The New Routine, Two left feet, What goes around…

Friday night I went to spend happy hour at the bar with Meaghan for the second week in a row. The amount of people there for a Friday hour were light, a testament to snowbird season being over. Much like last week I just drank there and then went home to make a frozen pizza for dinner. I ate it while I worked on editing the video that I shot on Wednesday.

Both Saturday morning and Sunday I played pickleball with my friend Sue, who recently moved out of Talis Park where I had been playing on weekends for most of prior year. We played at East Naples courts which are only a few minutes away. It makes weekend wake ups more casual as before I had to set a 6:30 alarm to be at Talis by 8. We now played at 9am instead so it is far easier for me. We had a lot of fun playing both days. It’s a good opportunity to play with a more diverse set of people.

Saturday I tended to a number of small tasks around the house. I went into the raised bed garden and did a lot of ripping out. Many of the things in there had become unruly and/or bolted. All that I left was several pepper plants which are doing well. I will have to reevaluate what I want to put in there next.

I decided to skip Carrabbas Saturday night and went to Tacos and Tequila instead, it’s only a few miles from my house and I like their food. I have never gone there solo, I went there quite often with Christine in the past. I think it will regain a regular spot in my rotation now that I am single. It’s a younger crowd, a bigger bar and they have good margaritas. I got to watch the Kentucky Derby while I was there, bonus. What a crazy close finish that was.

When I got home I fired up the YouTube app on my phone and did another unscheduled, spontaneous live stream that lasted over two and a half hours. The stream meandered back and forth between PEV and non-PEV talk and had over 1000 views while it was running.

After playing pickleball Sunday morning I had sort of a lazy afternoon where I watched some more of the OJ documentary on Netflix. It’s a five part series and each episode is around 90 minutes long. I just started the last episode. Although everyone knows about the OJ murders the series does a great job of getting into the minutia surrounding it.

The Cinco de Mayo / Salsa dancing class I was invited to was scheduled for 6. I made arrangements to meet up with a guy I play volleyball with and his wife around 5 so we could grab some food/drink prior. I knew I needed to pre-lubricate with some alcohol to get through this. After I was couple margaritas deep there was an incident that I don’t want to go into detail about other than to say the way the universe works sometimes is crazy. For my entire life I have subscribed to the “what goes around, comes around” concept which is just another way to describe karma. It appears to be once again working it’s magic. It has to be an awful thing to go around life having the truth be your mortal enemy.

So once that mini-drama passed the salsa class began. I have a rhythm, I can keep a beat all day long but when it comes to dancing it looks like I have hips made out of granite. The class started with showing a few basic steps of the salsa. The steps are not all that hard but when I was asked to put them together it was a bit of a shit show. Once the basics were explained the rotation started. Basically the men would stay put and all of the women would rotate around and dance with each man, going through the progression.

I found myself doing way too much thinking about the steps to really relax but luckily all of the women there were happy to help guide me and were patient. The woman that invited me is a high level dancer and one of the event organizers so I didn’t get to talk to her much but it was ok. I did get to talk to various women that were at our table and it turns out several of them are really into pickleball, so much so that we made arrangements for a group of us to get together to play this week.

I wound up staying there until after 9:30 before I called it quits. Even with the unanticipated drama and my clumsy dancing attempt I was glad I put forth the effort to go. I need to keep forcing myself into these unfamiliar situations to grow, learn, and expand my circle of friends.