Dance can be as simple as moving your body to a rhythm. The beats can come from external sources or internal musings. The dance can be aerobic, therapeutic, sensual. It can be anything you want it to be. Dance is a form of self-expression, whether you follow prescribed steps with a partner on a ballroom floor or twirl with an air guitar in your living room.

Dancing improves strength, balance, coordination, flexibility, stamina, and posture. Vigorous dance provides excellent cardio and fat burning benefits. Don’t slump, pull in that tummy, and dancing will work your core nicely, too!

I’ve recently found my inner dancer, and have been taking her for as many spins as possible. I dance alone to liven up my housekeeping, I dance with my dog just to keep her on her toes, and I even take lessons and dance with other people at a couple of local ballroom dance clubs. I may be addicted, but I don’t think I’ll be seeking any treatment beyond dance therapy any time soon.

I’d love to hear from other dancers around Huntsville and Madison. How, where, and what kind of dancing do you do? Feel free to link dance halls, clubs, schools or events, or any dance pictures that you’ve taken around town.

Dance stuff:

Quote: “You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching!”

Come on out! Those of us in the Huntsville area are pretty lucky to have lots of options to dance socially. Here’s a list of mixed type dance clubs and a list of ballroom and Latin style dance clubs and organizations to get you started.

I dance mostly at Rocket City Dance Club on Artie Street and Madison Ballroom Dance Studio on Madison Boulevard. They both have superb leadership, friendly regulars, great websites with calendars that stay updated, and wonderful opportunities for learning dancing in different venues (private instruction, group lessons, and dance parties).

For dance shoes, the ladies at Bloom over on Regal Drive rule. They have a nice selection and the customer service is excellent. Or, if you’d like to just convert a pair of street shoes, J.T.’s Shoe Care over on Bob Wallace was recommended to me by my RCDC instructor. They replaced a buckle on mine for me and I bought some nice pads there, too.

Genre: Mystery

My Rating: 6 out of 10

For a $0.99 ebook, The Abbey provides good entertainment value. However, I purposefully set aside consistency issues and hanging threads to make it through. If you are anal about these things, you may wish to save yourself some cursing and skip this read.

Consistency example: Ash is forever interjecting his thoughts about and practice of his Muslim religion, which wouldn’t be bad except for things like explaining to his ex-partner that he couldn’t eat at a diner that cooked their bacon on the same griddle as their pancakes, and later lecturing the investigative lead that Muslims didn’t eat pork, but he sure loved bacon! I guess Ash thought he needed to confess a foible for the lesson, and, to be fair, he may have been referring to the “turkey bacon” he mentions eating later – but that doesn’t really fit with the lesson of “people follow urges despite religion”. I guess he couldn’t exactly admit to being the closet drunk he was and keep his badge, but couldn’t he pick one that didn’t clash so loudly?

Open threads example: Let’s see, a certain question he asks of the main bad person is never answered. The answer impacts Ash directly and, not only does Ash not follow up, he doesn’t bother to ask for any tests to get the answer for himself… yeah, that bothered me.

On a positive note, while most of the characters are left hollow, you can’t help but sympathize with Ash, and the pacing of the story provides a nice tempo to march you through what I would consider a story on par with your average TV cop show episode. It kept me entertained for a few hours with only the occasional, “WTF?” Well worth the buck for the download.

Amazing, fantastical news like the results of UC Berkeley Professor Jack Gallant’s team research that proves that you can recreate, in technicolor pixels on a monitor, what your brain is envisioning just makes me sad. I feel like a junk heap of slowly rusting parts. “K, try cranking it up now…,” “No, wait! I found it! We’re ok. That rebelious spark didn’t originate from independent thought, just a crossed wire. All fixed now. You can return to being a productive battery in the Matrix, Joani…”

I probably should have never watched that movie. I still have regularly recurring thoughts wondering if it didn’t portray more truth than fiction – on literal levels, as well as nailing humans dead-on metaphorically. Then I get pissed off about the Matrix humans needing painful existences to not reject their programming. I promise that if you let me stay young, with working joints, and the illusion of freedom, I’ll be happy!

But that’s it, really… all the layers of illusions being stripped away. The more mechanical that science discovers us to be, whether adjusting our personalities and dispositions with this chemical or that, or translating our dreams into movies for anyone to see, the more I wonder if I’m really anyone at all…