A lovely weekend at Senexet House in CT

This weekend about 30 of us went to Senexet House (a "retreat" center in northwest CT) to socialize, eat, dance, sing, look at archival photos and videos, and help some new musicians and callers develop themselves. I think everyone had a pretty great time. We did some dancing to recorded music including one Lady Gaga Techno Contra, and to music from the band of experienced and not-as experienced musicians. There were 4 experienced callers, and 4 new ones.

The band instruments included two button accordions, recorder, banjo, dulcimer, piano, percussion, uke, and fiddle. There was lots of variety and they were pretty good. I like bands with a variety of instrumentation and sound color. They had several practice sessions as did the new callers and then we danced to them to give them a chance to try out everything. This afternoon we went to the nearby Senexet Grange for a dance; a couple of other people came down from Boston to join use. I did some of the sound engineering which was more challenging than at a regular dance because of the variety in voice of the callers.

We ate lots of food cooked by several of us and for Saturday Dinner was a Potluck. We all pitched in for various scheduled chores related to the food production. There was much more food than we could eat and I certainly ate too much.

All in all it was a great weekend and we'll probably do it again next year or so.