Not so wow

Day 109 of practice.

After yesterday's partial success, I expected today to be even better. Instead, today was kind of weird. I had more errands to run, and I was just off. For instance, usually I'm starving for dinner by 6, but today I didn't eat until almost 9, and that was only because I realized it was getting late and I should eat, hungry or not. But then I was full and didn't want to dance for a couple of hours. I think that for once, I actually spoiled my dinner by eating cookies. They were really good cookies, too.

On top of that, my wonky right shoulder is acting up, making weird crunching noises when I do snake arms (note, it doesn't really crunch, I can just feel/hear it grinding, but anyone outside my body can't hear it). It feels a little better now, but I don't know if that's because I warmed it up and danced it out a bit, or because I rubbed some nice lavender massage oil on it. Anyway, that kept me from wanting to do too much slow stuff with veil and basket like I did last night.

So I did some isolations, a good warm-up, practiced my solo, danced around to a song I was supposed to practice my fast moves to, and danced to my random song of the day... which was "The Beast of Pirate's Bay" by Voltaire. That kind of summed up how today was different from yesterday -- instead of a profound experience, I had a silly pirate song. Which was, admittedly, fun to dance to. And it allowed me to work on my goal of practicing spotting while spinning. I think I found one problem with the technique I use for practicing at home. My usual "spot" is this weird candle on my bookshelf, which is below eye-level. When I switched my spot to be the dragon picture hanging over the shelf, above eye-level, I did better. So I'll play with that a bit more this week.

Now I'm going to go read in bed and work on my glute isolations. I did pretty well with glute shimmies during the Mira Betz workshops, but I haven't been practicing them as much as my oblique shimmies (which I like better), and now they kind of suck again. Note that "pretty good" for me with glute shimmies means "Oh hey, I am actually shimmying with my glutes" and has no actual resemblance to a well-done shimmy.