Dance, dance, dance

Wow, things have actually been going on here for the past week! And selfish me, I haven't been sharing with my avid readers. Well here I am! Let me try to make it up to you. =)

Last weekend my dearest, darling Colleenie came out to the Bay Area to visit! So on Saturday, John and I drove out to pick her up at the airport and play with her. We had lunch in Palo Alto (the Peninsula Creamery, joy of joys!) and wandered around Stanford for most of the afternoon. Colleen wanted to show me the god-tree, but alas, it is no more. Probably the work of a jealous god, not looking too fondly on idols, or perhaps just the machinations of an administration hell-bent on maintaining the necessary status of a campus as a perpetual construction zone. You be the judge =). Mostly we just sat around and caught up. It was marvelous. In the late afternoon/evening we went up to the city to hang out with Rubi. San Francisco is a neat city. I really enjoy the architecture. And luckily, John agreed to drive for that bit, so I was able to enjoy the architecture rather than stress out about city driving and (even worse) parking. It was a nice, lazy day. Nothing too exciting. Which is good, given the circumstances. The return of my long lost Colleenie is super exciting on it's own! Anything more, and my little heart might not be able to take it. And besides, when catching up with a dear friend, you don't really want anything else going on as a distraction.

Then on Tuesday my dulcet Donia came up to Davis to visit me. We went to a swing band performance at the Sacramento Zoo. Again, with John in tow (poor John. He had to tag along with my good Stanford friends and I twice this week). It was much fun! We got to wander around and look at the animals in addition to swing dance! It had pretty much your usual zoo suspects. Highlights included mating tortoises (which was actually kind of scary) and a baby monkey! It was a something-something guenon, I think. It was sooooo cute and super hyperactive. You could tell that it was working on its motor skills. It bounced all over it's enclosure! And it kept trying to catch and hang on to its mother's tale. Afterwards, we had ice cream sundaes for dinner =D.

On Wednesday I finally got off my lazy bum and did something I've been talking about doing for a year now. I took a ballet class! It was a good class. Below my level, but given my 2 year hiatus, just about right. I've lost so much strength. It's good to be dancing again. It'll be nice to get into shape again (I haven't been in really decent ballet shape since high school!). And it'll be fantastic to have an outlet from daily grad student life. Perfect for my mental health. I think that lack of dancing is one of the main things that has kept me from being as happy here as I was at Stanford. Of course, there are others. I still need to establish really good friendships. But that takes time. Took time at Stanford too. And I've only been here for a year so far. Yep. I think things'll be good here in Davis. They'd be much better if there was social dance, but hey, you can't have everything.

Of course, seeing as it was my first class in 2 years, I've been really sore for the past couple days. So much so that I decided to go exploring. I don't really have anything to do at work right now, just reading. Only the chairs in the UCD library are just very hard, wood chairs. Well, I definitely needed something comfier than that, to forget my troubles in. So I checked out the Davis Public Library. Bingo. Not the greatest chairs, but much much better! Coincidently, John also went to the library on Thursday. So he found me, convinced me to ditch my reading (real hard), and we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean. Good, clean, pirate fun!

Well, I guess that's about it. Definitely a good week.