Things have been pretty ok.

You only have to try something new once for it to become something that you've done before.

Work
Has really been ramping up, so I have been expending a lot of mental energy during work hours trying to get everything done and keep track of things.  I can almost feel all of the calories that I've been burning, haha.  I'm doing alright with that so far, but as always, it's important to remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint, and pacing is an important thing.

Dance
I'm hosting a dance and some private lessons at the GCC this coming Friday, which should be fun.  It's been a while since I did any lessons, so looking forward to those.  Hopefully I will be able to be useful. :x  Rest of the dance itself is pretty much all set, though I will be giving the setlist one extra lookover in case I want to swap anything.  It's hard to know how much to balance my music choices between what I know people like, keeping a good variety so that no one feels left out, choosing what's familiar and playing things that I enjoy personally.  Thinking about it a little more, it's funnily similar to how I was feeling confused about my reasons for dancing, in the sense that I felt a lot of external pressures clouding my internal compass of what I feel I should be doing.

Stopped by South Bay Fusion again this past Thursday -- I haven't been going every week and certainly don't plan to, but it's something I think I'll be doing every once in a while now that their new location is that much closer to where I live.  Fusion will never be my "home" dance, but SBF is perhaps a nice atmosphere for where I am at currently -- in terms of making sure that I am remembering what I believe in and not forgetting about myself in the midst of thinking about external pressures.  I say this because SBF (and probably the larger fusion scene) is a place where you can very strongly feel that you are =not= pressured into being a certain way, into dancing a certain way, into dancing a certain role, into anything at all.  The people there were generally quite pleasant to dance with and doing so actually made me realize that I generally =don't= automatically expect that from all dancers I meet because that just isn't always the case in other places.  Being put into a place where I did not always NEED that "cautious and wary" mindset ready to defend myself made me very conscious of that being an actual intuition that I've developed.  I can't really say whether that's a good reflection on SBF or just a bad reflection on other places, but it just...is a thing, I guess.

Cooking
Gumbo has definitely solidified itself as a recipe in my repertoire now, albeit a more involved one since you gotta make a roux first.  I also had some pretty good success making kalbi at home, which was yum!  The next thing I'm going to try making is actually shrimp and grits with some gruyere cheese, mushrooms, and bacon :3  We'll see how that turns out!

Melee
Had a pretty good session, where I figured some stuff out -- some stuff in the Fox/Falco matchup, but also a lot of things in Falcon/Falco, by just grinding the matchup a ton.  I feel like I was starting to get a better sense of how you need to mix up between taking a laser and dashing back vs trying to call out a laser with a more aggressive/approaching option.  I figured out one or two "plans" for edgeguarding as well (always respect the side-b), and realized I need to be more like wizzrobe and cover the option =after= they get to ledge rather than focus so much on preventing them from getting to ledge.  More importantly, I realized my reliance on dthrow techchases was actually preventing me from developing the sort of "set play" stomp/knee followups that makes falcon an actual good character, and that I was relying too heavily on "safe" options like nair/uair/grabs in neutral even at higher percents when I ought to just be looking for opportunities to call out movement and land a stomp/knee or something, which is what actually makes Falcon a scary character.  Even if you only land that knee once out of every 5 times, it's still gonna just lead to a stock, rather than just "trying to be safe" and using options might win neutral but just don't lead to any kills.  Also I had completely forgotten the percentages for uthrow->fsmash on no DI (80-90% ish??).

Haunting of Hill House
I'm not really a Netflix person but watched this series on recommendation of my best friend.  It was really good!  The horror element of the series definitely went up and then back down...episode 5 (the halfway point) was definitely the most intense and chilling part of the whole thing.  I chose to take a short break from the series after watching that episode, which in hindsight (hindsight...) maybe ended up being harder to deal with; I definitely didn't want to deal with something MORE intense after that so I chose to play it safe, but honestly if I had just kept watching another episode or two it probably would have made things a bit easier.

Aaaaaanyways, yes!  As with a lot of haunted/ghost stories this is, naturally, a story about the past.  They treated the subject quite respectfully, neither glorifying nor shunning the past.  The storytelling was quite interesting as well and it's just a well-done series in general, but that's the part I wanted to call out, is that it does not present an "answer" to the problem of past vs present/future -- but teaches about why each one is important, and follows these characters as they themselves learn this for themselves and about themselves.  Zombies, ghosts, and the like are all symbols of an unresolved past, but resolving them is not always so simple as "vanquishing" them.  For the Haunting of Hill House, it could be said in the end that the past itself is what gives these people the strength to move forward, and that is an idea that I really respect a lot.

Poi/Rando/Music/etc.
Have not been doing a whole lot here, but for poi I have started to practice stall chasers.  Not sure what I will work on next, probably just....bunch of random stuff that I already know, trying to get it all better.  Stalls especially, they are pretty useful and can always be worked on.
I keep on wanting to do some rando runs but it's sometimes hard to set aside the 1-3 hours needed to really do it.
This weekend I've been working on finishing up an old music WIP that I originally made for One Hour Compo -- as always, it feels great to be actually working on music outside of One Hour Compo.  Scheduling in time for your hobbies and projects is always a challenging thing...I happen to have been particularly good at it over the years, but even I am only mortal and have stretches of time where I neglect some things that I fully intend on doing.  But like clockwork, I always think about them, and come back to them, sooner rather than later.  That's the best way...for me, at least.