I spent the weekend in Tralee at the juggling festival, which largely involved gaping in awe at some very talented performers and generally not sleeping. I got tantalisingly close to qualifying a five-ball juggle (ie. getting ten catches of five balls) on Saturday, which I hadn’t expected to happen this side of Christmas. I’m beginning to feel that juggling is quite like programming in one important respect: you need about two hours to catch up with where you were last time before you can start to do something worthwhile.
The weekend peaked on Saturday night at the Renegade show. For those who haven’t been to a juggling convention before (which I take to be all of my readers), Renegade is an opportunity for the people who think they’re great to get on stage and prove it. For the most part they did prove it. Given my preference for technical tricks over crowd-pleasing visuals I prefered Renegade to the more family-oriented public show earlier in the day.
I’m proud to say that Cecily and I won the Diabolo-tennis doubles, beating Paul—the hat man—and Ruben—apparently some sort of mutant juggling-child owned by the circus—to the top prize of a cookie and a lollipop.
No doubt we’ll have some photos, and maybe some videos, at the DIT JugSoc site at some point, but since that site is in the very preliminary stages of development it may be a few weeks. On a related note, I’m designing the site for DIT’s JugSoc so if you have any comments about it I’d like to hear them. You know how to comment.