After 40 minutes lying on the floor of my living room, I'm back up. Bonita, having lost her sleeping place (my chest), is now stalking around with tail swishing, shooting me dirty glances. Well, I think she is, anyway...with her myopic stare it's kind of hard to figure out where the destination of those dirty glances is. I am rolling my eyes...generally I prefer cats to dogs because cats are more independent, and then I go and adopt a cat who turns out to be clingier than most dogs. Hrmph. Howevah, she redeems herself by being wicked cute.

Anyway, prior to the 40-minute crash, I spent an hour and a half clearing snow. It's now changed to "wintry mix", with ice pellets bouncing off my windowpanes. Blech. But it's a Snow Day! Which means I could finally catch up on some of the sleep I lost during my trip to Argentina. Snowstorms in Washington, D.C. on the way home meant I got to spend 4 hours sitting on the runway at Dulles and ended up arriving home Sunday afternoon, with little time to sleep, no time to replentish my empty fridge, etc. I was praying for a snow day, because progress reports were due today and I still have a stack of grading to do. Thank you, Winter.

So, once I finish my grading and cook some dinners and arrange Nothing Else Matters for ¡Tango Mucha Labia!'s gig next weekend and practice the violin and get my taxes ready to take over to the guy who sorts them out (a luxury that was necessary last year and that I now can't give up)...after all that I will sit down at the computer and upload my Buenos Aires pictures.

It's actually nice to be back in the cold (I know, I am weird). It's also nice to be able to breathe without choking. Between the black cloud of diesel fumes that hangs over everything in Buenos Aires and the cigarette smoke, "Buenos Aires" is a bit of an ironic misnomer. But more about that later. Right now I'm going to go cook and stand around in one of my new pairs of Tango shoes and think about how to describe what I'm going to teach the Tango dancers in New Hampshire next weekend before their milona. Dynamics? Musicality? Posture? I want to use the word "energy" but I don't want it to sound too new-agey...hmmm.

On Friday I put on my new pair of black tango shoes and washed dishes, thinking about what I'll teach before the milonga in Manchester next weekend. C. asked me to send him the title of my class so that he can publicize it. I finally decided on the following:

"Foundations of Musicality: Playing with Speed and Energy"
This technique class will increase your comfort and concentration during walking and pivots, and will help you achieve more dynamics in your dancing with complete ease of movement. We will use familiar figures to explore variations in compression and release of energy. Come see how easy it is to dance musically!

I wish I would have time to do a Boleo Clinic for followers, but sadly, I think it will have to wait for another day (unless I can figure out how to stick it in at the end). As I was thinking about compression, windup, and release, and practicing boleos at the sink, my floor became covered with black circles from the chrome leather soles on my new shoes. It made me think about how so many dancers spend so much energy trying to get their boleos to look right in the air, when the important part of the boleo happens on the floor. I left the circles to remind myself of this, but I suppose they'll have to go before Monday.

I could wait and save up money to buy another pair of ultra-comfy Tara Shoes...or I could buy shoes in Buenos Aires, and take advantage of the ridiculous exchange rate. On Monday, Dom and I set off on a Shoe Expedition. First stop: Tango8 and Loló Gerard, located across the street from each other in the Abasto neighborhood. I was looking out the window of the bus and knew exactly when we needed to get off: mannequins. On this stretch of Corrientes, almost every store is a mannequin shop. With heads, without heads, black, tan, lifelike and completely not...mannequin families in every window. Mind-boggling.

I did not buy shoes at Tango8 or Loló Gerard. Too uncomfortable and most styles had a far too open toe. I am not interested in getting my toenail kicked off. We lunched nearby and discovered the word for "fava beans" (porotos), which luckily went well with the beets we had ordered on our salad. :-)

During the afternoon we also went to see Fabio Shoes (for Dom) and NeoTango (for me). No luck in either place. NeoTango shoes weren't so comfortable either, and they had almost nothing in my size, probably due to dancers arriving for the Festival Tango de Buenos Aires and buying tons of shoes.

On Wednesday, after a quick stop at the museum of modern art, we headed to Regoleta for some sightseeing, lunched at the Design Center there, and then went to hit a couple more shoe shops. We stopped at Comme Il Faut, which was very quiet since they were closing in an hour. No shoes on display there--you describe what you're looking for and they bring you things to try on. No way. Totally uncomfortable and also waaaay too gaudy for my taste. Our last stop of the day was Segunda Generación. Those were definitely the most comfortable shoes yet, but I wasn't crazy about the style. They had a few classic styles, but looked like mostly a clothing shop. Hrmph.

Later in the week we went to Susanna Artesanal, and there I bought 2 pairs of shoes: a red pair that will be my "workhorse" pair: comfy, toe open enough for comfort but protected enough for careless dance partners, and a black pair that I just had to have. I'm not a fan of black shoes in general because I think they look kind of severe, but these sheer black ones were just the thing I needed.

An hour and a half before I left for the airport, I saw a display of DarCos shoes and totally fell in love with them. Next time I'll go visit that shop. I hope they're totally uncomfortable, because otherwise I will need a shoe budget. :-)

This week I've been agonizing about an audition I have coming up. I have to send a recording by April 20th. (Actually, I have a little leeway I think, because I'm auditioning for next year, not this year, but I'm trying to hold myself to this date). For the audition, I have a piece to prepare, and then I have to choose one other piece that shows my technical and interpretive skills. OK. So, the piece they gave me is...wow. Challenging. The guy who wrote it either really loves violinists, or he really hates them, and I can't figure out which. Howevah, I'll be able to play it by April.

This is very cool. I think I've crossed the line into new violin territory, because I can now easily play stuff that was difficult for me pre-MS. I have to be really focused and pay attention to my technique (I assume that after a while I won't have to think about it) in order to do it, but it's possible and actually pretty comfortable. For example, I can play a pianissimo triplet way up on the E string half an inch from the end of the fingerboard that leads immediately into a double-stop, (still with my hand up near my nose), with fingers practically crossing, and I'm able to vibrate on the double stop without really thinking about it.

Now I'm knocking firmly on my table.

The thing I've been agonizing over is: what to play for the other piece? Tonight I was going through a bunch of stuff, crossing things off, when I realized that I was saying "no" to pieces not because I didn't like them or because they wouldn't show my technique/interpretation, but because they were reminding me of things that had happened in my life when I had learned them. "No, not that one, because I remember when X played it in a recital and he was so pompous." "No, after I played that one X chewed me out in front of 4 Symphony players for something that was his son's fault." "No, I played that in competition one year and after I played, one of the judges walked up to me and told me how much he hated that piece."

Oh. So, if I resurrect one of these pieces I'm going to have to relive my adolescent angst and basically work through all of those issues at the same time I'm trying to train my body to play the piece? Yikes. No. Not if I have to record it in April. So I picked one of the only pieces that I've always loved and have wonderful associations with: the Barber Violin Concerto. I am crazy to try it. I know. But at least I'll be happy in my craziness. :-) I'm also happy knowing that I was being super sensitive about those pieces. At least when I have to go learn one of them I'll know that I need to be prepared for some emotional turmoil.

Actually, that's the second time in 2 weeks that I've noticed that I'm being super sensitive. The first one was last week with Dom. Lying down one night in Buenos Aires (doesn't that sound exotic? Oh right, that's because it is exotic...), I felt suddenly anxious, with a huge knot in my stomach. I couldn't figure out what it was...was it a sign that things with Dom were not good? Was I overtired? Had I eaten something weird? Then all of a sudden I turned to Dom and said, "you're anxious, aren't you? And you've been anxious since sometime during the concert?" "Yes," he said, "how did you know?" "Because I'm anxious for no reason." Yes, he was anxious, and I was the one in a panic with my stomach in knots. It is so warped. But once I realized that I was feeling his anxiety, then I could free it. I need more practice at this.

So, last week in my zealous cleanup of my PowerBook's hard drive (in preparation for upgrading it), I accidentally deleted the database for this blog. Ugh.

The good thing about being a programmer is that I didn't have to hire anybody to write a utility to walk through the tree of files, pull out the info I need from each HTML file, put it into Movable Type's import format (yay, date conversions! Woo.), and then suck the whole lot back into Movable Type, recreate the templates (which you can bet are now linked to external files...), and rebuild. While I was at it, I upgraded to the latest version of MT.

And the bad thing about being a programmer is that I didn't have to hire anybody to... yeah.

I hope this is the last big snowstorm, because my snowblower ("soplador de nieve") was not so happy about moving 10 inches of heavy snow + sleet. Now it's raining. Blech.

The great thing about getting a few inches of sleet and freezing rain on top of snow is that I can now walk around on top of my yard. Yesterday I met E. and her girls at her parents' farm and we all went sledding. The runs down were almost scarily fast and the walk back up the hill on top of the crust was easy, except for the occasional "aiie!" or "oof!" that meant that E. or I had suddenly gone through. N. kept jumping up and down, trying to make holes. I told her she had another hundred pounds to go. That was the best sledding I've had in quite a while.

D. and I have been talking on the phone (Skype on my end) pretty frequently, and one thing that keeps coming up is the importance of enjoying the process of doing something and getting better at doing something on your way to achieving the result you want.

Right now the Barber is pretty much kicking my ass. I have about 3 more weeks until I should have the whole thing basically playable and memorized in order to be ready to make a recording of it. It's too much, but in working out how to play this piece (and noticing what I can't play), I'm learning more about technique. And knowing that I have violin students who will be able to benefit from my own process really makes me concentrate on what I'm doing and ask myself questions about it and calmly (ahem) try to figure out why the heck I can't play this section when it doesn't seem that hard. Tonight I was able to vastly improve the technique of 2 of my violin students using something I devised over the weekend while working on the Barber. It took 5 minutes for each student and now they look totally different and are playing much more easily. It's kind of mind-boggling.

I'm not sure whether I'll be able to do fantastic spiccato in 3 or 5 weeks. It would be kind of a miracle anyway, since I could never really consistently do spicatto pre-MS. But I'm actually a lot closer to understanding how it works and seeing (partly) what I'm doing wrong. One step at a time. Maybe someday I can teach somebody how to do spiccato in 5 minutes--wouldn't that be a great trick!

It really is getting to be Spring ("Spring" only lasts 3 days in Maine, but we spend weeks getting there...): it's past 6:00, sun is streaming through my southwest windows, seed catalogs are open on the kitchen table as I figure out which permaculture projects I will tackle this summer. At school, they've finally fixed the heat in my room (just in time!); they discovered that a vent had been wide open all winter, which explains why I was often wearing a hat and scarf indoors. What was that about Portland Schools going over budget on heating expenses this winter?

Now I'm gearing up for this Saturday's TML performance at the Downeast Country Dance Festival, holding the last of my parent/teacher conferences, and thinking happily of Easter weekend in NYC. And really making an effort not to eat any Cadbury Creme Eggs. :-)

I was just about to go spend some quality time practicing, when D. sent me the link to OK, GO on Treadmills. What a masterpiece.