So You Think You Can Dance

My guilty pleasure is "So You Think You Can Dance" and after a long hiatus, it is back.  Thursday was the first episode of the new season and I spent two hours this AM watching it on the DVR.  It amazes me that dance can move me to laughter, tears, and amazement. If you've never seen the show I highly recommend it.  The skill, the talent, and the artistry of the dancers is nothing short of astounding.

Today is the first day of the three day weekend and that was a good way to start the day.  My plan today is breakfast with friends, then off to see Men In Black 3. I don't know have any plans in the afternoon - I might kick out and play some pool, which I haven't done in a while due to the IPO boot, or I might just wander aimlessly through the afternoon. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, but it is very cool outside and it is not supposed to get up above the low 70's, so it is jacket weather.

Grace, Art, and Beauty

My dinner tonight was a simple but excellent Cobb salad. I spent the rest of the evening relaxing, then catching up with my DVR watching. I watched an episode of Eureka, I watched an episode of Haven, and I watched the Jon Stewart show.

Interwoven through those shows I was moving stuff from the kitchen into the spare bedroom. I pretty much got all of boxes cleaned out of the kitchen - they are now stacked in the middle of the floor in the spare bedroom, with the rest of them in the dining room. My kitchen table is still covered with books I haven't started sorting yet and I probably won't do that until Friday or maybe one of the other days this weekend.

Having officially recaptured my kitchen however I'm looking forward to cooking dinner tomorrow night. I've been eating out a lot and I can tell the impact of processed food on my system. I'm craving fresh fruit and fresh salads. Maybe an egg white omelet or two.

Let me entirely switch gears now. I'm not sure if you're fans of the show So You Think You Can Dance. If you're not you're missing what really amounts to being a truly incredible show. I've always been terribly impressed by the raw physicality and grace of dancers.

I remember when I was an undergraduate I had class, a theater history class, that was preceded by a jazz dance class. It was held in an auditorium and sometimes I would arrive early before my class began and join a handful of people watching the jazz dance class. Over the course of the semester I recall just a tremendous growing admiration for the sheer strength and stamina of the dancers. That feeling infuses me when I watch So You Think You Can Dance. This season has been incredible and it has come down to two truly amazing dancers - Melanie and Sasha. They are both simply dazzling. So, that is my little tribute to one of the truly entertaining pieces of television out there.

Since this is my three-day weekend tomorrow is my last day of work this week. I've got a small stack of meetings, I've got about 20 odd things stacked up in my e-mail box, and I've got about a dozen open tickets. What can I say - it's been a week. I'm definitely looking forward to the weekend. I really want to go out and see the movie The Guard with Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. My tentative plan is to do that on Friday.

So as I slide into the weekend let me do it in the state of grace, dazzled by the dancers on television, and anticipating the power of modern theater through the lens of filmmakers. It seems that I am ending the day in appreciation of the arts that so cover our lives, that so enrich us, that so dazzle us. The picture that graces the beginning of this entry are those two amazing dancers I spoke of earlier, Melanie and Sasha. This is link is to one of their routines that brought the house to it's feet - enjoy - Melanie and Sasha Dancing.

Daily Life: Num Lock, Egg Drop Soup, and Noil Silk

Well, it took me a while to figure out how to turn the NUM LOCK off on this laptop. In the course of learning that I managed to find out how to put it into battery conserving sleep mode! I guess we learn something every day.

I woke this morning for a dream of noil silk (a type of raw silk), of great bolts of it draping and cascading. It was a visually powerful and charged dream. The dream pretty much set the mood of the day for me and I moved through the day with an strong sensual awareness. Work went smoothly, productively and quickly. Lunch was a simple egg drop soup (not the best I have ever had, that honor usually goes to Tao Tao in Sunnyvale, where they make an excellent egg drop soup. I wrapped up the day reviewing a couple of training modules (all in all a vast improvement over what we have in place now), so that was good focus time. I like those moments in work where you lose yourself.

Dinner was a chicken Caesar salad and a bottle of sparkling water at a local restaurant, then a quiet evening at home. I spent most of the evening reading the last of the Robin Hobb trilogy I have been working my way through, called “Assassins Quest”. It is also an excellent read. I about twenty five percent through it and I will probably dedicate another hour or so to it tonight. I’ve also downloaded the Kindle application for my iPhone, which has me doing something I used to do years ago but fell out of the habit, which is read on breaks and at lunch during work. That is speeding me through the novels a little faster.

Then, I have Dean Koontz’s new novel, “Relentless” waiting in the hopper. (That is actually a tribute to Robin Hobb – I am a huge Koontz fan and when he comes out with a new novel he is automatically bumped to the top of the list – and in this case, he wasn’t – because I want to see how Hobb wraps up the Assassins Quest.)

It is a beautiful evening here right now. The day was hot, in the high eighties, and now it is dropping off into the seventies, heading straight into the sixties. There is still a band of soft gray at the western horizon and a few stars are peeking out. I’ve got all the windows open, there is a cooling breeze drifting through the living room, and having had a good conversation with my dear T.R., I am wrapping the night up with a little bit of writing and “So You Think You Can Dance”. It is a guilty pleasure for me, and I tend to be fond of guilty pleasures.

Daily Life: California Evenings

A quiet and reflective evening tonight. I enjoyed dinner with nephew Tom at the Super Buffet (a chinese buffet on Saratoga Avenue and Stevens Creek Blvd). One of the things I like about the buffet is the ability to fill your plate with a little bit of everything, which is also one of the things I like about life in general.

After dinner we wandered around for a bit and then I swung home and spent a very nice evening just relaxing. I had a very nice phone call with my dear TR, and then later, while I was online, I googled a video on the shag (the dance). I was pretty impressed - if you want to see something cool, just YouTube or Google "Carolina Shag" and look at any of the many videos of that particular dance.

I then spent some more time configuring this new laptop and probably have some more configuration work to go, but it seems to be "mostly there" now. It is a very nice machine. While I was doing that I watched the auditions on "So You Think You Can Dance" which is one of my guilty television pleasures. It was pretty good and parts of it were very funny.

Now, I am going to let this computer run for a while and install some Windows updates while I curl up with a book and read myself to sleep.