A few months ago I was trying to figure out how to make bedtime go better with Nora (3y). She would go very slowly through the process, primarily by being silly. She'd run away playfully when it was time to brush her teeth, or close her mouth and hum, or lie on the ground and wiggle. She wanted to play, I wanted to get her to bed on time.

I decided to start offering her "silly time", which was 5-10min of playing together after she was fully ready for bed. If she wanted silly time she needed to move promptly through the routine, and being silly together was more fun than what she'd been doing.

This worked well, and we would play a range of games:

Over the past six months there's been a huge amount of discussion in the Davis Square Facebook group about a proposal to build a 25-story building in Davis Square: retail on the ground floor, 500 units of housing above, 100 of the units affordable. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, weighing the housing benefits against the impact to current businesses (while the Burren, Dragon Pizza, etc have invitations to return at their current rent, this would still be super disruptive to them if they even did return).

The impact to local businesses is not the only issue people raise, however, and I wanted to get a better overall understanding of how people view it. I went over the thousands of comments on the posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16) over the last six months, and categorized the objections I saw. Overall I found comments by 90 different people opposed to the proposal, and ignoring super short ones ("Stupid idea", "Oh no") I put them in 11 different categories. I counted some comments towards multiple categories: the goal was to understand how many people hold each objection. Here are the objections, sorted by the number of unique people raising each, and with some representative quotes:

While in a more remote area bike lights let you see where you're going, in a city there's usually enough light around for that. But you still need lights, so other people see you. [1] Unfortunately, lots of people end up biking without lights: it's easy to forget them, have them break, or end up out after dark when you intended to be home sooner. Batteries and LEDs have gotten so cheap, however, that you can get little be-seen lights for $1/each:

Lily has been trying to raise money for her class by busking, but it's cold enough that I don't want to play violin. I've been playing penny whistle, warm inside my pennywhistle mitten (thanks Julia!) but a lot of the fiddle tunes Lily plays are hard to play on a D whistle. A D whistle is good for a lot of keys (D, Amix, Em, G, ...) but Lily knows a lot of tunes in A and even some in E. Ages ago I had a tiny whistle in A, but I lost it at some point, which was probably for the best since it's absurdly high.

The two most common kinds of big event with contra dancing are the dance weekend and the dance camp. Putting any individual event into one category or the other can be a little tricky, but it might be helpful to consider the "classic" version of each:

	Weekend	Camp
Timing	Friday evening through Sunday afternoon	Full week
Location	Urban	Rural
Activities	Almost entirely social dancing	Mix of workshops, classes, social dancing, nature
Schedule	Tightly packed	Relaxed
Meals	Local restaurants and packed lunches	On-site together
Housing	Hotels and staying with friends	On-site together

Nearby I have Beantown Stomp and American Dance and Music Week at Pinewoods, as pretty typical examples.

A weirder difference, however, is that while weekends book bands, camps often advertise as if they are booking individual musicians even when they're booking bands. For example:

Max Newman is a great contra dance musician, probably best known for playing guitar in the Stringrays, who recently wrote a piece on dance performer pay, partly prompted by my post last week. I'd recommend reading it and the comments for a bunch of interesting discussion of the tradeoffs involved in pay.

One part that jumped out at me, though, is his third point:

3) Real World Compensation is Behind

Risking some generalizing and over-simplifying, any dance performer could tell you that over the past 10 (20!) years, the compensation numbers have been sticky, sometimes static. In real terms, compensation on the whole has not kept up with inflation.

This is quite important: if pay is decreasing in real terms then it's likely that the dance community is partly coasting off of past investment in talent and we shouldn't expect that to continue. Except when I look back over my own compensation, however, I don't see a decrease. For dance weekends, counting only weekends that included travel, my averages have been (in constant January 2025 dollars):