billeyler | Day 2, San Antone

Sleeping mercifully and soundly until 8:30 was good for me, and we still had time for a nice meal down in the breakfast room here at the La Quinta.

My Hexagon Clinic (as they call it) wasn't until 1:30, so I spent part of the morning just yakking with Andy, then wandered over the convention center to do various wanderings and dancing as the spirit moved me. I actually made it to the Advanced Hall this morning. The powers-that-be realized the original hall was WAY too small, so it wasn't switched out for the "Mainstream With Rounds" (I think) in hall that could hold 100 squares easily, with smooth parquet floors. Yay!

I was nervous about the Hex workshop...when I first came into the hall about 45 minutes before my session, there were only a couple of squares, but by the time I got started, there were at least 120 dancers in the room. Although I kept it VERY vanilla for everyone, I got 4 full tips in to the hour, and thought it went really well, if a bit too vanilla. All 40 copies of the handout I had were snatched up quickly and about 1/2 dozen came up after to talk about how it all works. Some of Clark Baker's acolytes were even in the room dancing.

The more stressful time was in anticipating the 30 minutes I'd have to be calling in the Youth Hall. In Denver, when I tried this, it was late in the evening, the kids were exhausted and giddy, and it was an absolute disaster. This time, it went a LITTLE better...I came in early enough to watch Vernon Jones work with them. It was supposed to be "Challenging Mainstream," so he set the two squares dancing like opposing teams, and every time one finished a sequence but the other didn't the winning team got a point. The team that won got prizes.

But when I tried to get them up for dancing, it was one decent square and one total square of mismatched kids who couldn't get past allemande left. Oh, well, I just called a standard tip and that was that...happily I saw that my schedule was wrong and I was only supposed to call for 20 minutes, so I beat my retreat and went back to dancing C1 for a while.

I had a C1 30 minutes at 4:30 and another High Energy mainstream at 7:40, and those went decently, but not spectacularly. By that time, spending all day in heavy c/w clothing in this humid climate let me flat out exhausted.

But I persevered and danced a couple more tips in the C1 hall with Andy as my partner. The hall was supposed to be closed for the day after my C1 30 minutes, but the C1 dancers had a coup and had it reopened from 7pm to 10pm. Yay team! Mike Jacobs and John Marshall called some really great material.

Actually, the temperature seemed to be maybe 2 degrees cooler today, and the humidity was maybe a few ticks less, so it wasn't quite a jungle-like out today.

Oh, yes...I stopped by the Line Dance hall and learned an interesting line dance called "Billy" done to "Billy's Got His Beer Googles On." Got the site for the cue sheet, and think I'll intro it on a Thursday. Hope this past Thursday went well for Scott covering for me!

I had intended to go 'with the gang' and Andy for drinks, but after going home and changing into comfortable clothes, then going back again to see some of the after-party dancing, I decided to call it a night...those two blocks are really, really long.

And it midnight is fast approaching.