USA Dance 2008 Nationals, Baltimore

Ugh. I woke up at 8:30 this morning, because of a certain orange and white pest. Humans are not jungle gyms, Jesper.

Nevertheless, I got straight to work, cleaning and organizing and looking for things to throw away. I made an amazing discovery - the e-mail address of one of the most superfun women I met in Japan. One of my best Japanese friends, Dainty, has been incommunicado since September of 2007, ever since my university e-mail account was shut down. I think she has a filter, so I just can't get in touch with her and it's alarming me. I think I'm going to e-mail Sugar Star (the superfun woman), ask her how she's doing, and get her to tell Dainty to add me to the "allowed list" for her USA e-mail address!

I also found a whole slew of various awesome gel pens. This is exciting!

Baltimore! We had a blast, despite my lingering migraine (it hit Wednesday night, and I missed dance). I drove up alone in blinding rain on Thursday, stopping for coffee on the way, of course. I basically followed the vague glow of tail lights through the mist at 90 mph. Hit traffic at the drawbridge over Washington Harbor and called Redhead - I thought that she and her posse had left hours before I did, but they were actually 4 miles north of me, stuck in the same traffic jam. It took me 45 minutes to get to the bridge.

We met at College Perk - 5 of us in all (me, Redhead, R, H, and N), and enjoyed tapas, talk, and the company of all the random resident weirdos. Redhead, R and I dropped our stuff off at our hotel and took H and N to theirs, where we met up with K, J, MK and A, and goofed off for awhile before heading back to our hotel and crashing.

On Saturday, we had a lazy morning of chatting and eating tangerines before heading to the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel for the comp - which was so much fun. We watched our people compete, and then Redhead and I went exploring. We had lunch and chatted, then went walking around the Camden Yards area for awhile. We went to a fudge factory, where all of the employees drew a crowd singing My Girl a cappella with 4-part harmony; I think she took a video of it. We bought half of a hazelnut chocolate cake from a little Italian pastry shop to celebrate all of the team victories, and ran into the rest of the team, who were headed out in search of dinner. We followed them and chatted for awhile, before going back to the Renaissance Hotel and getting all gussied up for Latin championships, which were, needless to say...

AWESOME. I am so inspired. Amazing dancing, hot dancers, and the excitement of the audience was almost palpable. There were TV crews and radio stations, and people giving interviews for the media. Redhead and I were there until about 1:30 AM, since we paid $45 for tickets and had front-row seats. We talked for awhile before crashing.

Saturday we woke up a little earlier, had our tangerines, and went to the comp to watch the standard and junior events... THE LITTLES! THE TINIES! They were so cute, dancing bronze Latin! They looked like shrunken grown ups. I stayed until the afternoon, when things were winding down for a little while and the team was going out for lunch, and Redhead took me back to our hotel. I gathered my things and headed back towards home... But I'll be returning for Baby BAM Jam, next Saturday, and now I know exactly where I'm going.

Quote of the day, courtesy of my dad the database consultant: "You can't hide your source code from me, young Skywalker! Hoo hoo hoo hooo...."