On March 10th, what originally started as just Matt and I, quickly turned into a nice little group of 15 of us headed for this year's ballroom competition at Brandeis University!  (Otherwise known as the Northeast Collegiate DanceSport Challenge - yeah... we'll stick with the "Brandeis Comp"...)


Anyways!  All in all, it was an AWESOME day - we had a ton of fun at the competition, we all danced really well, and my back held up!  For those of you with your puzzled-face on, I managed to tear/pull/misalign something in my back right at the end of January and it's been a little rough.  My first day of physical therapy was the day before this competition... I went for it anyway... :) 

We started the morning off with Rhythm - that can be a little rough... asking for a lot of high energy first thing in the morning!  Matt and I got 4th in Gold ChaCha/Rumba/Swing/Mambo (out of 4... but we had fun!).  

For Gold American Smooth, we ended up with 3rd in Waltz/Foxtrot and 4th in Tango/VWaltz (out of 6).  The couples that took first and second were actually Open couples, I think so we're totally fine falling in behind them!  

And finally, for Gold International Standard, we ended up with 5th for Watlz/Tango/Foxtrot/Quickstep (out of 7) and 6th in Viennese Waltz (out of 10).

Matt and I also ended up winning the Dance for the Cure Foxtrot Fun Dance and I followed a Newcomer from WPI (Sam) for a Waltz Fun Dance and we took 5th!

My favorite dance of the day?  Definitely the Fun Dance I did with Rob!  I was SUPER excited that he wanted to come with us for the day and watch.  In the afternoon, they did a Macarena Fun Dance - basically? Anything and everything was fair game!  I was kind of just hoping we could go out and goof around for the first round, but one of the judges (Russell) really liked us and thanks to him we ended up with 3 call-backs and made it to the final round!!  (We got Finalist ribbons - I think they only actually placed 1st place.)  Soooooo much fun :)

Some other photos from the day... :)

Part of my birthday gift from Rob was a trip down to NYC to see a Broadway show!!  We took advantage of Spring Break and headed down to the city for March 15th.  We got up bright and early (something to the tune of 5:30 AM) to catch a train from Poughkeepsie into Grand Central Station.

Once we got to the city, we headed straight to the South Street Seaport - we had decided to try our luck with TKTS in terms of tickets - neither of us had a particular show in mind and generally figured we would have been happy with anything!  We lucked out with AWESOME seats to see Memphis!  More on that later though...

It was still early (and a little gloomy) so the Seaport was pretty quiet.  We wandered around a bit and took a few photos to stall a little until lunch time.

We decided to have lunch at the Paris Cafe, which was actually a beautiful old Irish (yes, everyone who worked there was actually Irish) pub!  It was jam-packed because they were catering some kind of big business luncheon but we found two seats at the inside edge of the bar and just kind of took in the chaos!  Fish and chips with a little Blue Moon - yummmm!

After lunch, we wanted to make our way down to Battery Park, but first Rob had to take a pass through Wall Street.

Ok... enough of a detour!  Back on track to the park!

After my junior year, I had an internship in the city working for a civil engineering general contractor.  The project?  The South Ferry subway station at the end of the one line!  They basically built an entire new station - it's amaaaaaazing!  My internship ended before we finished the project so this was the first time I've seen it since it was completed!

Yup.... I was excited :)

Love the main entrance!! Really similar to the Bowling Green entrances...

I was super anxious to see the rest of it but Rob really wanted to see the World Trade Center site and we wanted to walk around a bit more so we decided to just come back to the station when we were ready to head back uptown.

On to the World Trade Center site:

And we stopped by the Trinity Church, too...

Finally time to go back to my subway station!!! (Yes, that's right... I claimed it as mine...)

My windows!!!!

Long story short?  These blast-resistant windows were my big project!!  I designed the steel framework for them :)

We got off at Lincoln Center so that we could wander around Central Park a little bit...

And then onto the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

The look on Rob's face when we got to this point was priceless.  :)  Not to mention the kid-in-a-candy-store reaction he had every time we walked into a new room of the museum.

At this point it was around 5:30 so we didn't have a chance to go into the Guggenheim but Rob wan't to at least take a peek at the outside.

At this point, we had done a LOT of walking and I was mostly exhausted...

We hopped back on the subway and headed back to Times Square.  Since we both had a big lunch, we decided on a lighter dinner and then wandered around a little until it was time for the show!

Yup... we went to Toys 'R' Us!

It's SHOWTIME!!!!!!

The show was INCREDIBLE!  I would 100% recommend it to everyone - amazing songs, story, acting, just everything!  Plus, seeing Adam Pascal on stage was icing on the cake!

All in all, we had a pretty spectacular day...  :)