Last night I danced the belly.

It was brilliant! It was exactly what I wanted - nice gentle start (we only did about 4 moves), all split down into tiny little bits so I could actually understand what the hell I was meant to be doing, instead of just trying to follow someone else. Having a name for each of the moves meant I could figure out the differences between them. Melissa is an excellent teacher.
Apparently the style Wafa was teaching is "old" because it involves keeping your knees bent all the time, which felt really unnatural to me at the time, and I don't have to keep my feet right next to each other which means I don't fall over halfway through the moves.
And right at the end we did a bit of actual dancing rather than just doing the moves separately so we could see how it all fitted together.

The class are really nice, there's an Australian lady who keeps asking questions like "So, are you meant to clench your bum, then?" .

WOOHOO!

(no subject)

This morning saw the return of my little breakfast companion. I had just finished my cereal when he joined me, peering in through the window. He didn't even skip back this time when I put some nuts out, just waited until I'd scattered the nuts and then nervously began to eat. It occurred to me to pretend to be eating cereal and as once he relaxed, hoovered up the offering, and came to the window for more.

It's so damn hard not to anthropomorphosize (sp?), especially with a creature with little hands and everything. I leaned out of the window with a handful of pine nuts and just waited, and you could _see_ it go through his little squirrel brain;

"Nuts!"
"Balanced on something three million times bigger than me!"
"But, nuts!"
"But it’s three million times bigger than me!"
"Lovely nuts!"
"But it’s three million times bigger than me!"

He twitched his paws for a while and quite happily ate a few nuts which had fallen out of my hand onto the ground below, which actually meant touching my hand, but he couldn’t quite get up the courage to eat them out of my hand. I don’t think it’d take much, though.

Oh dear. Abject squirrel slave...