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Thoughts on Bellydance Fitness for Beginners: Basic Moves & Fat Burning:

• This is not a "how to bellydance" video, it's a workout video. I knew that, and I bought it as a workout video, but the reviews on Amazon indicate that a lot of people don't actually read carefully before they buy. I'm shocked, really I am. If you want dance instruction, you'd be better off with their "Discover Bellydance" series as opposed to the "Fitness for Beginners" series.
  
• The set is fairly innocuous, and the music is more bland than I'd hoped.
  
• Speaking of bland, the narrator's voice is soporific. I don't want to hear her talk about "sensual' anything again, thanks. The plastered-on smiles from the twins are a bit annoying at first, but it's easy to ignore. (Speaking of the twins, I have severe hair envy. And there are worse ways to spend half an hour than watching attractive identical twins.)
  
• Oh, so that's what a hip drop is. Yeah, I can do that. Maybe; the narrator makes noises about it being hard, so maybe I'm not doing it right. Or maybe she meant it was hard for beginners to do hip drops and lifts for several solid minutes, I don't know. Either way, it didn't seem to merit being the only thing called "hard" in this segment in my opinion; doing a proper shimmy was much harder. Trying the "balance a sword on the hip" move in one of the bonus performances, that would be hard.
  
• Speaking of trying to shimmy? Heh. No, I can't quite do those yet.
  
• Snake arms make my shoulders click, maybe it's time to do some light rotator cuff work.
  
• I went through the "Basic Moves" twice, since it didn't feel like I was really getting much of a workout; by the end though, I had worked up a bit of a sweat. I don't know if that's because of the workout itself or because I was doing it in a sunny spot; I suppose if I start hurting later, I'll know. I'm not going through the "Fat Burning" workout yet, since reviewers point out that it's a lot of jumping around and is hard to get through if you're not in reasonably decent shape already.
  

So I'll give this one a couple of weeks to see how it goes; it's short enough that if I get up half an hour earlier in the morning I'll have more than enough time to go through it and shower before I need to leave the house. Probably I'll supplement with DDR at least until I feel like taking on the more difficult part of the video. Which reminds me, this DVD is a compilation of two different VHS offerings; I think if I'd spent $15 on individual videos rather than $20 on the DVD, I'd feel cheated.

My laziness pays off

Last fall, I'd raked the carpet of leaves covering our entire (small) back yard into a pile in one corner, intending to bag it up and go recyle it. That never happened because it rained for several days and then I got lame. Today was a nice day (61 degrees!), so I went out back to take some measurements for the small raised beds I was thinking of putting in along the fence. Since I was out anyway, it seemed like as good a time as any to bag up those leaves; in the process I discovered that I had a nice layer of humus at the bottom of the pile and it presented the perfect shape for a corner bed. Tomorrow afternoon I think I'll swing by Lowes after I get back from the exhibit at the Kennedy Center and get some soil and some sort of retaining material, then figure out what I want to plant.

Gardening here is a bit of a challenge since the only place in the entire property that gets a fair amount of sun is one corner of the upper deck. A lot of the flowers I'd like to plant wouldn't be particularly happy, since they tend to need full sun. The front yard is mostly moss on one side (and not the decorative kind, the "this area stays really wet and shady a lot" kind) and essentially bare right in front of the front porch. That area in front of the porch floods every time it rains, so not much point trying to reseed. I put planters out on each side of the steps to try to cover up some of the bare spots, but the squirrels apparently think that it's possible to dig a hole to China through them and the little furry menaces didn't do my hostas a lot of good. I'm not sure if they're going to come back this year or not. (The hostas, I mean; I'm quite sure the squirrels will be back.)

The back yard is both short and very sloped; what grass is there is patchy and there's a lot of moss. The back corner around the air conditioning unit has been taken over by wild strawberries, and it's kind of hard to get back there to keep them trimmed back. If this was my house, I'd try replacing some of the eroded soil and maybe putting in some form of terracing. Since it's not, I'm frankly not inclined to spend the money on it; I'll settle for building a couple of raised beds. I'd also, if I owned the yard, plant things like hydrangea which I love but don't know whether my landlord would like to inherit.

Okay, time to get out and get materials to decorate the egg I promised; the first attempt at decoupage turned out to be a miserable failure, so I'm going to take a different tack.