My birthday present to me, 2016 edition

It's my birthday again, which means, again, that as my birthday present to myself, I get to share some things I have no excuse for sharing except that I love them....  So here is my annual totally selfish blog post.

I love swings, I love peaceful beaches, I love Canadian summers, and I love my family -- put them together and that makes this photo, taken by my dad last summer of me and my mom, perfect.

 

It's in the Canadian town my grandfather moved to from England with his siblings and parents decades ago, where he built a cottage for his family, and -- when that cottage sunk -- where he built another that's still in the family and where I can pretend I'm Nancy Drew and discover long lost letters from my British relatives to my newly-landed-in-Canada ones about job prospects and dating prospects, and look at the school work of my great aunts and uncles, and admire the painting of my great grandma (of whom I have heard so many wonderful stories from my mom) and her incredible sewing machine and the bed that came over from England that's still in great shape.  I can see the river where my mom and her siblings played as children, hang out at the tavern (one of only two full restaurants in town) that was back then an inn they passed by, walk by the shop that once upon a time was the Golden Crust Bakery that my mom and my aunt imagined some day taking over, and get ice cream and go down to the beach to watch the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen in my life -- and the exact same view my mom and her siblings, their dad and his siblings, and his parents watched.  Time in this town moves at a different pace -- There are no chain stores, let alone skyscrapers or large office buildings; no one shoves or pushes to get where they're going; everyone says hello (and perhaps invites you to tea or offers to fix your front porch or cut down your dead tree); dinner at the tavern is served slowly, because everyone knows the only place you have to get to is down to the beach for that sunset, where everyone goes and, without texting on their phone or surfing the internet, simply watches the beautiful colors until the sun dips beyond the horizon (some nights while listening to the bagpiper... and some nights followed by a ghost hunting tour).  I think it's my favorite town in the world, and the spot in the above photo is quite possibly my favorite spot in the whole world.

The bagpiper's pretty nifty too.

Oh but I take that back. This is my favorite spot in the whole world (Cheesy? Too bad. It's my birthday, so I'm allowed to be cheesy):

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Pearl the goat.  Pearl has a lot of personality.  She likes to "help out" (i.e. file things in her belly and verify there are enough cookies) in the offices of Gentle Barn Tennessee, doesn't like to be left out, and has been known to wear the oh-so-fashionable "garbage can lid" necklace.  She makes me laugh.  A lot.  As do all the animals at Gentle Barn Tennessee.

Pearl and her garbage can lid necklace: bit.ly/1YjnAGk

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This video of some golden retrievers in a pit of balls, which I'm pretty sure holds the secret to life: bit.ly/1XgXapD

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Sasha the Wonder Goat and the pigs Jiglet and Figlet.  They might get their own posts eventually because they deserve to have their stories told, and their stories as a whole are sad and make me cry so I'm not going to tell them on my birthday... but in every sad story, hopefully, there are happy moments, and I'm quite confident that the moments captured in these photos taken on successive weekends and described in the accompanying Facebook posts were as happy for them as they were for me.

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I've written on this blog about how much I love dancing, but I've never really shown it, nor have I written about how much I love choreographing.  I love to create.  I love to make something where there was nothing and interpret a composer's and singer's creation, mingling it with my own thoughts and feelings and experiences and coming up with a creation with my movements that ideally fits like a glove with their music. 

Last Wednesday it rained a lot, and so I thought, "Well, what better way to spend a rainy afternoon than by choreographing to a song with 'rain' in the title?" and began dancing to a song I love but have never danced to before called "Wait In The Rain" by Graham Alexander.  I'm not normally a fan of sharing my works in progress -- because I'm a perfectionist and my works in progress are anything but perfect -- but I loved working on this so much and got such a high from it that I'm making an exception.  I asked my fiancé to come to the studio and record it on his phone, and after shooting the clip below, he exclaimed, "I don't think I've ever seen anyone so hot and sweaty be so happy and in such a good mood."  Yep.  Choreographing and dancing do that to me.  They make me happy.  Hopefully a fraction of that happiness makes it across from the video and it somewhat captures the joy of creating art.