My 2010

It's pretty unbelievable that another year has passed! It's true what they say about time passing faster when you get older! Anyway, this is my yearly attempt at summarizing all that happened in that year...

Work
I actually still work for the same company as last year! After a few turbulent years I've finally found a steady work environment again. I'm learning a lot about HR Management, which is also part of my responsibilities. The workload is very heavy though and I really have to watch the work-life balance to avoid coming too close to a burn-out situation. It's a good thing I really like the job and the variety of responsibilities!

Love
We've been living together for almost a year now and so far so good! Our love is only getting stronger and I really do believe that I've found the love of my life!

Health
The biggest news here is probably the lasik eye surgery I've had in July 2010. I can't even begin to explain how wonderful it is to wake up and see! No more glasses, no more contact lenses... No more eye infections either, which is the reason why I could finally have the lasik surgery. They disappeared as sudden as they appeared almost 5 years ago! Good riddance!

House
Well, our house is for sale at the moment! One of the requirements of my current job is that I live within 30km of the office. Right now it's 89km, so time to move... Unfortunately the house market isn't very good and I already know that I'll have to sell the house at a loss. I am also struggling with leaving my current home town, as my entire social life is here and I don't find it very easy to start all over in a new place. On the other hand, it will be really nice to start a new home together and find something that pleases us both. But first we've got to sell this place... Will you keep your fingers crossed for us?

Cats
Tux & Roxy are both well. They had to get used to collars (?) this year with a magnet on it to open the cat flap. An unfortunate measure we had to take to stop other cats from coming into the house!

Dancing
We did it again, promoting to the next class within one year! We are now dancing in the one-but-highest class for our age group in The Netherlands. Progress is getting harder and slower, but we're definitely still growing. Our biggest challenge is to add more power and dynamics to our dancing, which is what we'll focus on for 2011. I also have a beautiful new dress and we've added an extra trainer who together with our regular trainer will help us progress even further. Another highlight of 2010 was of course the trip we won to Vienna where we had lessons from a top dance, Anastasia Stiglitz, to help improve our Viennese Waltz!

That pretty much sums up 2010 for me! I'm looking forward to what 2011 will bring us and will end this blog with my favourite new year wish:

May the best of 2010 be the worst of 2011!

Sorry, so sorry... but we can't renew your contract...

That's what I got to hear from my boss earlier this week... not that surprising really, since even an idiot can see that there isn't enough work to keep everyone busy. And that means no income for the company, while there are still bills to pay... On top of that I'm the newest employee and the only one still on a 1-year contract and thus the easiest to 'get rid of'. But still, even if it was expected, it's not easy to hear this kind of news, nor to bring it. My manager was also visibly shaken that he had to give bad news.

My contract runs until the end of October, which gives me about 6 months to find something new. Having taken a first look at jobs in the learning consultancy / training management space I can tell you that while 6 months sounds like a lot of time, it won't be easy to find something. There simply aren't a lot of companies hiring at the moment, while the number of people looking for a job keeps increasing.

Having said that, I'm an optimist and a positive thinker and I'm convinced that things will work out. It's too bad really that becoming a professional dancer is barely an option, since I love dancing so much! I'm too old now to become a professional, and they pay isn't all that either.

So, my challenge for the next few months: finding a job that I feel just as passionate about as I do about dancing (and which will pay the mortgage!) ;-)

Dance Bootcamp

Today is the first day of what would have been our vacation... Well, it still is our vacation in that we won't be going to our regular jobs for the next 2 weeks. However, we're also not packing our bags to go on a lovely trip somewhere nice...

No, instead of all that, we have decided to invest 2 weeks of our time and energy into our own personal dance bootcamp! Now that we've reached the highest level of dancing in ballroom regionally we will have to compete against people who've been dancing at that level for many, many years. Some even on national level and not just regionally.

We have seen several other couples become demotivated and frustrated by never even making it to the demi-finals, let alone the finals, because the top couples in this class are just too hard to beat. We didn't want that to happen to us...

So we spoke to our dance trainer and agreed on a tough 2-week training schedule, with private dance classes for 2 hours every day, followed by practice sessions the rest of the day. In between we'll also be taking part in 3 dance competitions, one at the start, one in the middle, and one at the end of the two-week bootcamp.

I have no idea whether my body and feet will be able to handle this physically, but I do know that if we make it to the end, we will have made vast improvements to our dancing technique and we should be able to make it to a final round every once in a while.

Some people have called us crazy for sacrificing our vacation time for this, but we both strongly believe it's worth it. It's an investment, and it's bound to pay off!

To be continued...

It takes two to tango...

It's time for a bit of a dancing update here... I have another site in Dutch where I write detailed reports, but since a lof of people reading my Tink blog don't read Dutch, here's an English update:

In the regional competition which we've been taking part in for just over a year now, we've done really well. At the moment we're dancing in the A-Class for both ballroom and latin, so only one class away from the absolute top. It's only the top class that wears the beautiful dancing gear, but with only 1 or 2 competitions away from it in ballroom I've now purchased a dress (picture to the right) and tan colored shoes (see picture below) to go with it. For latin it will be a bit longer before we reach the top level as we have some tough competition there! I expect to wear the ballroomdress for the first time in March or April, so stay tuned!


In the national dance competition we just finished our third competition. Unfortunately there are only a few participants in our class, and if there are only a few participants they don't give points to all couples dancing a final round. So progress is really slow, and at this rate it will take a good two years before we get promoted to the B-Class, which is when you have to wear the official gear in this national competition. Having said that, this is the competition we'll be focusing on as this is the one where we can see progress once we've reached the top in the other competition.

To help with the progress, we've decided to sacrifice our two week vacation planned for March, and take a two week dancing bootcamp during that time instead. Our dance trainer is developing a program for us. It will be tough, but most definitely worth it!

Sniffles, coughs, dancing, and websites

That pretty much sums up last weekend for me... Both me and my boyfriend were not feeling well with a cold for him and a throat infection for me. One of my cats, Tux, joined us in the sick bay with an eye infection requiring 4-6 drops of anti-biotic in his eye every day for a week (have you ever tried giving eye drops to a cat? I could dedicate an entire blog entry to just that process!).

The 4-6 eye drops a day also meant that we had to rearrange our weekend plans a bit. In spite of not feeling well, we still went to the private dance class we had booked with our trainer, where we learned some cool, but difficult moves in the tango. My boyfriend has bought a video camera so that we can now tape the training and for example how we dance during a competition to review later. I'm glad we taped this training, as I'm bound to forget a few steps until we've practised it enough!

Saturday evening we had our first Christmas ball. Unfortunately it was so incredibly crowded that we couldn't really dance the way we normally do. But they had some interesting shows as well, so we still had a good time. Sunday was a family day, as my boyfriend's mother was celebrating her birthday with a family brunch. And of course we had our regular Sunday-evening dance class as well.

I also decided to build a new website (in Dutch), just to share our dance experiences with family, friends and other people who are interested. We have some big plans for our dance future, so stay tuned!

Giethoorn

Last weekend's dance contest was in Steenwijk, a town in the North East of The Netherlands. This is quite a long way from where I live, so we decided to make a weekend break out of it. This also gave us the opportunity to visit Giethoorn, a really cute, pitoresk village where no cars are allowed. All transport is done by boat, bike or your own feet. The weather wasn't very nice, there was a slight drizzle and it was quite cold. But in spite of that we both really enjoyed our walk and boat trip through the village (see picture below).

The dance contest was interesting... There were only 7 couples for our competition class. So they decided to let all 7 couples dance two finals. Normally there are only 6 couples in a final and normally there is only one final round. Anyway, we danced two of them and ended up in second place of the competition. The skill level in this competition is very high, so I'm actually really proud with a second place! This time I kept all limbs intact, although I did manage to break the prize about 5 minutes after receiving it... Nothing a little glue can't fix though! We have a little break from competition dancing now, as our next contest isn't until the 17th of January. But no worries, plenty to talk about until then!

Let's dance!

We started our day yesterday with a good training session to practice several new dance moves we have learned recently. The past few weeks we haven't really practiced much, because of my hand injury. Which, by the way, is much better now. My thumb still tingles a lot, and not all feeling has returned yet, but I can pretty much do anything with it again.

Anyway, we also practiced because we had another competition yesterday evening. The weather here is very tricky at the moment, with moments of snow, hail, rain and then blinding sun in between. So we left early to make sure we arrived there well on time. This would be the first time we danced in the A-class for ballroom, which meant that we also would have to do a slow fox this time. I'm not all that comfortable with the slow fox yet, it really is quite a difficult dance to do right! Also, as the classes get higher, the quality of the dancers gets high as well of course. So when we started our first round I did feel a bit of a knot in my stomach! For Latin we are dancing in the B class, as we did last time. So not such a big knot in my stomach there. It wasn't my best dance experience, I forgot several steps and really didn't have high expectations regarding the results.

But we made it to the final for both ballroom and latin and to our big surprise we won first prize in both competitions! So two new cups (see below) to add to our collection... I won't take them to the dance school anymore though, don't feel like repeating the experience of last time I wanted to do that!

A night to remember, or to forget...

As I told you we had another dance competition last night, and it was certainly a night to remember, if not for all the wrong reasons!

The day started bad for me, with a headache that was close to a migraine, and in spite of taking way too many painkillers it still wasn't gone completely by the time we had to leave for the competition.

We didn't do all that well during the first round of our class and were sitting, chatting with another dance couple while watching the other classes first round. Then all of the sudden one of the dancers collapsed on the dance floor! Luckily the first aid people arrived quickly and started the reanimation process. The man came to quickly and was taken away for further treatment. Of course the dancing was stopped during all this and to give people a chance to recover from the shock the organizers decided to let another class do their first round first before letting the one where the incident happened complete their round.

So we were all watching this new round, when another dancer collapsed! This time it was way more serious, the man had a heart attack. The organizers called for the first aid people again, but they were away still treating the first man. Somebody ran to fetch them and they finally came and started reanimation again. It didn't work though and they had to get the AED kit for electric reanimation. Of course they had also dialed 112 (the European equivalent of 911). That turned out to be a bit of a disaster too! First the fire brigade arrived and they started their reanimation. Then the police arrived, but they just stood there and watched. Finally, way too late in my opinion, the ambulance arrived. They managed to resuscitate the man and where preparing to take him to hospital. But then the poor man had another heart attack and the whole reanimation process started again. Finally they stabilized him enough to take him to the hospital... We later heard that he's stable now, but I don't know what the slow reaction times of the emergency services have done with him.... I'm also upset with the fact that the first aid people took such a long time to come to the second man's aide... We were discussing later that perhaps the dancing shouldn't have continued until the first aid people had retaken their posts after completing treatment of the first man. Or maybe they should have had more first aid people on site!

Anyway, as you can imagine everybody was quite shocked by what happened. After some deliberation the organizers decided to continue with the competition anyway. But as you can imagine it's a bit hard to dance a happy, quirky, joyful quickstep after all of this! We didn't come home with any prizes this time, but frankly I don't mind at all. Any prize on display would have been a reminder of this evening, and like I said, for all the wrong reasons...

Let's keep this dancer in our minds and hope that he makes a full recovery soon!

Spirit of the Dance

Thursday evening we went to see the dance show "Spirit of the Dance" in our local theatre. This Irish dance show, based on the original Irish dance show with Michael Flatley, had been on my list of things-I-want-to-see for a long time, so my expectations were high!

The show is definitely worth seeing! The light effects are amazing and the choreography is very well done. The dancing wasn't superb, but good enough. I certainly couldn't have done better ;-)

We spoke to the driver of the dancers during the break and he told us that this group, about 25 people out of the total of 350 members of the Spirit of the Dance team, was the youngest group of all touring groups. They had their last performance for the season in The Netherlands yesterday, but are still touring other countries!

Today I can put on my dancing shoes for another competition. I don't think we're going to win prizes in this one, it's a tough one, with really good dancers. But it will be good practice anyway, and one day we will make it to the nr. 1 spot there as well! Just watch this space! ;-)

I could have danced all night...

... well I pretty much did! We didn't get home from the competition until 2am, but what a start of the new season! We came first in both Latin and Ballroom! As usual I didn't think I did that well and I was surprised to even make it to the final round. So you can imagine my surprise when we came 1st twice! The nice thing about this particular competition is that it was held at the rival dance school in my home town. Always nice to beat them :-)

This afternoon we will go to the Tea 'n Dance at our dance school, then out for a quick bite to eat and back to the dance school for our regular weekly lesson. Several people from our class came to see us last night and they took a few pictures which we should get from them this evening. If there's a nice one, I'll post it underneath this blog later!

For now, feet up and relax! There's more dancing to come today and I want to be ready for it!

Another one bites the dust...

So today was my last day at this job, and what a day it was... I won't go into details here, this is the internet after all, but I can tell you that the stuff that happens at this place has left me flabbergasted (love that word) more than once. And today was certainly one of those days. All in all I've learned a lot there... a lot of good things, but certainly also how things should not be done :-) At least not according to Tink's Law.

On the positive side I finally got an email that my new Latin dance shows are on their way to my feet. This is great news, because as of the 18th of October I'll have three dance competitions on 3 consequetive Saturdays, two of which will include Latin American dancing. So far I've done all my dancing and competitions on ballroom shoes. And during the competition on the 18th there's a good chance that we'll get promoted to the next level if we make it to the final round. And of course I want to wear the right shoes for that!