HAPPY FRIDAY!!
I just had to get that out first. This week has been a LONG one! But I made it to Friday and I have fun plans for this weekend (and a surprise!).
I teamed up with Dancesport Place again and wrote an article for anyone in a similar financial boat as me and finding themselves unable to compete.
Click on the image to check it out!
Coins have been counted, expenses have been tallied, and numbers have been crunched. It looks like the Girl with the Tree Tattoo will not be entering the 2016 Emerald Ball. Or any other competition for the rest of the year, unfortunately.
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Every so often I need a hermit weekend. That is, a weekend when I don’t leave the apartment except to walk the dogs. I need the quiet time to recharge and to gather and organize my thoughts. Between my day job, my writing, my dancing, my financial juggling and Life’s latest challenge, I have a lot on my mind! Sometimes it gets to be too much and that’s when I take a hermit weekend.
I swear, every time I start to feel secure in my plans, Life shouts “plot twist!” and I’m back to square one. But that’s what Life does, isn’t it?
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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I hope everyone had a fun and safe holiday.
Ready to take on new adventures in 2016?
After thinking about goals for the new year, a lot of other “resolutions” started popping into my head. Things that sounded good and I should resolve to do in 2016. But I won’t.
I’ll explain.
With the year nearly over, there is no shortage of goal-setting talk and new year’s resolution discussion. Some like making resolutions, some purposely avoid them. Others prefer to set goals rather than resolutions. I fall in the “set goals” category. I think it’s important for my ballroom dancing and the rest of my life to think about where I want to go because that will determine more immediate actions. So for this last Ask the Girl episode of 2015, I present to you my goals for the new year.
I miss ballroom dancing.
I haven’t completely stopped, but I am doing a lot less. So far in December, I’ve had two private lessons. In mid-November, I had to cut down from two to one per week due to finances. Then Teacher was gone for a week for the Holiday Dance Classic. This past week, we were supposed to return to the normal two, but Teacher cancelled the second one.
Two lessons. Normally, it would have been six by now! Or at least four, if you account for the week Teacher was gone for the competition. And with the holidays coming up, I might have two more lessons before the end of the year.
I miss dancing.
Two is better than none though, right? Am I just being ungrateful?
A quick post.
I came across this video on Facebook, posted by Steezy:
I love Mitch Villareal’s very precise, yet smooth movements. Every one is executed with purpose and confidence.
Oh, if only I could dance like that!
The ironic thing is the title of the video is the reason I can’t: trust.
“Trust” is going to be my key word for 2016. I know I have issues trusting others, but the harder thing to admit is how much trouble I have trusting myself.
Teacher brings it up again and again. I whine or fret that I just can’t get something right, and he comes back with “it’s because you’re not trusting yourself!”
Point taken, I’ll work on that. Trust me.
Today’s Ask the Girl episode was inspired by a conversation I had with the creator of freeballroomlessons.com. He specializes in teaching social-level ballroom dancing, but used to dance competitively. We were talking about how expensive ballroom competitions are, especially for a pro-am student like myself, and about the emotional rollercoasters that competing in ballroom puts me on.
He wondered, with all of the financial and emotional stress involved in competition, why do I do it?
A year ago, on this Thursday (although it was December 11 in 2014), I was in Las Vegas dancing in my second-ever ballroom competition, the Holiday Dance Classic. I didn’t sleep the night before, made my morning tea with hot water from the bathroom sink because I had no money left after getting myself TO the competition, and had an amazing time dancing.
It’s weird that it was a full year ago! It is cool, however, to look back at the four competitions I’ve danced in and see how far I’ve come.
Holiday also marks what would have been my first repeat comp. What would that have been like?
The Girl with the Tree Tattoo 