Flutterby™! : I don't feel like dancin'

Had a really nice weekend hanging out with Charlene for her birthday. At last year's Bodega Bay boat building challenge I'd won a stay at the Flamingo Conference Resort and Spa. It's only half an hour away, but anything can be a vacation if you approach it right, so... We went up on Friday night after doing the first 4H "Junk Drawer Robotics" project meeting, and crashed out. Saturday morning we went and wandered down Santa Rosa's 4^th Street, where someone said "I'm going to The Imaginists Theater Collective's re-envisioning of The Wizard of Oz". We checked the web site, and it said it was sold out, but after bouncing around Railroad Square and a few other places we got seated, and thoroughly enjoyed the goofiness of the show.

After just catching the kitchen still being open at Rendez Vous Bistro, where they happily went off the menu and made Charlene a big bowl of veggies, we headed back to the Flamingo, hoping for some dancing in the lounge there. Last time we were there there was an absolutely kick-ass band, and on Friday night the band sounded pretty good but we were worn out after 4H and crashed.

So we had high hopes when we went into the bar, where the act was Decadance, a DJ sort of thing. Which sucked. Let me count the ways:

• They were playing that style you sometimes here in passing cars where there's that sub 60Hz thing that's just about vibrating your body. Okay, but unfortunately I think it was some sort of add-on filter that the guy had running on his laptop, and rather than being texture over the songs it quite often just stuck on for measures, making the whole experience like being caught in a malfunctioning assembly line rather than getting pleasantly teased.
• The guy managed no beat matching, and in between songs there was often a few measures of down-time, which would have been acceptable had the next song had either a reasonable counter-point or kept the energy at a similar beat. Instead it was either something with a complicated rhythm that took another few measures to settle in, or was otherwise different, just sucking energy out of the dance floor.
• The smoke machine was run to excess. Cool lighting effects? Awesome. Choking on the smoke? Less awesome.
• The club had a fairly reasonable gender mix. The dance floor was largely male. Occasionally the women would start out on the floor, but then there'd be one of those song breaks and the energy would just disappear.

We tried to hang out for a while, but ended up heading back to the hotel room to move a little to the clock radio, played softly. A reminder to check out the music before we commit to a club.

But the Sunday brunch this morning was awesome, so all-in-all a great weekend.