Tough Tuesday.
April 13, 2010Spring Has Sprung and Set Me Free!
April 12, 2010
Cherry Blossoms at Sakura Park
I’m off! I’m free! I’m out of work for a whole month. Awesome! Now I can do whatever I want to all the time. It’s gonna be great! But wait… “all the time” is a LOT of free time. What am I gonna do with all my time?
I have several options and several obligations to keep me entertained between now and May 10th . For starters, My sister is getting married in June and I have a bachelorette party to throw and a shower to attend for her. Since she lives in MD and I don’t anymore, that means I’ll be spending at least two weekends on I95, in a Megabus, traveling between NYC and Baltimore. A maid of honor’s gotta do what a maid of honor’s gotta do, right?
Next on my list is taking some time to play with my newish, Nikon D90. I bought this formidable piece of digital image capturing equipment shortly after Thanksgiving this year and have been dabbling in the art of photo enthusiasm ever since. I say that I’ve been dabbling because this camera has so many bells an whistles (compared to my old Olympus point and shoot) that I’m sure I’ve merely scratched at the surface of this camera’s capabilities. I love what I’ve been able to figure out on my own so far, and I can’t wait to discover more. I’ve been reading David Busch’s Nikon D90 Guide to Digital SLR Photography for further enlightenment and I’m hoping to take a class somewhere in the NY area sometime soon. For now, I’ve included a link on the sidebar to my flikr account where you can check out some of my work. It’s a decent starting point, but I’ve got dreams, baby. It’s only gonna get better from here!
The other thing that will be keeping me out of trouble during my month of rehearsal free days is my 2010 New York Fitness Passbook. This book is the best thing to happen to penny-pinching, yoga-loving, fitness fanatics since spandex was invented! Basically, it’s a coupon book full of free passes to gyms, yoga studios, spas, and health clubs all over the NY area. (There are also books available for Chicago, Houston and LA.) Last year I bought the yoga book and loved it, so I decided to try the fitness book this year. So far it’s been fantastic. I’d like to blog about some of the really hospitable places I’ve visited in a later post. There are some gyms that deserve recognition for their customer service (and others that I’d hope to help you steer clear of.) So while I’m not dancing this month I’ll be gym hopping and working on my abs of steel.
Easter Shirts!
March 17, 2010It’s hard to know where to begin a brand new blog. Since blogging is not nearly as precise an art as say, writing a novel, I suppose I’d like to jump right in. I don’t want to start with a “getting to know me” post. This blog will let you get to know me as it is created. So, come along, enjoy the ride. Like I said in the title, it’s almost always an adventure!
A Classic Easter: Revised and Revisited
I have been on tour in Champaign/Urbana, IL for the past week rehearsing for a show that my dance company is premiering tomorrow evening. After touring to exciting cities throughout Europe for the past year, you’d think that spending 10 days in Illinois would be a little ho-hum. Well, thanks to the Schehlein/Swartz family and a good ol’ holiday tradition, this trip has been one of the best yet!
When I was a kid, my sister and I would dye Easter eggs with Katie and Chris Schehlein. Each year we’d put on our special egg dying shirts, do the “easter dance”, dye a dozen eggs each, eat bunny cake, then get awards from our mothers for having dyed the best blue egg or for having the messiest hands. (these awards were, of course, carefully planned out so that each of us would receive the same number of awards making all the kids equal winners!) It was a holiday tradition all of us looked forward to with great anticipation.
Then Easter
However, in 1990 the Schehlein Family moved to Illinois and left my sister and I in Maryland. Lindsay and I were completely devastated. We couldn’t fathom the idea of having an Easter celebration without Katie and Chris. But we had to make the best of things, Lindsay and I donned our shirts in Baltimore as Katie and Chris put theirs on in Champaign and we had a long distance egg dying party. For the next 10 years or more we kept the tradition alive by wearing the shirts whether we were together or not, and marking the date on the shirts with a magic marker.
This year it just so happened that I was scheduled for this tour to Champaign, during Easter. What a coincidence, right? Before heading to the mid-west, I not only double checked my luggage for enough dance clothes and pointe shoes, but I made sure to pack my old Easter egg dying shirt as well. When the big day arrived to head over to the Schehlein/Swartz residence to celebrate, I couldn’t wait to put it on. Katie and I were the only kids from the original kid quartet that could make it together this Easter, but it was our first holiday together again since 1990! We had a blast reliving the old traditions. Karen made us do the Easter dance, we pretended to have dyed a bunch of plastic eggs while posing for our annual egg and hand photo, we even ate bunny cake. It was a great day, and even though it had been years since our last celebration together, it felt like it had all just happened yesterday. Good friends and good memories really do last a lifetime!
Now Easter
