Friday 7-30 Just Another Friday

 

It's summertime

We have been virtually square dancing through Zoom for fourteen months and love it. We have met a lot of wonderful callers and dancers from all over the world. It has kept our skills up and personally I think it has made me a better dancer. The dancing is mainly two couples, where we dance with a phantom couple. A lot of dancers dance by themselves so they have three phantoms to watch. Sometimes I dance by myself. At the beginning the dancing was very hard but now we can dance full squares with six phantoms. Zoom allows you to select and make one couple full screen, this can really help if you get lost. We dance to Di Green and Terry McCann from England and Joachim Ruehenbeck and his partner Mariyam from Germany, both couples dance with their backs to us and become a mirror image, this helps a lot because we know exactly where to be. We dance almost everyday one to three times a day. Last year we danced 349 virtual dances and so far this year we have danced 301 dances.

As to live local dancing:

Brad Caldwell has a A2 club called Diamond Masters, he started it back up awhile back in a new location. It use to be at held at Zilker Park in Austin and we never went because it's so difficult to get there, but now Brad has moved it to Georgetown which is more convenient for us. We started dancing there the last Tuesday of June. 

The Sundancers Thursday A2/C1 tape group started dancing again. We started going the last week in June.

The Sundancers Monday dances started up three weeks ago. These dances are Mainstream/Plus and if there are enough folks Brad will call a A2 tip. It's been about 18 months since most of the dancers danced so Brad has called slower and walked through the calls the dancers were having problem with. 

Virtual square dancing is great and has helped our dancing but it's great to get back to dancing in person because of the atmosphere of people visiting, hugging and having fun. I'm not saying we don't have fun virtually but it's different in person. Even though we're dancing in person we still dance virtually. 

 

Get a partner and dance

We had a relaxing Friday. I hope you have a great weekend.

 

 

I started the day out doing the Daily Challenges and Event: Free Cell Mini of 5 games. It took me 17 minutes and 28 seconds, which put me in 32nd place in my group. I also did the Mahjong Daily Challenges.

While I played my games Larry finished a book and started another one on his Kindle.

We attended two virtual dances. First was Dayle Hodge's Weekly Four Couples A1/A2 at 11:00. Dayle called two tips of each. During the A1 session we had 21 participants and the A2 session had 19. Dayle was having problems with his external microphone so he had to use the built in one on his computer. He sounded like he had a cold but the dancers could still understand the calls. We had a fun time.

Second was Di Green's Weekly C1 Workshop at 2:00. I attended this dance by myself and Di had 35 participants. I had fun.

While I danced Larry continued reading his book. After Di's dance we watched an episode of the GizWiz.

In the evening we watched the Olympics. When Larry went to bed I started to watch the fourth season of Silent Witness. I ended up doing 27,000 steps, which put me in 5th place in my group.