Sore limbs and software

Having really missed dancing and being freshly inspired by the Olympic figure skating I decided to send a quick message to my old dance teacher and see if I could come back to a few classes as I appear to be stuck at home for the foreseeable future. "Yes," said she, and so I found myself raking around my room for a pair of ballet tights on Friday evening for a ballet class on Saturday morning. I did a ballet shoe sweep and found five pairs.

I was a bit nervous as it has been almost six years since I've done a class and a good few months since I've done any regular exercise at all and I was going back in at the level I left off but resolved to give it a jolly good go. I'd forgotten most of the ballet terms but as soon as I was shown the exercises I was surprised at how much came flooding back, and how much core strength and poise I had retained. Yeah I was basically awesome. 

Nah, I'm not that much of a dick. I really was surprised, though, at how I had kept my natural turnout but my flexibility and energy levels left a lot to be desired, the rest of the class were young, sprightly seventeen year olds and on more than one occasion if we were doing an exercise on the right foot, then the left then repeating I would just do it the once on the right and the left. I'm young in the grand scheme of things but I felt old in those moments. Then came the time for pointe shoes. If I was apprehensive before I was at that moment but again, resolved to give it a jolly good go. I did the exercises at the barre but sat out the repeats for most of them but when we moved to the centre I was pleasantly surprised to find I still had some old strength for a few of the exercises. I'm not going to lie, it felt like I was magically floating a wee bit until my toes started hurting and I realised I'd scraped a bit of skin off the top of my fourth toe. 

In other news, my younger sister has a laptop she is essentially not using as she got a shiny one from disability services at her university so she said that I could put some fancy editing software on it (stuff that would make my computer shake of this mortal coil) and HitFilm were giving away HitFilm 2 Express for free so I downloaded myself a bit of that, used an amazon voucher I got a few months ago to buy a graphics tablet (the Wacom Intuos, will post more about it as I use it and let people know whether I rate it) and have a version of photoshop now. I am, indeed, a woman of the 21st century. My friend and I filmed a short on Sunday, the idea being a spoof of those existential French New Wave type films but about my unemployment. We'll see how it pans out, we thought it was hilarious but really I just want to have a play around with my new software and see what happens. 

In other other news, I was back at the job centre on Thursday for my signing. I couldn't remember the name of my advisor so when the G4S man at the entrance to the stairs asked who I was seeing I ended up saying "Margaret..?" As it was a name that popped into my head and seemed like the name of a woman who would work at the job centre. He goes "Margaret's not working today" at which point I find my card and tell him who my advisor is and I go through but it tickled me that I assumed an advisor would be called Margaret and of course there was a Margaret working at the job centre. There is always a Margaret. Then, when I went into the room to wait for my name to be called, I walked through the door and another G4S man said "you know what you're doing, yeah?" to which I replied "sit and wait for my life to begin." He didn't look too amused but as I took my seat on the primary coloured benches I had a good old chuckle at my own wit.

Oh, and I shadowed the lights at Bolton Little Theatre last week and even pressed the button for the cues a few times. It felt pretty powerful. Hopefully I'll be able to help out at the upcoming shows too and learn a bit more about it all.