Yesterday was a busy day for me. It started early (painfully so, in my opinion) with a train journey to Hastings. There, I had my first session of a counselling skills course. The official title of this course is "Helping Skills & Personal Development" and it will give me at the end a Level 2 certificate in counselling skills, which would count as entry requirements if I wanted to do further professional development in that area. I'm more interested in the transferable skills and the personal development aspects of the course, but certificates are good.
The course runs on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, so I will have lots of painfully early starts to come.
I'm looking forward to it, although there was some uncertainty about whether I would get travel expenses covered by the Jobcentre (who set me up on this course in the first place) or not. I've got that sorted out now, though, so it should be okay.
After I got back home about mid-afternoon, I was knackered and had a little power-nap snooze, because at 7:30 it was back to the dancing lessons.
After struggling the first couple of weeks with the cha-cha, I found some music to practise it at home. Because I struggled to go straight in at disco tempo, I needed to find something with a similar beat but slower. Since cha-cha has a strong 2nd and 4th beat, what sprang to mind immediately was ska, and its slower-tempo cousins rocksteady and reggae. I also discovered by chance that "Showdown" by the Electric Light Orchestra also has a cha-cha beat at a slower tempo.
Armed with a selection of these tracks, I found the ones that had the clearest "cha-cha" element to them and practised diligently all last week, and as a result yesterday evening I totally (well, maybe not TOTALLY, but a lot) nailed the cha-cha! Super sense of achievement and satisfaction for that. Also, super amounts of sweating and muscles aching. Half an hour of pretty solid cha-cha dancing is a real workout! Especially with half an hour of waltzing as a gentle warm-up. It was pretty good.
Tomorrow, it's back to Hastings and then come home and go out to vote. Annoyingly, I haven't had replies from the Liberal Democrat or Green Party candidates, so I feel like I'm going to be voting "blind" on important issues (I could reward Lorna Blackmore for Labour, since she did at least reply, if only to recap briefly the small section we'd discussed face-to-face after the hustings - but I wasn't terribly impressed by her understanding of sex workers' rights issues). There's no chance that I'd vote for UKIP, and although Hendry has done a good job as MP, he's still a Tory, and crucially, he's in favour of the 20 week limit on abortion (and, if I understand correctly, he'd prefer to make it much harder to get as well - almost a "pro-coathanger" candidate).
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