Once a Lakette....Always a Lakette

Something I've been waiting years and years to hear....the Lakettes are having an alumni dance performance. 

YAY!!  For those of you that didn't know me in HS, I honestly can't express how much danceline and jazz/marching band meant to me.  After I graduated, I did spend an extended period of time feeling quite lost and like I left behind who I was and had to start all over. 

Good grief...ok the point of this blog is not to be all sobby and bleh so I'm going to move on....geez...

So over the course of a month, we had a couple two hour practices on Sunday nights.   I REALLY looked forward to those practices :D  And it was so much fun to be in a room of alumni from 2012 all the way back to 1974.   Now let's not forget that when I was in danceline we won state my sophomore year and won again my senior year in jazz funk and took second that same year in high kick.....so I can't help that edge of competitiveness to be perfect.   But right off the bat, I knew it couldn't be perfect, we all have lives scattered all over the Twin Cities so not everyone could make every practice and we only had really one day to work on formations.   So I let go of caring about the little things and just enjoyed practicing again in the gym, in the cafeteria, in my kitchen, my living room.  

Our performance was during an intermission at the Lakettes Dance Invitational.  It brought back a lot of good, bad and indifferent memories walking through the front doors of WHS again but maybe luckily, the building has gone through a lot of changes.  We all had shirts with our graduating year on the back and "Once a Lakette.....Always a Lakette" written on the front.   In the end there was about 40 of us on the floor.   So many of us that our kickline had to be a U shape so we all fit!

It was really exciting and fun for me to introduce Mark to something that was such a huge part of my heart and my life when I was growing up.  I suppose I should have clued him in to how guys typically guy their dancer girlfriend/wife a flower ;)  The crowd was SO loud for us and it gave me the chills and made me feel so amazing.  

I just wish I could continue to perform as an adult.  I'm not classically trained, I'm not a ballet dancer and it just seems like unless you can go out and find actual paid jobs as a ballerina or a backup dancer for JLo, the closest I'll ever get is DanceFIT class at the gym.  

Ok here's the video we made:

Anyone know of an "outlet" for a precision dancer?  I've often thought that maybe I could do something with the local community theaters or something but with dancing often comes singing and while I can kind of sing, I'm not up for auditioning my talents as a singer.

Christmas and the ALARC Ice Dive 2013

We had a great holiday season this year spending lots of time with family.  Although within a two week period,  I likely consumed enough food for the month of January.  

A quick recap of Christmas:
"Santa" once again got us a really fun gift that we are looking forward to trying out this next weekend.  We both got x-country skis!  We took lessons in classic skiing a couple years ago and quickly learned what a great workout it would be.

My highlight gift from Mark was the amazingly beautiful frame that Mark put together for me of my Grandma's Marathon and Boston Marathon photos, medals, bib numbers and finisher's certificate.

This was the gift that I have been super excited to give her ever since we got back from Boston in April. A truly amazing accomplishment needs to be put on display.
   

New Year's....

As we have the past 3 years, we started the New Year with the ALARC Ice Dive.  We volunteered for the event and then did our dive at around 10am.   It was below zero but finally we got a year with no wind so it wasn't as bad as past years.  The water is still painfully cold and every year I seem to forget how much it makes my toes hurt.  That would be thanks in part to the fact that I had frostbite on them about 16 years ago so they are very prone to freezing....quickly! This makes 5 years in a row for me and I have now attained the rank of Barracuda 5 (The first salt water fish) and I am half way to earning my Shark Robe.

One thing we were discussing though is that we may take a year off from the Ice Dive and then come back to continue our pursuit of the Shark robe (you get that after you dive 10 times).   Mark and I have been together for 4 New Year's now and have never actually gone out to celebrate because we always have to be up super early to get to the Dive.  So next year may be our skip year so we can go out someplace fun, have dinner/drinks and actually be awake at midnight :) It was already hinted at that staying out late for New Years is not excuse enough to miss the Ice Dive, so we might just have to travel somewhere to celebrate New Years.... I have always wanted to watch the ball drop in Times Square.

Things are going really well for our UpTempo business and we have a positive outlook for 2013.  There is just so much going on that we do hope to find a way to get ourselves a  few more hours in the day.  The biggest thing weighing on my mind lately is the fact that we haven't done any type of workout in over a month now. (Sigh... The worst month possible, all of the food and treats associated with the Holiday season)  Since the Reggae Marathon. We have been turned off to actually enjoying working out since it's been so much of a hassle around our super busy schedules.  So I'm looking for our window of opportunity to start training again.  We don't have any goals really set for racing yet this year until fall marathons so I suppose that is something we need to work on.

Another thing I'm hoping to try to do more of this year is not only write our blog but do videos again too.  We were watching a bunch of the short videos we did back in 2011 while we were doing the #Geocache365 challenge and it was so fun!  Only two years ago but it's surprising even the little things we found in the videos that have changed.   Sorry if this disappoints anyone but my efforts in blogging are not to entertain any of you.  I just want to document our lives, the little and big things, so we have that diary to go back on.