Holy crap!

Yep... it turned out that the dance yesterday turned out WAY better than I could have ever expected it to! They had the VMI jazz band come in and play for us live (and the dance was in Chandler Hall, where they usually have plays and concerts and such, so they were up on a stage instead of taking up dance-floor space), which meant there were very few "random wiggle-dancing" songs involved... so there weren't very many times when I ended up just standing off to the side with nothing to do.  And the few times that did happen, I usually took the opportunity to take pictures of other people dancing and such.  Like this one:

Look at that face! I don't know how I managed to catch this one at the exact moment I did, but it came out so funny-looking. XD

But anyway, the dance turned out really good.  Started off a little slow for me since I didn't know exactly what was going on dancing-wise (I need some idea of actual steps before I can dance, so if I see a bunch of people doing stuff I don't recognize I get confused and if I have no idea what I'm supposed to do it's impossible for me to do much of anything), but after a couple of the girls explained what kind of thing was going on, I caught on to it pretty fast and was able to actually dance.  And even more amazingly, actually ask girls to dance, which normally I am terrible at (most of the time at dances, it ends up taking so long for me that the song is halfway over before I actually manage to ask... and that's when I do actually manage to ask, instead of just freezing up.)

But yeah... I ended up doing so much more actual dancing at this dance than I have at any of the others this year.  Definitely the most fun I've had at a dance in a while (probably the only other one similar was the Honor Ball last year, which also had the live band and no random wiggle-dancing.)  In case you couldn't tell, this was one of those fancy dances where everyone had to dress up, which meant the guys had suits and ties and the girls had dresses.  Like these:

That's me on the right in the first picture, by the way.  Probably only the third time in my entire life that I've actually had to wear a tie, and I still have no idea how to put one on (thankfully one of my housemates was able to help me out with that before I went off to the dance.)

And after the dance was over, I hung around for a little while talking to people and helping move the chairs back down into the room while other people cleaned things up and moved stuff back to where it came from.  Here's a couple of pictures from then:

Yeah, there were random fall leaves, hay, pumpkins/gourds, and stuff like that as decorations here and there.  It is November, after all.  And speaking of gourds...

...what the heck is that giant gourd doing there!?