Monday 20 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

Saturday night is the 50s and 60s night. So, lots of rock & roll dancing, eh?

Oh, did I mention? It’s +30°C outside. So everybody is utterly roasted. In fact, for the first time ever, they opened up the doors to the back garden. Most people seemed to spend most of their time out there.

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Saturday 18 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

Friday night, there were only 7 of us. In particular, no Helen. I ended up dancing with Val instead. It’s a pity, because we spent almost all night solid learning the Viennese Waltz. It was a tad warm for such an energetic dance.

I’ve always wanted to learn this. All of the great waltz tunes are all Viennese waltzes. Which is unsurprising, because the English are the only people who do the slow waltz; the Viennese waltz is the original and authentic style. But damn, is it hard work! Val is standing in front of my desperately scampering backwards. She keeps telling me that I’m not in time with the music and I’m going too fast, and yet Steve keeps telling me my timing is excellent. So there.

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Friday 17 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

So last night we had another Lindy Hop class. Only Laura this time, and only for an hour. It was more of a recap than anything else. Of course, I say “recap”, but Nicole hasn’t actually seen all of the steps yet. She’s hardcore though, I knew she would be fine. And she was. It was so nice to dance with somebody good.

The final dance of the evening was… absurdly fast. She loved it!

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Thursday 16 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

Wooo, boy! What was that?

Well, last night’s class was fairly uneventful. It was nice to see Nicole again. No Helen though. Apparently Pete may have a slipped disk, hence why nobody has seen him for weeks. So anyway, we did some dance steps. We did some Triple Jive. It’s all pretty standard stuff.

And then, right at the end, Debbie introduces us to… what the hell? OK, I have no idea what this thing is called, but it’s fast! I can’t even keep up. Oh my god! Way to end the last lesson this months.

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of that thing.

Looks like Nicole is definitely coming on Saturday. We’ve got another Lindy Hop class tonight; not sure if Nicole will come to that. We’ll see…

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Wednesday 15 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

Yesterday I commented that I should have baked a cake. Because then there would be cake. The girl sitting next to me seemed surprised that I bake. “Don’t you remember the cake I brought in last month?” “Really? Was I here that week?”

Well anyway, apparently there’s going to be pizza today. So last night I baked another lemon cake. They bring the pizza, I bring the desert. And hey, we’ve got quite a few eggs that need using anyway.

The cake didn’t come out quite as well as I’d hoped, but it still looks good. The biggest problem was assembling it rather than eating it! My supper was quite late…

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Saturday 11 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

No Debbie in class on Wednesday. Instead we have the lovely Laura. No Nicole either; she still can’t breathe properly. So I ended up with Elaine. Nothing much particularly exciting happened; we just went over a lot of old stuff. A brisk stroll, Tiger Feet, Baby Workout, a couple of move combinations, and a little Triple Jive at the end.

Friday we were down to just 4 couples. Helen asked me whether the class will continue; all I know is that they shut the dance school over summer for a reason. We spent most of the class doing some new stuff in the Rumba. I must say, I like having Helen in “cuddle hold”. Even if neither of us are particularly sure what she’s supposed to do there. And we finished with a Catherine Waltz (thanks Helen), but started slightly too late because I went off on the wrong foot. So we spent the whole track a few steps behind.

Helen says she can’t make the exam dates because her flights have been moved. Ah well. Hopefully I can still do some rock & roll &mash; if Nicole survives…

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Tuesday 07 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

On Friday Julie actually rang me to remind me about the Lindy Hop class on Sunday night. Nicole sent me a text to say she wasn’t coming. (She has some kind of respiratory infection, so she can’t breathe properly.) Helen appears to be attending the Olympics somehow. And a couple of other people weren’t there either. After the fiasco with the cakes, I was late arriving. So I ended up dancing with Karen. (There’s two of them, apparently.) Actually, initially I danced with Laura, who I wasn’t expecting to see there.

I only missed about 15 minutes. It all came back to be fairly quickly. Karen is pretty hopeless at Texas Tommy or whatever the heck that move is called. Some of the turns I have to sort of throw her around to get there fast enough. But overall it went OK. We’ve now learned a few additional moves, completing the sequence just before the end of the class. There’s a bit where we stand together and mooch around like a locomotive. Looks great done right, but few of us do it right yet.

Nicole would have loved the final dance. It was ridiculously fast. Even Debbie seemed to be struggling to keep up. By the end, her and Laura were the only ones dancing. Crazy people…

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Tuesday 07 Aug 2012 by Orphi the AweKid.

3pm Saturday, Eric announces that “you can have pie at my house, if you supply cake”. So I had to go bake a cake. It took about an hour to put the two cakes in the oven. I make a batch with 250g of everything (brown flour), split it into two batches, poured 3 tsp of Camp Chicory & coffee flavour and some chopped walnuts into one half, and 50g hot chocolate into the other.

They took a surprisingly long time to cook at gas 6. The chocolate cake even rose to a point, and then collapsed down again in the middle.

I topped one with Camp-flavoured butter-cream, and the other with chocolate butter-cream. Even though I sieved it, the chocolate was still speckled. I even added a little milk, but that didn’t help. Then mum came along and decorated the first cake with whole walnut pieces, and the second with chocolate hearts.

I hate coffee and I hate nuts, so I’ve only tried the chocolate one. It’s a bit dry, kinda crispy at the edges, and neither the cake nor the icing taste much like chocolate. (This did improve on refrigerating, though.) Oh well!

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