ljplicease | Mar. 31st, 2016

One of the oddball things about coming back to my journal after a little over a year of writing mostly technical Perl nerd stuff is that there are these big, some might think “important” gaps in what I've recorded. A little thing that we did, for example, was have our big wedding celebration last October^[1]. It was a wonderful feeling pulling it off, and people saying how much they enjoyed it, but I do not miss the preparations. One thing that we kept up was the dancing. Lena wanted to do something for the first dance, and (to her surprise apparently) I agreed to it. We are lucky in that there is a very kind instructor just up the road from us named Alex. Alex showed us the basic American foxtrot steps and developed a choreography for us.

We've kept up the lessons and January we were invited to do our “first dance” at the studio's winter ball. We were the opening act. The picture above is one I took of one of the more advanced dance partnerships. (I took several pictures with my digital camera; now I wish I had taken one of my film cameras and shot on high speed black and white). Last night we had another lesson. We were focusing on the International quickstep and footwork. There is so much to know, and frankly I am not very good. I will go toe-heal when I am supposed to go heal-toe and Alex will explain to me that the correct way is natural and the only way you can do it, even though to me apparently it doesn't seem very natural! Alex is very kind, as I mentioned, and in the running for nicest most patient person on earth so when he explains how unnatural my oafish moves are, it is with a smile and an honest confidence that I will someday be able to actually do it correctly.

Expectations are a terrible thing, and Alex being a Russian speaking dance instructor I honestly feel like he should be harsh and demanding. He has in fact adapted successfully to living in the states after migrating without much more than the clothes on his back from the Soviet Union. When my wife and I talk about it she describes him as being “from Russia”, though he is actually from Belarus. I think Alex even describes himself as such. I remember high school history teacher expressing surprise when on vacation in a foreign land that somebody from Wales thought of it as a different country than England, and yet you might reasonably think in 199x that the UK was a single country^[2]. You might think that a country that was nominally its own puppet republic during the cold war and now an honestly independent country as being not Russia. I am not sure if this is a language or a culture thing or maybe a Moscow thing (my wife is from Moscow). People in London for example might be more likely to view the UK as a united single country than those in Edinburgh.

Anyway, the important thing is that my wife and I have an activity that we can do together and we have a very kind and patient dance instructor, and not everyone is pedantic about technical details than I am.

update: Lena noticed our DJ had posted an entry about our wedding, you will see the pickys are heavy on the dancing.

we also did the courthouse thing in 2014 with just parents and grandma
Same history teacher told me that I couldn't ever hold both American and Australian citizenship so whatever