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Friday, March 19, 1999
One year ago: Surreality
Just at the time I would normally have been leaving the office today, they had a small gathering in one of the conference rooms to show off the winners of the DHTML Behaviors contest -- the internal winners, that is. There are others from people external to Microsoft that got some substantial prizes. The internal winners got gift certificates for dinner and stuff like that.
So we crowded in to the conference room and snacked on chicken wings, raw vegetables, and those jalepeño poppers. The winners came up to the front of the room and showed off their entries. I was impressed by the cleverness and usefulness of the behaviors! One is already being used by our test team for debugging pages -- HTMLSpy. There's a video soccer game that was fun, too! I looked around the room and really felt a sense of pride and team spirit, so I guess the meeting fulfilled its purpose.
But by the time we were done, the traffic was very bad. I waited in my office until it lightened up.
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I had time to walk into my apartment, change my clothes to dance clothes, then leave immediately to walk the few blocks to Friday Night Practice at the Savoy Swing Club. There wasn't a huge crowd; I think many people went directly to the Russian Center for the dance being held there that night. The lesson for the evening was on dipping, where the lead bends over, holding the follow in his arms. This takes practice and you should know what you are doing, or you could drop your partner on her head! I don't know if the short-lesson setting was the best for this, but I did learn something, especially for the basic version they showed us. The more complicated variation coming from open dance position didn't get understood by some of the leads, so I found myself being led in different directions with each new partner.
Some folks were filling out their sign-up forms for Catalina swing dance camp, held in Southern California each year around Memorial Day. I'll go one of these years, but for right now I'll continue with the film festival. I was quizzing people as to what their evening plans were: go to the dance at the Russian Center? It seems that John Holt's band has really improved lately -- or go to the new-ish event at the Ballard Eagles lodge, Mid-Tempo Madness, promoted by DJ Leslie's CSL Productions. Joe Ross and "Superstar" Jen Paur teach the lesson there, and I wanted to support them so I decided on Mid-Tempo Madness.
I drove over to Ballard. When Jen and Joe had talked about there not being a big crowd, I had no idea how small a crowd they meant! The lesson had finished a short while before I got there, and I think I saw about eight people in the room, not counting some by the bar. So Joe and I danced a few songs, we chatted a while, and I gave Jen a ride home. We discussed the possible reasons why they weren't getting much of a turnout, when the Saturday nights at the same location are packed!
I decided against going on to the Russian Center dance, since it was already eleven o'clock, and I had plans to go to a dance workshop all day tomorrow. I need to rest my feet!
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