First, when there's nothing but a slow, glowing dream.

I overstretched at my jazz class last week and had trouble even walking normally right up until Sunday. I took it a lot easier last night and so far I've only had a few twinges. My dance teacher Wendy said that they'd broken me in last week and that this week would be better. So far so good.

I enjoyed the jazz classes so much that I wanted to do more dancing. So I'm going to start ballet tomorrow night. I'm a bit nervous but I'm looking forward to it.

Work has been a bit of a nightmare lately and I'm in one of those periods where it seems really hard to please any of our customers. Still, my team seem to be happy and I'm really proud of the work they're doing. But I'm still feeling like I'm a real bottleneck and I can't get on top of the mountain of work in front of me.

I've been knitting in every spare moment and in less than a week I've got the bottom 20cm done of a jumper for me. I'm knitting it in the round so the front and back get done together. Between that and the dance classes I'm chilling out reasonably well out of work hours. Oh, except for the driving lessons, which despite getting easier still throw tiny moments of terror into my weekends. I drove at 100km/hr on the freeway last weekend for the first time ever and even successfully managed a lane-change (although I did inadvertantly slow down significantly during the manoeuvre...Thanks to the lovely lady behind me for slowing down too!). My instructor is talking about booking the test soon and I have a 2hr lesson on Sunday to spend a lot of time around the testing area....It's getting to the pointy end of the process and I'm nervous.... I've just got to keep thinking how good it's going to feel to put those P plates on my little purple car. :)

Happy Feet, but an intensely unhappy back.

I've been wanting to go back to dance classes for a long time. I haven't taken a real class (I'm not counting the exercise-driven ones at the gym) since high school but I dance in my head much every time I hear a piece of music, and I'm always glued to shows like So You Think You Can Dance.

I finally took the plunge this year, after figuring out that there was a dance school at the top of our street, and when they didn't answer emails or phonecalls, that there was another one which ran classes in a church hall less than 10min walk away.

I made my enquiries, established that there was an adult jazz class on Tuesday nights, and that all ages and abilities were catered for.....

Then on Sunday I made the trip to Bloch in Fortitude Valley where I became the proud owner of my very own pair of leather, split-sole jazz shoes. I got gym wear as well, but that's a sore point because most of their clothes didn't fit me. I think for most of the pants I was looking at, I was really an extra large, and they only stocked up to Large.

(On that point, I can highly recommend Lorna Jane for gym-wear. They are very expensive but have a great range of really good quality gym-wear that fitted well and didn't make me feel fat and lumpy the way other brands have in the past. The sales assistants were friendly and helpful and best of all, in their sizing, I am a medium.!!!)

Class tonight was great. A lot of it came back to me, (although a lot of it didn't) and I even got the leaps right. I had a little bit of trouble with the routine to start off with, but had it at the end, and managed to mostly keep up with all the other students who had started learning this routine last week. It was a good workout, but not so good that I couldn't keep up, and the stretching will do me good. At least I hope it will do me good sometime later, because at the moment my back and legs are in a world of pain. My hamstrings are going to hate me in the morning.

If I recover from the pain, I might think about taking on a Ballet class....now that would be funny.