Disney Trip -some photos

I took my 9-year old niece, Nicolette, to Disney World earlier this month.
I'm still sorting through all the photos we took.
Here are a few.

More from last weekend

Here is a photo of me dancing with Luke, one of our instructors.



I love the way the mass of sequins reflects the light.

And another of John & I dancing the West Coast Swing.

Notice the "John face" aka Mr Cool.

John dancing West Coast Swing

From the yesterday's Showcase...
Here's John dancing with our instructor, Julia.
John is being cool, funky and making lots of "John Faces".

2009 Spring Showcase -sneak peak

John & I were in an all-day dance competition/show yesterday.
Here's a quick peak. More photos to come as I sort them out.

This is one of 3 dresses I made for the event. I think this one is my favorite.
And in typlical Ann style, I was finishing up the dresses at 11:30p the night before!

Oakland & San Fran

This year for our “I need a break from Chicago winters” trip in late January, we went to visit friends in Oakland & San Francisco. We coordinated this trip with a national children’s art contest that Ann was asked to juror.


Here we are on a hill overlooking San Fran.

We were there for a long weekend. So on one of the days, John spent the day with his friend, Wes.

While I spent the day with my friend, Rob.

Then we all got together that night for dinner. The restaurant was packed with a long wait time for a table. But Wes managed to talk the hostess into letting us have the “chef’s table” that they were holding for later that night. We just had to be out in less than 2 hours. Easy enough to do and we had the best table in the house.

We also went out to dinner with a number of people from Sakura who put on the art contest.

While waiting for Rob to pick me up for our day of sightseeing, I wandered around near the hotel. I happened upon a farmers market. The market was in the city’s “China Town”. This street musician was playing 2-string, bowed instrument that made hauntingly beautiful music. As I was standing there listening, he stopped and motioned for me to sit down and try it. I couldn’t make the beautiful clear notes that he did (okay so dogs were howling two towns away) but it was fun sitting there in the middle of a street market in a strange city being shown how to play by someone who I didn’t speak a common language with.

The Museum of Children’s Art where I was asked to juror the art contest was on the same street as the farmers market.
During a break between the judging and the reception, another juror and I walked around Chinatown.

We found 2 sets of Chinese dragons roaming the neighborhood. It appeared that they were “blessing” the doorways of the local businesses. At each doorway was a dance to loud drumbeats followed by the dropping of a large handful of very loud fireworks. We learned quickly to back away before the deafening fireworks were dropped!

Video from January's Dancing with the Stars

I just got this photo and video from Gail.
These are the couples from our dance studio that competed at the Dancing with the Stars roadshow in Januay.
(John, Ben, Ann, Nancy, Francois, Ben, Gail & Staci)



Gail's friend was taking a video of her & Fancois dancing and also happened to catch us dancing.
So here is a video of us at the event.

Too Cold

This was the thermometer on the back porch this morning when I let the dog out.

That's 10 degress BELOW zero! The wind chill temperature was 15 degrees colder!

And it never warmed up!

It's weeks like this that I can't remember why I like living in Chicago.

We had fun & watched a great show

We danced at the Arena in front of 12,000 people last Friday.
We thought we did a lot better than last year. But we still didn't make it past the first round.
Oh well, it was fun to do and we got free tickets to a great show so it was still worth it.
This years road show for Dancing with the Stars was so much better than last year's show.
It was great fun.

I'm waiting to see if friends have any photos of us dancing. We were on the opposite side of the stage so they had trouble getting photos.

I did miss a bit of the dancing in the professional show because I was staring at the dresses to see how they were made! Nancy, the other woman in the group who makes dance dresses, had the same problem!