[MSN Spaces] Four day long weekends aren't long enough.

Another long weekend has come and gone and what do I have to show for it? Sleep deprivation. Oh, and some really good memories.

So let's see...

Thursday night, Holly swung by and picked me up to go skating with a couple of her friends (it's tough being alone with three girls, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do). The last time I had gone skating was a couple years ago. It had not gone so well that time. Something about the blades on the skates being so very very very dull as to be almost convex... Yep. Fortunately, this time around I got skates with a decent semblance of sharp edges. I was pleasantly surprised by how well I could still skate... and stop. I wasn't flying around with reckless abandon and speed or kicking up a nice spray of snow as I stopped like I used to in my younger years (when I would go skating every week), but I could get up enough speed to seriously injure myself or somebody else while maintaining enough control not to... or at the very least, the illusion of. But I longed for the days where I could just run onto the ice, instead of gingerly stepping on for fear of losing my balance and making a fool of myself. At least I didn't have to hold onto the side and reach with my skate; no, I could step on from the middle!

So yeah, we're on the ice, skating around together. Occasionally we'd do the little "Whip O' Death" thing, or I'd give Holly or one of her friends a nice little boost from behind. I think the easiest part, though, was when I just stood there in front of Holly as her friends pulled us along. Here we are, four of us skating around in circles. After my confidence in my skating abilities improved, I resurrected my age-old lazy skating style of hands in pockets and pushing here and there to maintain speed. Well, most of the time it ended up being a one-handed lazy style, as my other hand tended to be attached to Holly. You know how that goes. Fun time was had by all.

Friday late afternoon, I head out to a potluck BBQ for Rotaract members at Liz's place (was out at skating). I'm apparently now an honorary member by association. Twas fun. Hanging out and food. I got a nice comfy, leather seat, complete with great service by Holly. Life is good.

We started playing a trivia game called "People of the World" or something like that, but I had to leave in the middle to go teach at Swing City. Teaching went well, I think. I taught with Carolyn and it was the first time I took lead mic at Swing City. I've done it before at UVic (where I also taught with Carolyn), but I've only taught with Christabel and sav at SC. I usually defer to them. As for sav, you have to fight him if you want to talk.

Speaking of which, that was a funny incident a few weeks back. I was scheduled to teach with Tina at SC, but she was not feeling well, so she couldn't make it. Christabel was having a bad day and wasn't feeling great, so I asked sav if he wanted to be my follow. So I ended up teaching with sav as my 'lovely follow'. Was pretty amusing... especially with his "doorknocker" beard. (I'm sure there are other names, that just happened to be the first page when I Googled 'beard types'.)

Saturday night, Holly and I (gee, are you sensing a pattern here?) went out for dinner at SpiceJammer, a pretty decent Indian restaurant. Not the cheapest food, but the food is good. So far, we've pretty much traded back and forth picking up the bill and Holly picked it up this time. Old assumptions still reign. After swiping the credit card, the waitress brought back the bill booklet and set it down on my side. She came back as Holly was signing the bill and I noticed she gave me a quick glance. Entertaining, really. Chivalry ('new' definition, not the classical definition which few people actually know) and the accepted norm are still pretty prevalent. I suppose it would have to be to be the 'accepted norm'.

So after dinner, we go wandering the streets of downtown, with the ultimate goal of getting ice cream... well, gelato. We step into Oh Gelato! and start looking at flavours. As we're doing that, a group of people walk past and one of the guys (mid-20s) looks in and starts screaming excitedly! Was really funny! Anyway, we get a cone of Chocolate Raspberry and Mango Coconut and head out. It's kind of cold outside (~6°C) and we're walking around with an ice cream cone. Not really all that weird here, though. So we're wandering around and a group of girls walks past us. I distinctly saw one of the girls eyeing the cone with definite envy. Sorry, but this one's ours.

Sunday afternoon, I taught the last class of Swing 2. It's a lot of fun teaching and we had a good group, but there's just something about being finished with a class that's so satisfying. Especially when that class falls on my crazy hectic Sundays, which are now at an end... for now. Since March, my Sundays have been crazy hectic busy. I'd teach Swing 1 at UVic at 12:30 - 1:30, then a short break of a few hours, then teach Swing 2 at 5:30 till 7:00, then 30 minutes to rest, then team practice that goes till around 10-ish. With UVic having finished with the end of classes a couple weeks ago, I was down to Swing 2 and practice... but as of Sunday, I'm now down to just practice. It'll be nice to have some 'lazy' Sundays again. How lazy they will actually be is a whole other matter, though.

What did I do Monday, you ask? Not too much. Hung out with Holly in the morning/early afternoon, then went to the last class of Swing 4. (I don't care if you didn't ask, this is my blog, so you asked!)

And now for something completely different... a song for all of us Code Monkeys:

Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton.

That is all.