A Recent Find

This was taken by Eric Torrie. Visit his blog to see more of his amazing work.

U.S. National Amateur DanceSport Championships

This last Dancesport, Brenton and I decided to give up competing Latin and instead dance Standard and Smooth. It was kind of rough, because in 2.5 months we had to learn or choreograph 7 routines, ok so really 5 because we used 2 class routines. Anyways...a lot of routines! We didn't make it as far as we would have liked, but we did have several successes we were quite proud of. One of the times we danced our Standard Waltz we got called back by every single judge :) !! That was awesome. But my favorite by far was with our Smooth. We had choreographed our waltz completely from scratch and we got called back by all 7 judges for that dance as well. Wow! We were pretty stoked :)
Anyways, here are some pictures from competition and some random ones we took afterwards. We had such a blast doing it. I'm so glad I had the chance to dance once more with my best friend.







Let me just add... He is so dang good looking. Wow.

My trip to Provo, Part 2

The next day was BYU's first ever Summer Dancesport Challenge. Brenton and I competed in 6 events and with all of the callbacks we ended up dancing 21 times! We were so exhausted!! Our competitions went from 12:05-6:20pm. We competed in Novice and Pre-Champ Standard and Latin, plus the gold class events of foxtrot and westcoast swing. We placed 5th in Foxtrot, 6th in Westcoast, and then made it to the quarter-finals in the rest of the events (except pre-champ Latin). Wow! That's pretty dang good after practicing for really only 1 week. In fact, we practiced the Westcoast about 10 minutes and Foxtrot only 20 minutes. Here are some pictures:

Latin:





Gold Foxtrot


Westcoast


Standard

My Summer Trip to Provo, Part 1

I spent the last week and a half in Provo. It's kind of funny that during my summer home from school I took a trip back up there, but I love it. So funny story, when I first got to Provo, my partner Brenton called me and told me he'd be there in 10 minutes to pick me up. I was so excited to see him again!! I hurried to get ready and after 10 minutes there was a knock at the door. B yelled "Come in!" and I rounded the corner from the hallway all ready to tackle Brenton. Much to my dismay, it wasn't him!! It was M's boyfriend M2(who used to be my boyfriend). I was so disappointed I'm pretty sure my whole countenance fell. "Oh hi." The poor guy, I wasn't disappointed to see him, I was just disappointed it wasn't Brenton. However, when Brenton came over M2 was just sitting on the couch so I felt really awkward running and tackling Brenton in front of him. So I just scurried over and hugged him. Darn M2, he ruined my plans! But regardless, it was so good to be back with Brenton and dancing with him again.

I spent the whole time dancing or doing dancing related things. I got to be a TA for the BYU Youth Ballroom Camp. It was amazing because I TAed for some of the best ballroom dancers in America. I worked with Tomas, Christian Perry, Urs, and Curt Holman (from BYU). It was incredible.


I now have some new ideas for teaching ballroom to children. Out of the guest professionals, Christian was my favorite teacher to TA. Everyone seemed to love Tomas, but he had a nasty habit of hitting on all of his TA's even though he is married. Uh...that just made me a little uncomfortable. I loved TAing for Curt too because he is one of the dance teachers at BYU that I look up to the most.

My dad flew in on Friday to see me compete in Dancesport. That night he took me and Brenton out to Tucanos for dinner. Mmmm... =) It was so dang good. Neither Brenton nor my dad had been there before and they loved it. It was such a good evening, nothing awkward. My dad and Brenton got along so well and they chatted away the whole night. We dropped Brenton off after dinner and then dad and I went to the grocery store to buy items to make a "Dancesport survival kit" for Brenton. It was so fun. We came back to my (well, M's) apartment to assemble it. MC and M were there and it totally threw M2 off guard when Dad walked in because it was always really tense and awkward between them. I silently laughed inside. After we made the kit, we dropped it off on Brenton's doorstep and then I texted him from Dad's phone to tell him to go outside.

I don't know why I bothered to do that because 1) It was something related to Dancesport and he probably could have guessed it was from me and 2) I signed my name on the card!