With Kingfisher I'm starting to need to think about how many gigs I should accept, which is good and bad! I like playing a lot, but since I also work full time, have three kids, etc. I need to be careful not to say yes to too many things. It would be helpful to know how much I've been playing, so I went back over my booking calendar to figure that out:
This is all my Free Raisins and Kingfisher gigs. I've counted dance weekends as three days, though some are two and some are four. I haven't included the 46 days of gigs I had booked but didn't play because of covid. For 2024 I've counted two Kingfisher evening dances that are in progress but not confirmed yet.
We can break this down by regular one-off dances vs dance weekends:
It started off as all one-offs: initially it was that we weren't good enough to play weekends, then that we were good enough (I think...) but people hadn't heard of us, then that weekends book pretty far out. In 2015 my gigs became majority weekends because Amy moved to the West Coast so we couldn't play most one-off dances, plus I have a baby and don't want to tour anymore.
Then in 2018, when my (then) youngest is 2yo I had more time again, and started Kingfisher with Cecilia:
In 2019 it was almost all weekends with the Free Raisins and one-offs with Kingfisher; now it's a lot of one-offs with Kingfisher and weekends about evenly split. My guess for 2025 and later is the weekends will also be mostly Kingfisher, though I'd also love to keep playing with Amy and Audrey if people want to book us!
In 2014 I was averaging one night of dancing a week (50/y). That was fun at the time, but it isn't an amount that would work now. The current rate of two nights per three weeks (35/y) seems pretty good, especially with the older kids coming along now.