I seriously have been so busy. Just so you know.

My lack of updates isn’t due to laziness or slackitude or anything.

Anyhow, I’m seriously like, “ack, how did it get to be Jan 22nd already?” Because last I remember, I had every intention of getting some of my Christmas photos online. But that sure never happened.

Then, that first week in January, I had those belly dance workshops that I’ve been so worked up about for so long. Good lord it was a long week. The workshops were all with Denise Enan. And they were supposed to be Wednesday, Thursday, Friday evenings, then Saturday, Sunday all day.

After Wednesday night (6-9), I went home, took some ibuprofen, had a hot shower and fell into bed with a heat pack on my lower back. Thursday night, same thing. Friday night, I showed up for the workshop at 6, and we discovered that the studio space we’d booked was double-booked. And the conflicting booking had shown up early to get the space all set up – so, even though we’re pretty sure we booked first, she got to keep the space. But the conflict was all weekend. And the Saturday workshop was the big one, publicized and open to the public and everything.

So there was about an hour of panicky phoning around. Emergency space was found downtown for Friday night and Sunday. And one of the dancers talked the school she works at into letting us use their gym and their kitchen for Saturday. By the end of the weekend though, boy I was exhausted. We were trying to learn four choreographies in those five days. And Sunday morning, Denise said, “let’s run through this one,” and put on the music, and we all just stood there. With sixteen dancers, usually a couple of people will remember and they’ll shout it out, or you’ll follow whoever’s sort of got it. It’s a collective mind thing. But that day, even with the collective minds of sixteen women, nothing came.

That night, I got home, and I was lying on the couch and I thought, “oh shit. I forgot to write my novel installment for my public.” And I thought I should at least get up and send an apology email, or post the few words that I did have written. But instead, my mind went completely blank, and I went upstairs and fell into bed.

Anyhow, that was pretty much the significant happening since New Years. Denise Enan, for the record, was just awesome. I am not a demonstrative person, but she was so fabulous and adorable. Whenever she was talking or explaining something, I felt like I had to resist running up to her to hug her or shout “OMG. I adore you!”

I succumbed at the end of her last day, gave her a hug and said I was so glad she’d come, but it didn’t come remotely close to expressing how awesome I think she is.

I don’t know how old she is now – she did some of that careful sitting down and standing up as of one whose body has allowed a nest of aches to take up residence in it. And by the end of a day of dancing, she’d be hobbling a bit. But when she put on music, the dance took up her whole body. There was nothing held back.

Also, she has this adorable habit of finishing her toss-off statements with little qualifying comments to herself. Which I totally do all the time. Though when I do it, it’s creepy. And she is, as I said, adorable.

And then, since the crazy-week-of-dance, I’ve been knitting and drumming and writing. I’m feeling pretty good about my tendancy to spread myself too thin and want everything to be high priority. Things at work are humming along, I have lots and lots of interesting tasks and projects going on and lots of little things where at the end of the day I can look at what I accomplished and feel like, “holy hell, I rock!” A couple weeks ago, I was at my wits end with the kids. But now we’ve got them back in swimming lessons and we’re being more careful about enforcing time limits on video-gaming and overall I think it’s improved everyone’s mood. In the evening, I get out my darabuka and I drum for about half an hour, we eat supper, I do some knitting, then I play around on the computer, sometimes I write a bit. When Ian puts the kids to bed, I put on a song and dance while he’s upstairs with them. So, by doing a tiny bit of everything every night, I get to feel like I am making everything a priority and I don’t have to feel guilty about letting something slip for months (except for blogging!).

I don’t know how long I can keep it up. At some point, I’ll probably want to get immersed in something instead of being toe-deep in everything. But for now, it’s good.