Please come pay tribute to the legendary Michael Jackson by dancing along to his favorite hits. I will be hosting two workshops this week – one on Thursday at6:30 p.m. and the other on Saturday at 11 a.m. You will learn his original choreography to the chorus of “Beat It” as well as most of the moves from the music video in a modified dance routine for “Thriller.” Plus, many more easy-to-learn combinations modeled after his style of dancing.

I’ve put a lot of time into choreographing this and I think it will be great fun! For more information, click here. Hope to see you there!

Kudos to my wonderful husband for helping me redesign an amazing webpage for my fitness venture.

Classes have been going well so far – I have some wonderful students from the neighborhood with a lot of energy. Special thanks to Shruthi and Kat for helping me promote the class.

Come dance with me!

Just booked a flight to Rikud 2010 in LA this Memorial Day weekend. I didn’t think I was going to be able to find a decent fare but the prices dropped this week. Hope to see some of my fellow IFD dance junkies from all around the country!

I’m practicing dance routines in my sleep now to get ready for a Zumba series in Graduate Hospital. It starts on April 21 at 7 p.m. at the Marian Anderson Rec Center. Please pass along to anyone you think might be interested. All the details are here. (And yes, that’s another Word press site.)

I’ve decided to apply my fitness training to a business venture. This is all in progress, but the gist of it is that I’m going to market my services as a dance and fitness instructor to the public, specifically to people who are interested in group classes, private lessons or “girls night out” dance parties.

The company is called Philly Dance Fitness, www.phillydancefitness.com. The site is still under construction, but please check it out and pass the link on to anyone you think would be interested. I’m hoping that enough traffic will get search engines to pick up on it. Any suggestions are also welcome!

As our basement continues to leak, we head to NC to shop for furniture for our house. Because what else would we do with my forced week of unpaid vacation? Sadly, furniture is not as exciting as say, wedding stuff or clothes or almost anything else you could shop for.

However, this time off has given me a chance to consider starting my own fitness business. We’ll see how that goes.

PGW workers outside our house

After smelling natural gas last night, PGW confirmed that there was, indeed, a leak somewhere. They proceeded to drill holes in the street from 1 a.m. until dawn. Around 3:30 a.m., I tried to bribe them with mint oreos to take a break and come back in the morning, but no luck.

Crews were still outside working when I left for the office this morning. Apparently, they found a crack in the gas main, which is now sealed.

I’m trying to be grateful that we didn’t asphyxiate or that our house didn’t explode, but right now I’m just grumpy from the lack of sleep. I wonder if there will still be a four-foot hole in front of our house when I get home…

Tigger

Tigger has officially recovered from a week of illness.

I just want to publicly say that United Airlines is officially on my boycott list. I have suffered through many, many delayed flights and even voluntarily bumped myself from a flight to get a free ticket. But I have never, ever had to miss a flight because of the airline’s idiotic scheduling. I should be landing in Philadelphia right now. Instead, I’m sitting in a hotel room outside Denver, biding time until a 7 a.m. flight tomorrow.

We were scheduled to fly from Sacramento to Philadelphia on the same plane, with one stopover in Denver. About an hour before the flight, we saw online that it was delayed by 40 minutes. We figured, no problem, it’s the same plane so we won’t have to worry about running to catch a connection. At the gate, the sign also noted the flight’s continuing service to Philly. Seth checked with the gate agent to be sure and was told that because the plane was delayed, they were going to substitute a different one that would leave just before we landed. We were livid, of course, because there were no other flights that would get us home that night. Worse, we arrived literally five minutes after the Philadelphia flight had taken off.

I want to know why United couldn’t hold the plane 15 minutes if they knew that several connecting flights were arriving late? Based on the customer service line in Denver (which took an hour to get through btw) it seemed like the same thing had happened to several other passengers. I remember gate agents holding planes all the time in the past when they knew that passengers were coming in from flights that had been delayed. Isn’t it more cost-effective to do this than to pay for hotel rooms for dozens of people? It would certainly make those passengers happier. I, for one, will not be flying United again anytime soon unless there’s an extremely compelling price difference.

I’ve always wanted to be on Amazing Race, but I don’t think that’s in the cards for me, since I probably wouldn’t even be able to get the time off work.

But I just read about the Great Urban Race (thanks Kat). It’s only five hours max and a similar mix of clues and running around. I’m so sad I missed it this year but I’m keeping it on the radar for next year. Check out the link – there are races all over the country, even in my lovely hometown of Madison, WI.