Jeff

Danse Libre's final season performance will be at PEERS Secret Agents' Ball TONIGHT, Saturday, 6 June 2009. We'll be performing three Ragtime era dances (hesitation waltz, tango, and a Castle walk one step) around 9:45pm, I believe. Some of us may also be helping with a Big Apple (everyone dancing) around 8:45pm.

General info: Class 7-8pm; dancing begins at 8pm; $20.

Since I'll be dancing on the Queen Mary next week (and leave Sunday morning), I'll likely be leaving PEERS shortly after our performance (after I change out of my tailcoat). If you want to dance, grab me on the early side or let me know so we can try to grab a dance right before I depart.

Another month goes by without time to write. Maybe someday soon I'll write more again.

Some of what I've been up to (in no particular order):

o family birthdays.
o severe allergies or normal kind of illness.
o trip to visit family. meeting my new niece.
o checking out the piano I grew up on and considering having some work done on it.
o dancing while traveling. reconnecting with dancers there.
o vintage waltz workshop in Lexington, KY.
o changes at work (as predicted, but having an impact on my vacation).
o only barely finding time for personal projects.
o turning an overbooked weekend into one of rest with apologies to friends events I had to skip:
- a play, recitals, dance performances, dances, friends booths and talks at maker faire, friends attending maker faire.
o registering for the Stanford Dance Weekend and hearing about a good friend registering, too.
o missing talking with various friends.
o missing getting together with others.
o trying to figure out how to get everything completed in the short amount of time I have.
o providing help for a friend and getting the opportunity to chat for a while.
o finally catching up with another.
o my own performance.
o dancing all night for the 4th year in a row.
o helping celebrate a couple friends' wedding.
o missing some a friend's band and other events to rest and take of my own health.

There were details I thought about and wanted to write up here, but they'll just disappear or be written about another time.

Next week I get to dance on the Queen Mary and will be visiting with an ex and good friend I met 22 years ago. It'll be great to meet her kids and see her and her husband again.

I'll be dancing at FNW in Palo Alto tonight! Richard Powers and Angela Amarillas will be teaching Frankie Manning's Shim Sham at 7pm. Frankie, one of the original lindy hop dancers from the 1930s, passed away this week, a month shy of his 95th birthday.

decadance will be performing at the first break (~9:45pm).

$12 for Classes and dance ($8 for students). Classes 7-9pm. Dancing 9pm-midnight. Casual attire and friendly dancers. No partner necessary.

Come dance with us!

Come see Danse Libre perform an approximately hour long show this Sunday, 26 April 2009, starting at 3:30pm at the Cubberley Community Center Auditorium in Palo Alto. Danse Libre will perform a variety of dances from the 19th and early 20th centuries (Victorian and Ragtime eras) in period costume. Each dance brings a period in history to life, complete with the music, dance, dress, and mannerisms of the time.

This FREE performance is part of the Adele Saxe Cultural Arts Series organized by the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center.

RSVP via the facebook event.

Performance details:

FREE
Sunday, 26 April 2009, 3:30pm - 5pm
Cubberley Community Center Auditorium
4000 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA 94303
(near the Mountain View border)

I'll be at the final performance of Cats tonight at the West Valley Light Opera in Saratoga. jhazen is playing Old Deuteronomy!

I'll be dancing at Friday Night Waltz in Palo Alto tomorrow, Friday, 20 March 2009. My former instructor Anna Botelho will be teaching some fun classes from 7-9pm. There are always introductory waltz classes downstairs, too. Dancing 9pm-midnight. $12 for classes and dancing. You should come dance with me.

Come dance with me at Friday Night Waltz in Palo Alto. Classes 7-9pm; dancing 9pm-midnight. $12 for classes and dancing; $8 for dance only. Casual attire; no partner needed. Friendly dancers!

Ack, it seems that I still haven't been updating. So, here's just a quick late notice to say: come dance with me tonight! I'll be at FNW.

My dance troupe Danse Libre will be performing Victorian era dances at the Stanford Viennese Ball tonight, Friday, 20 February 2009, at the Burlingame Hyatt Regency. Our performance is around 10:30pm-10:45pm-ish in the waltz room. I believe that tickets for the ball will be available at the door.

Life's been a bit crazy, especially this past week or so. Someday I'll get back to reading and even writing. Apologies for being out of touch.

Come dance with me at Friday Night Waltz in Palo Alto tomorrow. Richard Powers and Angela Amarillas will be teaching rotary and left turning Viennese waltz and the Rio Tango, a fun early tango based on the Astaire and Rogers film Flying Down To Rio. Classes 7-9pm. Dancing 9pm-midnight. $12 for classes and dancing. No partner necessary. Casual attire. Friendly dancers. There's also an introductory waltz from 7-9pm downstairs.

Hope to see you dancing.

Check out The Chaos Inside a Cancer Cell, a very nice visualization of cancer cell DNA rearrangement using sparklines in circles. The original article titled A sequence-level map of chromosomal breakpoints in the MCF-7 breast cancer cell line yields insights into the evolution of a cancer genome published in Genome Research is freely available. Choose the "Full Text (PDF)" link in the attached sidebar.

The same MCF-7 Breast Cancer Genome Analysis visualization is also viewable (in case you don't have access to the New York Times site) at the Genboree project site.

Since I'm skipping NAMM this weekend, I'm in town and will be attending Friday Night Waltz in Palo Alto tonight. Come dance with me!

I keep intending to write something, but the days keep disappearing. Because of my overly full schedule, I decided to skip some events.

Though it would have been nice to see old friends at the EFF 18th anniversary bash, I decided to stay home to rest and work on projects. It's hard to believe that it's been 18 years since I first helped out there.

The deadline is approaching soon. I started to listen more to various categories. Though something is wrong when the record of year nominations are just not good recordings (well, in my opinion). I was much happier listening to best dance record nominees. Though voting can be easier when recordings are bad, I still prefer that the music be good. Sometimes I find something new, too.

NAMM is next weekend. C doesn't yet have a pass. I still need to figure out lodging and let friends in LA know I might be in town. It's been years since my last visit. Alas, there won't by any demos of the upcoming LinnDrum II.

I did make some progress on coding. I may also skip a dance event tonight to get some more coding done.

There's a lot of continued dancing. Friday is Jammix. Saturday is FNW Contra+Waltz in Oakland with the band KGB playing. KGB wrote the music for the cross-step waltz mixer, for those familiar with it. Sunday is R.A. Blues (facebook event) in Mountain View. Monday is rehearsal. Tuesday is three hours of classes.

My birthday's today. From a combination of having an overly full schedule lately and the desire to just rest on my birthday, I skipped Dickens Fair this year. Sorry to miss all my friends in their performances.

Today is also the birthday of my friends Q and L. All of us were born in different decades. Q wished my a happy birthday via text message at 00:01. L and I chatted briefly and will catch up later in the week.

My birthday celebrations are often personal and multiple. I may consider seeing the musical Long Story Short, written by a couple musicians I know and playing at Theatreworks this month, one of my celebrations. Time for myself is another. The others are yet to be determined and will likely happen in the next couple weeks.

I was born right on the solstice. Apollo 8 was on its way toward the moon having launched several hours earlier. I have some of the Apollo 8 archive footage on DVD.

Today was mostly resting, answering birthday phone calls and talking with family and friends, programming for a personal project, and watching movies. There was even a little football in the mix. And some piano playing and improvisation, of course.

Now, back to Hellboy II, my weekly injection, and some further coding. Maybe I'll find time to write more here again.

Here are some dances I plan to attend in the next week. Come dance with me!

Friday (tomorrow), Dec 12th: Winter Tango
Lesson at 7:30-9pm, dance at 9pm. FREE
Stanford Bechtel International Center

Sunday, Dec 14th: R.A. Blues
Dance: 8-11pm. $10.
There's also a blues workshop from 3pm to 8pm (dinner break, 5-6pm) for $50 drop-in (includes the dance). But, I'm probably skipping the workshop to take some time for myself. I do plan to be at the dance, though!

Tuesday, Dec 16th: Swing Central's final dance at Foresters Hall. The hall has been sold. Carla will likely continue Swing Central at the Imperial Ballroom (a few blocks away) in January. The live band Jelly Roll Souls will be playing, too!

Friday, Dec 19th: Friday Night Waltz's Holiday Dance.
Danse Libre will be performing Ragtime era dances after the first set (~9:45pm). RSVP on facebook.

There are also a couple swing dances on Saturday, Dec 20th: The Rhythm Lounge in Redwood City and live swing bands at the San Jose Woman's Club. I don't yet know if I'm going, yet, to either. We'll see how I'm doing then.

The new musical Long Story Short by GrooveLily is being performed by TheatreWorks at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto this month! Note that GrooveLily is not performing in this production.

There are also GrooveLily Concerts and performances of Striking 12 with GrooveLily performing this weekend:

GrooveLily concerts:
Tonight, Dec 11: Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Cerritos, CA
Friday, Dec 12: California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA

Striking 12:
Sunday, Dec 14: Sunset Center, Carmel, CA
Monday, Dec 15: Little Fox Theatre, Redwood City, CA

If I didn't have DL rehearsal on Monday, I'd attend Striking 12. Hopefully I can find time to attend Long Story Short this month, though. Let me know if you'd like to join me.

To my knitter friends: Check out Spinnity's design for her awesome Larus and Ardea fingerless mittens in Knitty!

I'm still alive. The procedure went well, I think. The reality is we won't really know how much it helped for a while. It takes time to heal, then time to see if there's a difference. At least three strictures were widened, I think. The fever afterwards was not fun. Luckily, I finally felt better the day I flew to Oregon.

Thanksgiving break was nice. Relaxing time spent with a good friend. Taking it easy, talking, enjoying the day, walking (and waltzing) on the beach during overcast days, Thanksgiving dinner overlooking the ocean, seeing Venus and Jupiter (and its moons), showing Pleiades through the binoculars, a sunset (though not the completely spectacular ones I'd heard about; still nice), tango dancing, demonstration of dancing (cross-step waltz and the BNP), and good conversation and companionship. A very lovely Thanksgiving vacation.

I could have done without the 20-25 minute experience with TSA (no one else in line) searching and swabbing everything, including my hands. One of the bottles even set off a chemical alert. Not that they'd tell me anything nor give me a record of the incident. They wanted to open the bottles of Ensure. I don't think so! This is the most I've ever had to deal with while traveling with my Ensure. And, that includes the 20 8-ounce bottles I brought to Prague this year.

We had two dance performances this weekend: Friday at Friday Night Dance's holiday party (at Cubberley Pavilion) and today at the San Jose Woman's Club Teddy Bear Tea. I also drove up to SF to see decadance's holiday performance at Pier 39 on Saturday. Danse Libre has one more performance this year: December 19th at Friday Night Waltz. Come dance with us.

I managed to get a tiny bit of coding in, along with some overall thinking about the code. Hopefully I can make more progress on that this week. I'll likely refactor those pieces, but it'll be good to move the application to more than a demo state.

I have a bunch of personal work at home to take care. Things around the house. Things that need attention sooner than later. Let's hope motivation comes.

It seems that Foresters Hall has been sold. So, Carla is looking for a new fabulous location for Swing Central. If the new owners choose to keep the location as a ballroom, she's also requested that it could continue to be used for the dances. She'll hopefully have something new finalized soon.

In the meanwhile, you have until December 16th to dance at Swing Central at Foresters Hall in Redwood City. December 16th will also have the Jelly Roll Souls playing live music. There's a YouTube video of the band from their gig at Swing Central a year ago. Come dance with us! Hopefully I'll be able to make it and will definitely try for the 16th!

Perhaps after this weekend, some of my time will free up. Though, it's more likely that other things will then fill that time. ;-)

The conference I've been helping organize is this weekend. It actually started two hours ago. Due to a prior commitment, I won't be arriving until very late tonight. I'll be performing with Danse Libre tonight at the Stanford Fall Ball (in just 3 hours) and dancing some there. Then, I shall drive to Santa Cruz for the rest of the conference. Unfortunately, because of the conference, I end up missing a friend's birthday party and open house in Los Gatos on Sunday and will also miss the next R.A. Blues. Maybe I'll make it to the December blues dance.

One project at work is finally over with. Another (with lots of moving parts) is happening some next week.

Voting for one thing was skipped last week. Another set of votes was cast. Next month will be another ballot.

I'm hoping I'll find time to get back to a few personal projects. I did finally send out some tips on practicing dance; I hope to flesh that out more. There are some coding projects. Planning for a pie in the sky project. Working on more music. Planning for holidays. Moving a piano. And, really, hopefully getting to visit, too.

Waltz Weekend is next weekend! More dancing.

The Friday after that is a procedure at the hospital that'll hopefully help. I must remember to check with friends next week to see who might be available for rides. If the procedure doesn't help, then we'll use that as more data to support surgery as a possibility.

In the past month or so, a number of connections from my past have resurfaced. One goes back 20+ years.

Hopefully I'll have time for some lunches, teas, and dinners with friends soon. Or, even just spending a little time sitting on the couch talking. Life's been too hectic -- too crazy -- lately.

You know a wedding is good when you're surprised that it's already over and you don't want it to end. Many of my weddings this year have actually been like that. I just returned home from what may be the last one of the year for me. A lovely wedding of two friends who I met separately (as was last Saturday's). The bridesmaid was another friend I'd met at FNW back when I wasn't able to dance due to health issues and eventual surgery recovery. Back when I had long hair. It was great to see her again. A fabulous wedding. And some lovely dancing. Even with the rain, it all worked out well. You would never have known that it was originally to be outside. And I got to carpool with two other friends, at the last minute. Yay.

I realize that I haven't written much except for dance announcements for a while. I haven't really been able to keep up on reading other journals, either. Between work, my dance commitments, steering committee planning for a conference (next weekend!), weddings, and health issues, among other things, I haven't really had the energy to update. Hopefully this will mean I may write more again soon.

Nanowrimo started today. I'm not participating this year contrary to a dancer friend's insistence and whom I saw last night at two different halloween gatherings (I danced at both, even in the 2-2 1/2" platform shoes; I was back in the 1970s).