Wow.

I don't know if I ever mentioned it on here, but I have a friend with a music studio in his spare room who's been working on some original compositions lately and wanted me to sing on some of his tracks. We've fooled around with it a bit, but nothing serious... Well, lately, this friend has hooked up with another musician/sound engineer friend of his, and they've been significantly revamping his stuff. I was over at their studio last night to rerecord vocals for the track I was originally involved in, and...wow. They took what was originally a fairly simple acoustic guitar-with-electronic-underchording arrangement and turned it into something reminiscent of Delerium, and it sounds amazing. Absolutely incredible. And my vocals are on it now, which I still have trouble believing! Anyway, this second guy apparently has a few label connections, and after we put together some more songs they are planning on shopping it around, hoping to get us signed somewhere.

Needless to say this is very weird for someone who had pretty much given up on the idea of getting anywhere past the occasional amateur side project to prevent her from going insane. Not that I'm walking around figuring that I'm a few hour's work away from a big-time contract that's going to make me rich and famous, but along with the fact that my bellydance teacher thinks I could have the potential to go professional in that area, too, it's almost making me rethink this whole giving up on the artistic career/selling out idea. Or at least giving consideration to reorganizing my priorities a bit. Doing this kind of thing in the U.S. would be difficult until/unless I got a green card, of course...but if nothing else it's nice to know that doors I thought were slammed shut may instead have cracked themselves back open and waited for me to notice.

In other news...amazingly, there are actually some jobs out there for me to apply for this week! Now I just have to find the time to put the applications together. I'm still suffering from the scattered focus I talked about last week, and it's getting really, really frustrating. Day after day I look back and find that nothing I wanted to do--whether personal or work-related--seems to have gotten done, even though I feel hectic and busy all the time. This is especially annoying because I was pretty successful last month in getting on track with planning and achieving some small steps towards some of my various goals. Now February seems in some ways to be one huge setback and time is slipping through my fingers before I can get hold of it. Maybe some sleep will help bring some clarity.

Finally, I am pleased to announce that I bought my first professional dance costume this week! My teacher knows a dancer who is moving to Tampa and selling many of her costumes, accessories, and music before she leaves, so she referred all of us students to her. I've been thinking of purchasing a bedlah (the embellished bra-and-belt set that makes up the foundation of many dance costumes), but I've been having trouble finding one that I like that is not too expensive. Needless to say, when I found that this woman had one lovely silver set left that fit me as if it was made for me, and was selling it complete with accessories for a ridiculously low price, I jumped at the chance to pick it up. Insert yet another promise to get photos up on the web as soon as I can get around to it >here<.

Whew. Life is strange. Add one or two new things to your schedule, and it seems to shake up your whole life. And you seem to have no time to do anything until the dust settles. February hasn't really been all that busy a month, objectively speaking, yet I am struggling--and sometimes failing--to squeeze in all the things I want to do or should be doing. Who knew that starting a yoga class and attending a meeting or two would make such a difference?

Well, I guess it doesn't help when the meeting is a weekend meeting, in a city that's over 4 hours away, and you have to drive up after working all day Friday. That was my first weekend this month. After a couple months of asking for information, not getting any, and starting to despair that I will ever figure out how to be the Chair of the FLA Continuing Education Committee, things finally started happening. One of which was that I was suddenly told I am also automatically a member of the 2005 Conference Planning Committee, and they have their first meeting in Tampa on the weekend, and gee, I know it's short notice, but couldn't you please come? Going was a good experience, but wow, that's a lot of driving. Added to the fact that since all the deadlines had passed for travel leave applications, and since I sure as heck wasn't using my vacation time, I had to manipulate my schedule to be able to go on personal time. So it went something like this: Friday: work 9-5. Hop in car. Drive 4.5 hours. Check into hotel. Fall asleep. Saturday: Wake up. Attend 5 hour meeting. Hop in car. Drive 4.5 hours home. Meet Michael at his place. Drive to downtown Hollywood to attend a drum/dance party for his drumming class. Sunday: Wake up with pounding headache (too many drums in too small a space for too long). Take Advil and relax a couple of hours. Shower and get made up and costumed for Harmonic Motion's monthly performance party. Drive to NE Ft. Lauderdale, attend event. Drive home. Shower and fall into bed. Monday: back at work. Not that it wasn't a good weekend, of course--it was. But I really could have done without all that driving....

Michael and I had a pretty good Valentine's Day. He had to work during the day, but we made a dinner date at a favorite restaurant in the evening so we had some quality time together at least. Sunday, we attended the Florida Renaissance Festival, where we walked through a maze, drank some mead, watched a demonstration about training and flying birds of prey, saw bits and pieces of some smaller shows and and did lots of shopping at the various vendor booths. Well...I did most of the shopping. But then, my goal this year was to spend lots of money, so I guess I achieved it! :)

And now I'm back at work. Sigh. Someday I'm going to get this getting-paid-for-not-working thing figured out. But until then....

This story has got to be the best thing coming out of the whole Janet Jackson/SuperBowl disaster....