it's been a long day..

We found out last week that Danielle, a girl in 5th term at school, has been diagnosed with leukemia. Apparently she has a 70% chance of recovery, and started chemo treatments on Friday, so we're all rooting for her. She's such a ball of energy and a hugely positive person- it's really hard to imagine her beaten by anything. But she's got well over a hundred people sending her love and prayers, and I know she's going to be strong and not let this thing bring her down no matter how sick she gets.

Danielle's supposed to be in my jazz class, so our teacher Natalie suggested that we tape the two combinations that we've been doing to show her what we've been up to. I can just imagine Danielle eagerly learning the combo's off the tape...

After working hard to dance my hardest for Danielle's tape, I had 5 minutes to quickly change and rush to Voice & Text. Today Joy (our teacher) wanted to concentrate on finding our inner abs, because they're a hard muscle group to feel. You can pick something up and feel your arm muscles work, and when you take a step you can tell which muscles in your leg are doing what, but it's really hard to pinpoint where your inner ab muscles are and what they do.

So we did some exercises moving our bodies in little ways, concentrating on the muscles in our core and feeling which ones were working. At first I had a hard time not using other muscles to move, but after a while I got the hang of it, and 'found' my inner abs.

Then, however, we did a loooong exercise on the ground to relax our bodies and breathe deeply, also helping to target the inner abs. Since I'm very flexible and have naturally open, loose hip joints I have to grip muscles in my hips to keep my legs up when on my back with my legs bent and feet on the floor. The exercise, however, was about relaxing and breathing, which I couldn't do if I had to tense my body to stay in position. As Joy led us through the exercise, lifting our legs in different ways and using our arms to passively add weight to our legs to further the stretch (which I also couldn't do, because the second I tried to relax my arms to let them passively stretch rather than actively pull my legs towards my chest, they flopped to the ground) I was getting more and more frustrated, and when I asked her how to fix my problem, she answered in a way that didn't really give me an answer to my question, and continued talking the class through the exercise. I was really frustrated by the time we finished - rather than being relaxed and loose with my breath nice and deep, I was stiff and confused, with a sore back and a tense, clenched jaw.

I managed to let that go a little while we sat and discussed meter and rhythm in the sonnets that we're currently working on, but left the class in a fairly bad mood.

I treated myself to lunch at Tim Hortons and tried their new triple chocolate muffin, which is extreemly tasty and cheered me up a bit. Also, I looked in my mailbox on the way back from Tim Hortons and found that my vocal teacher Jill had copied some music that I actually needed later on for a vocal coaching with Lona, the accompanist for our MTP class. I had a version of the song already, but it was in the wrong key, and Jill was nice enough to make a copy for me of her version, which is in the right key. That helped my mood a bit as well.

My coaching with Lona went well, although I didn't know the song well enough to feel at all ready to sing it in MTP. Luckily I sang last week, and therefore there was roughly a 1% chance that I'd have to sing today, which I didn't.

After class ended (at 5:20), I headed home, still in a bit of a bad mood. I had a nice, hot bath when I came home and lay in bed a bit with a heating pad on my back, and felt much better.

Then I watched Wal Redro: UVS (not as good as the original one, Ruth, but still good) (for those of you who don't speak Ruthish, Wal Redro is Law & Order, Wal Redro: UVS being Law & Order: SVU {Special Victims Unit}) and got on the computer to catch you all up with my fairly unsatisfying day.

Ta-da!