The title will become clear shortly I promise…yes it is still to do with exercise!

Firstly Day 211: Saturday.
On Saturday, I had to teach my friend Karen how to do quilting, despite the fact that I had never done any quilting before. Luckily she only wanted to learn the basics so I could impart knowledge hastily gleaned from Wiki how the day before.
TO be fair…she knew full well that this was the case…I wasn’t passing myself off as a quilting expert just before any of you think I was being duplicitous!

Anyhow…quilting was not the point of this blog…but is was the reason I was short of time on Saturday!

Before the onset of quilting, and related walking about (which is more than you might think) I fitted in another go at Jillian Michaels 30 day shred. I did the level 1 work out again, mainly because I was still using the kettlebells as weights! It is a pretty good way to start the day off and If I can drag myself out of bed in the morning I will attempt to fit more in before work!  I added a few stretches of my own onto the end of the work out and I have to confess that a I modified one of the strength exercises to accommodate the kettlebells… I just couldn’t do side lunge anterior raises with one in each hand, so I had to use only one kettle bell held with both hands; my shoulders think it still worked!

Day 211 Complete 😀

Day 212 Sunday with wassailing and mud and dancing in ruins!

On Sunday Mythago had been invited to lead a Wassail ceremony at Herrington’s Field Community Orchard in Arundel West Sussex. I explained a Wassail in this post but basically it is a ceremony to bless the apple trees and ward off evil spirits in order ensure a good apple harvest for this year.  We adapted a traditional Sussex ceremony (well researched by one of our members Martin) and incorporated some of our dances into the ceremony its self to make the whole thing more unique to us. With all the rain we have had recently, the prospect of dancing in a field was somewhat daunting and we approached it with more than a little trepidation, however, once we had convinced the musicians that slower rather than top speed was better, the dancing was doable 😀 and the audience seemed very appreciative! They even joined in one dance…

yes…we asked them too…they didn’t just invade the dancing, that would have been strange!

We did an audience participation  version of one of our dances called the Broomstick dance, and much to our surprise every person in attendance joined in! I have never seen a broomstick dance for 50 people before…it was an experience (yes…a good one!).

Once we had wassailed the heck out of the trees, and planted a few trees of our own (they asked everyone too…we are not just a rogue tree planting morris dancers) we decided that the day was too nice not to do a bit more dancing… So we headed into Arundel and spent a very pleasant hour dancing at the Priory next to the river!
Imagine this, full of Mythago Morris dancers and surrounded by an appreciative audience.

Yes…there was an appreciative audience…

No..we did not knock it down!
it was like that when we got there…honestly!

So, the dances that I ended up doing were:
Maiden Castle, Broomstick (ish + walk), Our Henry, Standing Stones, Spank the Monkey, Witch Hunt,
plus a (short) procession to the orchard, and a lot of tooing and froing between cars and venues 🙂
It was lots of fun and made for an excellent Sunday 🙂 I rounded off the weekend with a few hours of studying towards my anatomy and physiology qualification for the gym instructor / personal trainer course 😀

Day 212 Complete 😀