Hiphop Tutorials- Learn at Home

In yesterday's post, I mentioned working with a hiphop tutorial video for a combo I would be doing in my hiphop class. The guy who does them, Matt Steffanina, has lots of tutorials on YouTube with varying degrees of difficulty. No-one "gets it" immediately. It is something you need to spend some time on and work at it whether you are a complete beginner or a seasoned hip hopper. If I were to learn this complete routine, I would estimate that it would take me at least 5 hours. I have 3 years of hiphop experience, but I am quite slow at learning choreography. My youngest daughter would likely have this routine perfected in an hour. If you want to put the time in and work on a new skill, these videos are very thorough and easy to follow. Here is the one I'm working on:



Who knows? If I get enough support, I may just embarrass myself and post a video of my finished product when I've learned the whole thing.

Off the Cuff Decluttering Post

We are going to do something a little different today. I have been reading lots of decluttering articles and books (most notable Marie Kondo's book that is taking the world by storm), but nothing has really been speaking to me. I do get a little motivational fire from each thing I read, which gets me sorting and organizing happily for a day or two, but what I am really looking for is that ultimate a-ha moment where you suddenly realize your personal secret of why you want to be clutter free and then it is just easy after that. I don't know if it exists, but the Kondo book sounds like it maybe does, but I am not really "getting it" so far.

So...what I propose for today, is this. I saw an article this morning entitled Still Holding Onto These 30 Items? Toss Them Today. I only read the first item on the list, which made me snort and say, "June? Of which year?". Then inspiration hit me. I plan, without even reading the list first, to go through the entire list and seriously try to implement every list item. It will be like hiring a professional organizer. I have no idea what it is going to ask me to do. I already know I'm not going to be able to do the first item, but I will honestly try to get rid of at least some of my giant magazine collection. I am going to go for a run and then I commit the rest of the day to this project. I expect it will need more than one day, but I have most of this week free besides an appointment on Thursday, my daily running/exercise, and studying for an exam on Friday morning. I will continue this post at the end of the day and let you know what happened.

2:15pm. Here is what I have done today so far. Alarm went off at 7:45. Texted with a friend who was saying she was not able to come to our planned power walk that morning. Talked a bit to the family as they got ready for school. Ate breakfast. Washed face and brushed teeth. Took a practice final for my real estate course exam this Friday. Called real estate office to get help fixing something that was going wrong with course. Wrote the beginning part of this post. Got ready to go on run. Stretched. Was out for run for just over an hour. Stretched. Ran through a hiphop combo tutorial from YouTube that I will likely be learning in class tonight. Had a shower. Blow dried my hair. Texted with son in law about coming to pick up a dresser. Made myself a green smoothie for lunch including going out to the garden to pick kale and cutting up other fruits and veggies. Drank said smoothie. Daughter #2 is sick and needed to be picked up from school. Now I have come back home and have written this summary of my day and it is almost 2:30. I have not even begun the thing that I set out to do today. But, you know what? It's ok. There is a lesson to be learned here. Life is full and complete without using most of EVERYTHING that I own. That piece of insight may help me get rid of more things.

The next day: I ended up getting about 2 to 2.5 hours in on magazines yesterday. First I gathered all of the magazines into one place. Since, most of them were in the basement, I set up shop on our uncomfortable unfinished basement floor. Here is what the pile looked like:

Disgusting, right? If you don't think so, just picture a room or space in your house, and now think about all the room in that space that this amount of magazines would take up. The really sad thing is that I think that my husband may have almost as many or more, especially if he included anything at his office, and my youngest daughter probably has about 30-60 magazines in her room too. I was thinking this exercise was going to end up being a thirty day challenge, but I can see that just item #1 will take me most of this week if I am doing a couple hours a day. I know some of you are saying, "just toss them, already!", but remember what I said at the beginning of this post- I know I am not going to be able to do the first item. Look at me! I'm doing it, but in order for me to do this one I have to spend some time with those magazines in order to be able to let them go. I won't be able to get rid of them all, but I can see where I am headed and I'm feeling good about it. Here is how it sat when I left my pile last night: