the hand drills that we did in Fonda's class last night, because you can never work too hard on beautiful hands.

I gave myself a rain check

Day 57 of practice, sort of.

You may have noticed that I didn't blog yesterday. I also didn't dance yesterday. Why? I was SICK! I had some stomach issues, and I was utterly exhausted. The tummy problems ruled out belly rolls, and nausea and dancing just don't combine well. I was going to do some arm isolations and maybe some zills, you know, take it easy, but instead I fell asleep.

Dreaming of dancing doesn't technically count as practice, I suppose.

After over 12 hours of sleep, I woke up this morning feeling much better, and I'm back in the dancing saddle. Today I started going through the belly dance music CDs that I purchased at the Borders going-out-of-business sale, and I started my flashcard project (making flash cards for all of my Anaya Tribal moves, and eventually probably flash cards for all the combos from prop classes that I have handouts from). After setting up a new homework play list, I got half an hour of practice -- shimmy warm-up, veil practice, Anaya Tribal fast and slow, solo, knee shimmy drills and lots of stretching.

Tomorrow, I plan to get an hour of practice to make up for the half-hour I missed yesterday. If the weather's good (which it probably won't be), I'll take my zills for a walk around the block. If the weather's bad, I'll do some drills from a DVD. And I'll definitely keep going through my music and working on my flashcards.

So my year of practice won't be quite perfect, but I don't intend to let missing one day throw me off.