Nonattachment

One of the many chores that we did over the weekend, which was in fact mostly chore-oriented in case that wasn't obvious from other posts about it, was to drop a load of things we do not need off at the Goodwill.

I both love and hate giving things to Goodwill. On the one hand, I find it very freeing to let go of what I no longer need, of material stuff that longer serves me. And what a bonus that by doing that, other people can get things for cheap, and a third-party can serve the poor in the process. It's all good. On the other hand, what if you end up needing it again someday? Then what?

The load we dropped of on Sunday included:

• an old fan
• six or seven blankets, most of which were old and very worn and a couple of which were new but made of that poly fiber stuff that makes your skin crawl when you touch it
• the stuffed animal turtle that our friend Greg won at the county fair we went to for my birthday last year and then gave to me
• an old suitcase of Eric's that was referred to as "the dog" because the handle had broken off and been replaced by a leash. Eric found that giving it dog commands was effective at increasing its obedience and could be seen quietly shouting "Heel! Heel!" at the suitcase when it was falling over as he tried to lead it down the airport corridor.
• some flower pots that I picked up for free at a moving sale and that we determined were simply too hideous to keep around

See? None of this is stuff that I will ever ever need again. Except for maybe the blankets. You never know when you will need a ratty old blanket to wrap up an injured, bleeding animal or to pad something fragile in transport. But for now, the extra closet space is worth it.

Too sexy too cute

We play a lot of games. Often, they are made up on the spot. Like on Sunday, as we were just taking a walk around and Eric channeled the emotional state of statues that we came across.

Indignant indigestion:
Surprise:
Hrumph.
Then, we walked past a shop that was so overwhelmingly pink we had to go in. It was full of cheaply made fashion jewelry and accessories and the new game was that Eric would choose the ugliest earrings he could find and I had to wear them for the rest of the day and one time out with friends without a disclaimer.

He chose these, for $4.99:
I am nothing if not vengeful. My retribution:
I paid $1.88 at a shop in Chinatown for this beaut. Eric was convinced for the rest of the day that he was getting a rash from it wherever it touched his skin.

Then we went to see Up in digital 3D.
It is great and I highly recommend that everyone see it.

Profiling

On Sunday, as Eric and I were relaxing at home after lunch, we heard a small commotion on the street below. We headed over to the window to see what was the fuss and saw two guys attempting to break into an apartment across the street: one of them was supporting the other as he tried to climb onto a second floor balcony. There was significant grunting involved.

We thought for a moment about calling the police. But one of them was wearing a pink polo shirt and flip flops, and the other one was carrying a bag of Subway sandwiches. So we figured they were probably OK.

Critical, motorized

Riding my bike to yoga this morning, I unintentionally timed my trip perfectly to coincide with the Pride parade, which routes a few blocks past where I live. I tried to navigate around it when, suddenly, I found myself in sea of motorcyclists.

And these weren't just any motorcyclists: they were Dykes on Bikes.

And there were many hundreds of them!

It turned out they were turning right in front of me, trapping me in the elbow of the turn. All I could do for over 10 minutes was stand there and watch, and cheer, and be delighted and just a little scandalized at what I saw, which ran the gammet from women in full leather to women in nothing but leather thongs* and boots, and covered a lot of ground in between: leather corsets and garter stockings, topless women in tutus and bright pink fishnets, and even a couple of women dressed as bumble bees.

It, also, was quite wonderful. And just as unexpected. The mood was spectacular and it was hard not to feel, well, proud.


*I said "thong."

Critical

On my ride home from work yesterday I was on my usual route at the usual time when suddenly I found myself in a sea of bicyclers. Traffic was completely stopped as hundreds - maybe thousands? - of bikers did the equivalent of strolling down the street.

I had heard of this before but never come across it. This phenomenon is known as Critical Mass.

It was started in San Francisco (of course) in 1992 and now happens in more than 300 cities every last Friday of the month. It might be to draw attention to biker's rights in the city. Or it might just be fun to stop traffic. I don't know. But they happened to be going my way, so I joined the throng* and let them escort me the rest of the way home.

It was quite wonderful.


*I said "throng"

Stroking

This morning I went back in time to my freshman year of college. I did this via: the Erg.

The Erg is a medieval torture device, the modern incarnation of which you will recognize as the rowing machine you've probably seen sitting unused in some dark corner of your gym. It looks like this:


Unless you've been on a crew team at some point you've likely never been on one of these. There's really no good reason to get on one unless you are a rower or a masochist.*

I was not in a particularly self-punishing mood this morning, so it remains a mystery why I hopped on and started pulling. The pool just looked so...wet. And all the good Elliptical machines were being used.

I think I was partly just really curious to see what it was like after all these years. How much less strong am I now than I was then? It was time to find out.

The first 25 strokes were glorious! I was amazing! My splits were fast and I was feeling great. I started to think this could become a viable part of my regular workouts.

My sudden super-rower abilities quickly faded, but I was actually able to hold my own for a full 2000m, which is the length of a the races I used to do. For good measure, I did another 3000m after that but not at quite the same intensity as that first one. Would it be weird to admit that it actually felt really good? It felt cleansing somehow; there was an element of relief.

I believe that memory is stored not just in our minds but also in our bodies. When I started swimming again recently I found myself recalling people and experiences I haven't thought about since my days on the high school swim team. This morning was similar but this time taking me back to my freshman year of college: faces, moments, images all came flooding back as I cruised up and down, up and down the slide. Like when I tripped in the college cafeteria and did a slip'n'slide through my chicken curry.** Or when I lost a few teeth when I got ejected from a boat mid-race. Or like when I put Clarence Carter's "Stroking" on the Erg room mix as a joke to my teammates. It just seemed so apt.

I might even get on that old horse again sometime.


*Rowers are really just a subset of the larger masochist community.
**So weird that I ate meat back then!

Unstacked

On my way home from work on Tuesdays I stop at the Ferry Building to pick up our organic fruit CSA box at Frog Hollow, a wonderful farm just outside of San Francisco. And every Wednesday morning on my way in to work, I stop there again and get a much larger CSA box for my office. Biking with 20lbs of very delicate stone fruit is just the sort of challenge I enjoy on a Wednesday morning.

When I get to work, I very carefully (but also usually very quickly as I am running late for a meeting) lay all the fruit out on the table, each peach and apricot in it's own little spot, not touching anyone else. It's for their own safety.

For context, I need to tell you that the office is kept on high tidiness alert at all times. Neatness counts here. Violators are summarily berated, and, just for good measure, our Office Manager is regularly berated on their behalves in spite of the fact that she is awesome and takes really good care of the office.

Knowing that the urge to stack the fruit in a bowl to look neat and tidy would be practically irresistable, I was very explicit via office-wide email that this would not be advisable.

"If you're wondering about the non-hierarchical presentation, it's because the tender flesh of the stone fruits does better in a single layer rather than stacked in a bowl."

Given all this, I'm sure you will find it easy to understand my reaction walking by the fruit table later in the day only to find, to my shock and horror, the fruit had been stacked in the bowl.

"Ahh!" I cried out, loudly. "Unstack the fruit! Unstack the fruit!"

I paused and stood there for a moment. No one responded.

"Who did this?!" I shouted some more. "I was very clear! No stacking! The tender flesh! Oh the tender tender flesh! It can't take it! Unstack the fruit!"*

Nada.

I walked over to one of my teammates who wasn't going to the meeting that I was now very late for.

"Would you please unstack the fruit? It's all going to rot if it stays in the bowl like that." I used a much nicer voice. She humored me. And I'm pretty sure Emily didn't get yelled at (um, other than by me...)


*I did, in fact, literally shout this in my office.

That girl is poison

Because we are sophisticated and cultured, Eric and I went to the opera last night. We saw "Tosca" which, I was interested to discover, was first performed by the SF Opera in 1923.

And because we are not yet wealthy, we sat in the second from the last row in the upper balcony.*

But we did get dressed up in our fancy duds and we went to the pre-opera lecture beforehand to learn something about the show we were about to see. One of the things we learned is that all of the characters' names have connotations in Italian that give us insight into their role. For example, you know that Scarpia is the bad guy because his name is derived from the word for shoe. (This also gives us insight into Italians.)

Tosca, the title character and the beautiful woman at the center of the opera, is derived from the word for "poison."

There were some really beautiful moments in the opera. I think one of my favorite parts was in the third act where you can hear the bells from all around the city chiming at dawn. It was quite stirring and lovely.

And then they all die.


*We've been watching a series on Everest the past few weeks and determined that our seats were technically in the "death zone," which is above 23,000 feet.

At the core

I went to pilates last night. It was with a teacher who is known to be a nasty person but she teaches a halfway decent pilates class after 6pm so I sometimes go to it.

We were all setting up our mats and she seemed to be having trouble counting the number of people because everyone was scattered willy nilly around the room. She's probably in her mid-forties and I think she used to be a ballerina, which might explain why the experience of her is so severe. She has her bright red hair cropped into a pageboy haircut that I would believe was a wig if you told me and I might believe it anyway.

For some reason, counting us was extremely important to her yesterday. So she proceeds to have a hissy fit about getting people lined up just so - one person behind another in a very precise way (ballerina heritage?). I had the nerve to suggest that we set up in a staggered formation so that people could actually see something other than the back of the person in front of them.

This subversive suggestion got me moved to the front row. Not the front row with other people in it, where I tried to move when she told me to move up. No - the front row with the teacher. She was apparently so irritated by my desire to see that she decided to make everyone watch me do pilates for an hour.

"No one ever said they couldn't see before. I think it's because everyone comes so regularly that they all know the exercises and don't need to see," she snapped at me while getting ready to start class.

She begins class (it's about ten minutes late now). Then, after the first set of exercises, she pulls a fast one: stands up, picks up her mat, collects her other belongings, walks to the back of the room, has everyone turn around, and proceeds to teach the rest of the class from the back of the room, meaning I am now at the very back of the room. In a row all by myself.

I shared the story with Eric over dinner in an effort to determine whether I should take this personally.

"No, for her to have done that intentionally requires her to be thinking two or three moves ahead," figured Eric. "That seems unlikely."

Yeah. But still. Weird, no?

Busy as a bee

Beekeeping is cool. It is also one of those hobbies that I had no idea so many people did until I started talking about it in my facebook updates and now suddenly everyone and their dad is a beekeeper.

The class took place at a small farm in Ben Lomond which offers a lot of classes targeted at hobby farmers. It is not a large piece of land at all but it includes a massive garden, a whole lot of chickens, one very fat black pig and two old dogs.*

We got there a little early and wandered around checking out the plants and the animals and the other people. Nowhere in the class description did it say that it was Beekeeping for Lesbians but, well, the laws of probability suggest it must have been in there somewhere.

The very best part of the beekeeping class was the demo with actual real live bees. Thousands and thousands of them! Our fearless teacher put on her funny suit and took the boxes apart to show us how it works. The first thing to note is that everything is very, very sticky.

And also, everything is covered in bees. They literally drip off the frames when she picks them up.
This is where the bees go in and out. One thing I learned that I did not know before is that there are Guard Bees that are like little tiny bouncers; they hang out by the door and make sure that only bees that are hip enough and wearing the right shoes get in. Bees that don't belong will, apparently, literally get wrestled to the ground in an effort to deny them entrance.



*"Or what? You'll Release the Dogs? or the Bees? or the Dogs with Bees in Their Mouths so When They Bark They Shoot Bees at You?"**
**No idea why the website where I copied this has it in title caps. Or why I would rather write about the title caps than just fix them.

Best weekend ever

It was a solidly fabulous weekend. Beekeeping class on Saturday, a wander around Santa Cruz, overnight camping at a state beach including a most improbable and unfortunate hula show, breakfast at the beach in Capitola and last but not least a kayaking adventure through Elkhorn Slough ("sloo") on Sunday.

I'm still not sure what a slough is, exactly, but from what I can tell it is place that includes a really really shallow tidal river that connects to the ocean on one end and who knows what on the other and is full of animals.

Here are some of my favorite animals that we saw, starting with...otters! These guys were hilarious. They would pop up nearby out of nowhere and then rub their bellies and pretend to wash their hair. Then they would do these crazy rolls, going around and around and around. If I had to choose a water animal to be, this seems like a good option. They certainly look like they are having a lot of fun.

These guys, who are either seals or sea lions I'm still not sure, also seem to have it pretty good except that boy do they stink!

And then later, this one was looking at me.

These are gull-lings. I don't usually find baby birds particularly cute but holy gray spotted fluff balls are these little dudes adorable!

And then there was the sort of wildlife that just makes you shake your head.

Some things stay the same

We went to bluegrass at Atlas Cafe last night. It's a favorite Thursday evening event but one that we haven't checked out in a few months.

Yeah, nothing appears to have changed in the past few months. It's all the same. Most of the same characters were there, just doing their bluegrass thing. Food was the same. Beer was the same. All the same tables and chairs were there, and the same old raggy couch was still jammed awkwardly along the side wall.

I did notice that someone had left a man's brimmed hat above the Odwalla cooler. That was different.

And the heater on the patio was turned up so high it looked like a campfire on a tall stick. I haven't seen that before.

Everything else was the same.

Not keeping any secrets

I took a few minutes between work and my client dinner last night to stop at the enormous destination mall we live a block from to return some undergarments to Victoria's Secret. Last time I was there (part of the mall trip that included seeing Terminator) I got overexcited and bought more stuff than was really necessary. Plus, their big sale started Tuesday so I figured I would be clever and swap out full price items for sale items.

I returned my full price items and figured I'd take a look at the sale items to see if anything appealed. I'm not a good shopper to begin with and I 'm especially not a good bin shopper. I get really crabby really quickly. My mother can confirm this.

Historically, this sale has been a huge event for Victoria's Secret and I'm sure they've learned in years past that they need to be staffed appropriately so, understandably, the store was teeming with Associates.

I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I was asked 11 times in less than 4 minutes* if I was finding everything OK and if I was looking for anything specific. Then they want to fill out a card with your name and bra size. I was very pleasant to the first five. The next few I was a little more curt with. Numbers 8 and 9 I snarled and hissed at. Number 10 got a cold, unforgiving stare. Number 11 I just ignored.

In yoga classes, some studios offer you a card or a stone or something that you can set next to your mat to indicate that you don't want to be adjusted or touched. I need the retail equivalent of that. This might be a good start.


*Using not round numbers makes it sound more believable and is also funnier.

Lapped

I have a client dinner tonight, so I went to the gym this morning to make sure I got a workout in today. I can confirm what I have long suspected: going to the gym in the morning is hard.

The workout of choice today was 15 minutes of yoga and then 20 minutes of swimming. I've discovered recently that I like swimming as exercise and am trying not to shy away from it in spite of articles about the increasing problem of chlorine-resistant intestinal parasites like crypto.

The pool was more crowded this morning than I have ever seen it but I hopped into the lane with the fewest people, which was the fast lane, and started splashing my way up and down the lane along with the four other people. I was doing a great job of not being in anyone's way in spite of not really being a super fast swimmer.

One girl in the lane broke out a kickboard, and I thought that seemed like a great idea so I grabbed one too. I waited until everyone had gone and then off I went, put-putting toward the far end of the pool. It was, how you say, slow-going. In spite of my enormous head start, I was eventually lapped not only by the people swimming but also by the other girl who was kicking.

The lifeguard who monitors all pool activity stands up and makes his way toward the end of the lane I was in (I am still doing just one out-and-back lap with the kickboard). He stands there and watches me come slowly towards him...kicking...kicking...kicking... Hours pass. I finally make it to the end of the lane. He crouches down. I take off my goggles which are completely fogged up, and look at him innocently.

"You're a pretty good swimmer," he leads off generously. "But you're a really slow kicker. You can keep swimming in this lane, but when you kick, could you move over to the slow lane?"

"Of course!" I chirp cheerily. "Happy to."

He looks relieved.

He is lucky that I have no ego attachment to being a good kicker*. In fact, all the way back to my days on the high school swim team I have been an outrageously sucky kicker. My coach blamed it on my lack of ankle flexibility but I think he just made that up.

So I finish up my kicking practice in the slow lane where I continue to be passed not only by swimmers and other kickers but also by one of the mentally challenged guys who appears to be doing some form a water-based interpretive modern dance that involves a lot of whooping.


*In contrast to tetherball...? Yeah, I don't get that either.

Things you do for fun in Ohio

We were in Ohio for four days. Cedar Point really only gets you through one day. So what's to do in Cleveland for three days?

1. Go to a market and check out the local foodstuffs. This was fun - we sampled dried green beans and cherry donuts and many flavors of popcorn. Against better judgment, we purchased and then ate a chocolate covered jalapeno pepper. The market trip was followed by a trip to Great Lakes Brewing Company, a local microbrewery. For the record, beer only makes your mouth hurt more, not less. Also for the record, the wait staff at the Great Lakes Brewing Company will think you are weird if you ask for a Lassi.

2. Go to Ohio wine country. Have you noticed that literally every state has a wine country now? We were more than warned by our hosts not to expect a Sonoma or even Virginia wine country experience and we quite enjoyed sampling the really really sweet wines while listening to probably the worst live music I have ever heard not on a boat.

3. Play in the backyard. Grass! Dog! BBQ! Garden! Fish pond! Trees! Tetherball! How neat to have a yard. This was mostly fun except for when Eric beat me at tetherball and I reacted like a 5 year old and stormed off furious when I lost. We also played a game called Cornhole which consists of throwing bean-filled sacks at a board. I insisted on calling it Cornholio the whole time because I think I am funny. I think everyone was relieved when I held it together after losing at Cornholio.

Arriving home late, late Sunday night after an interminable flight, Perm, our homeless neighbor, welcomed us back from his usual spot laying in his own filth on the sidewalk in front of our building.

It's good to be home.

100 Day Stretch

Through work, I am doing a 100 day stretch where I set some goals for things I'd like to do over the next 100 days...and then I do them. I kind of half-assed the first 45 days so now (June 15) I am doubling down: I reset my goals and I am getting serious about meeting them.

"What would provide extra motivation to help me stay focused on these goals and not let myself down?" I asked myself.
"Posting the goals and the scorecard on the blog," said a very irritating voice.
"Shh!" I said. "It would be so humiliating to post them up there and then not follow through!"
"Exactly" said the voice.

Up, Down, and Around, and Around, and Around

Saturday was Cedar Point day. I’m sure it goes without saying that visiting Cedar Point is to be taken very, very seriously.

There was a great deal of thought and planning that went into getting ready for the day. Park opens at 10am, so we were in the parking lot by 9:30am and in an eager crowd at the gate moments after that.

Oh the coasters we rode! Let me see what I can remember:

Millenium Force: Very new and very smooth! It does the typical thing where it starts on a big up and then a big down, which leads right into another big swoop up. I wouldn’t say I blacked out so much as everything went kind of black, like when you stand up too quickly after crouching down and you get dizzy and lose your vision for a moment. I’ll stop there because I can tell I’m worrying you. It was a pretty fun coaster.

Maverick: Not regarded as one of the big-time coasters, my strongest recollection about this one is that it is pretty aggressive and the signs to remove earrings are not overly cautious; my head felt like it was getting knocked back and forth side to side a lot. I thought it was surprisingly good given that there was almost no line for it.

Top Thrill Dragster: This one is just plain ridiculous. It is only ~20 seconds long and it goes like this: from a dead stop, you accelerate to 120 mph in 4 seconds, then you go up a sheer vertical to a height of about 400 feet, where you go up and over the top to come down a sheer twisting vertical, and then you stop. Like I said, it’s quick. The acceleration is the highlight: I’m not sure how to describe what it feels like to accelerate so fast except that I almost felt like I was actually moving backwards.

Mean Streak: One of the oldest coasters at the park, it’s big, wooden and aptly named. The experience of riding it is like being in a really long car crash, like if you were in every car in the Blues Brothers mall scene. Brutal. Each of the eight people in our group walked on feeling fine and got off the ride with a headache, a nasty scowl and lumbar trauma.

Magnum XL200: This one was good, I think. This was where they all started to blur together. It’s possible I had a concussion by this point.

This post originally written for use by spiders

Here's my horoscope from this week's Cleveland Scene.

Leo
This would be a good time to activate your sleeping potentials by chanting positive declarations about your relationship to what you need. Instead of typical New Age affirmations, however, I think you'll benefit from something edgier and more poetic. That's why I'm offering you the statements below. They were originally written by Andrea Carlisle for use by spiders. Say the following several times a day. "I am now receiving many fine fat flies in my web. My web is strong and masterful. My web is irresistible to all the attractive creatures I like to nibble on. I am amazingly clever and extremely popular. Even now, hundreds of juicy tidbits are headed towards my web."

Boomlet on a plane

I am writing this on a plane right now and – I am not exaggerating – Eric and I are the only people over 15 years old on this plane. The entire flight so far has been constant shrieking, wailing, crying, whining and even a steady stream of farting noises from the baby behind us.

Don't get me wrong: I love babies and children of all ages. But if Samuel L Jackson were here, he would say: “Maaaan! There be a mother f*ing boomlet on this mother f*ing plane!”

And he would be right.

The 8-ish year old kid in front of Eric has been an especially nuisancey nuisance: he keeps grabbing Eric’s sockfeet and he has been maniacally putting his chair back and up and back and up the whole time. And then unexpectedly he turned kittenish and became engaged in a bizarre game of fish where Eric teased him with a blanket and his little child fingers tried to catch it. I'm not sure how else to describe that exchange.

The other funny part of the flight is that the fellow on the aisle seat, an Asian guy about our age, is so cheery and sociable that he kept contributing comments to the conversations that Eric and I were having. It was harmless enough - at one point we were talking about good kitchen knives and this guy lobbed in a comment with his own view on knives. It wasn't really a personal conversation but it still feels weird to have someone be so shameless about eavesdropping.

We're on a plane because we’re going to Cleveland for the weekend to visit some of Eric’s friends who live there. We’re going to go to Cedar Point, where all the best roller coasters are born. We will ride them. Except for the ones that Eric is too tall to ride.

Strange brew

This past Sunday I got a taste of what I think Eric must be like at work. We turned our kitchen into a lab of sorts and did an experiment: we brewed up some beer.

We had ordered some equipment from the Beverage People whose booth exhibit we had perused (and sampled) at the Maker Faire. Included in our home brewing kit were a large kettle (30 quarts) which looks really really big on the stove, an enormous bucket, two large fermenting containers, a thermometer, siphon assembly, 24 bottles and a bottle capper, two brushes that look like enormous pipe cleaners, a scientific looking thing which measures specific gravity, a copper wort chiller, and a big wooden spoon which I was promptly forbidden to cook with.

We also got the ingredients to make an American India Pale Ale, and this was what we brewed up on Sunday.

The first, most boring, and most important step is sanitizing everything. For all of those reasons, this was Eric's job. He gets extra points for repeatedly using his mouth to start the siphon which moved the iodine-water sanitizer from one container to the next. Gold star.

The brewing process is not hard if you have specific step-by-step instructions, which we did. Boil this, steep that, add that stuff, stir, add the hops, turn yourself around, that's what it's all about! Eric's laboratory expertise was particularly helpful in this process and it all went pretty well except that our puny little stove really struggled to keep the six gallons of beer-in-training boiling, so that is a potential excuse for this to not turn out very well.

Now, this big bucket of potent, yeasty liquid will sit in a corner of our apartment covered in a beach towel (it prefers to be in the dark) for a week or two. It has been four days and I have found myself talking to it when no one else is home. I don't think that's weird.

One final inhale, exhale

I just learned, courtesy of the most recent Economist, that Pattabhi Jois, the "founder" of Ashtanga yoga, the type of yoga I am certified to teach, has died. Just because it happened three weeks ago doesn't mean I can't pretend it is still "news" and report on it in here in my own newsy forum.

Many of the teachers I studied with for my teacher training last June had studied with Pattabhi Jois in India and each had their own funny and inspiring stories about him.

Katie's imitation of him always started with "Lady, you must..." and involved a delightful accent and facial expression. It also almost always involved doing something that clearly contradicted the capacity of the human body, or so it seemed.

Another teacher had a story about how he and some other students once rented a beautiful property in Hawaii for a week-long seminar with Pattabhi Jois where they had planned to do all of the yoga on this large outdoor patio overlooking jungle and ocean. What they had failed to glean from prior trainings was that Asthtanga must always be done within four walls and with a roof to keep the energy contained. It turned out that the house they had rented didn't have any suitable space so they had to resort to doing all of their yoga in the dark, dank garage.

The Economist's insinuation that PJ was known for giving men and women "different adjustments" is also entirely consistent with the apparent philosophy of the studio where I did my training, though I hadn't realized that it was actually part of the fabric of Ashtanga rather than just the opportunism of a middle-aged man surrounded by fit young women in tight clothes.

Of course, the question everyone wants to know is how fit, limber and clear-headed PJ was when he died at 93 after a lifetime of focusing on his physical and mental wellness? The article concludes with the disappointing news that he had apparently stopped practicing years ago.

Boo.

Who says being wet and cold can't be fun

The river trip was a success. Not only did no one die or even get thrown out of the boat*, but on the first day which was miserable, freezing cold and raining, we were all such good sports that no one even whined about it. Or at least not much. I think we are to be commended. When you spend two fulls days shivering in a wet wetsuit with several additional wet layers it can be easy to forget that you are doing this because it is fun.

The whitewater rafting was truly great fun and there were some neat bonus moments on the river, too. Perhaps the best special thing was a circular rainbow around the sun on the second day. Wow! I don't think I even knew that was possible. Also, not long after that, we saw an eagle fly by carrying a snake. Double wow! Omens both, surely, though I don't know of what. Something good, I hope.

My least favorite moments were my not awesome jogging-with-luggage stints which bookended the trip. I had to take BART to the end of the line where my ride was picking me up to head out on the trip. Of course, on Thursday I left home late and ended up lurching awkwardly as fast as I could move to the station carrying tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad and my backpack. On the way home, we hit traffic and I ended up doing that same miserable arm-aching hustle to the train station from the parking lot where my ride dropped me in order to avoid waiting a whole 15 minutes for the next train. "Why?" I had to ask myself. "Why am I always running to catch trains?" It's not like the schedules are a surprise.


*It's unclear if this means there will be layoffs when we get back to the office.

Down to the river

I head off today for a two day whitewater rafting trip with my cult, I mean, company. Our founder spent most of his twenties as a river guide and still finds it a good way to bring people together to connect, have fun, and hopefully not get seriously injured or drowned. Apparently water levels are extremely high at the moment so we'll be wearing wetsuits and holding on really, really tight.

In this economic environment, I think it is refreshing that my firm would still consider this sort of thing a good way to spend some cash. Either that or rather than doing layoffs they're just hoping a certain number of people fall out of the boat.


PS You can add "Revolutionary Road" to the list of movies that make me want to hide under a large pile of coats.

French butterfly yoga

In spite of, or perhaps because of, teaching two yoga classes Monday and one this morning, I decided that I would also go to a yoga class at the Y last night. Eric decided to join as well.

I had taken a class from this particular teacher before and had found her to be pretty good but not very tough, so I went for a 20 minute swim beforehand.

Walking into class a few minutes late (and reeking of chlorine in spite of having rinsed off) I discovered that it was a different teacher. I never got her name but she was French so I bet it was something like Amelie or Marie Antoinette.

This was a different sort of yoga class than any I have been to before. I'm open to yoga taking many forms and try to just go along for the ride when I find myself in unfamiliar territory.

This was quite a ride.

She tended to pick a short sequence and repeat it many, many, many times in a row. For example, we rolled up and down from standing to a forward fold and back again probably 35 times, no joke. Then after that we stepped into and out of Warrior 1, alternating sides, probably 20 times. It was fast-paced and even people who hadn't just swum 500m seemed to be finding it challenging.

Her voice gave the class a particular mood as well: strict, not quite shrill but very demanding and punctuated. Her thick French accent exaggerated this almost critical tone, as she barked commands about our left and "wight" legs and arms.

Then we went into holding high and low planks for extended lengths of time. At this point, one woman gathered up her things and made an unapologetic exit.

"This is not when you leave," chastised Joan of Arc. "When it gets hard is when you stay, not when you go."

After class, I asked Eric what he thought of the class.

"What was that? Some sort of French butterfly yoga?"

We may never know.

If he were dead, Edward Furlong would be turning in his grave*

Eric and I saw the new Terminator movie Sunday night after eating dinner at the food court at the mall.

(Writing that sentence makes me wonder if my current existence is not the hip, alternative, urban lifestyle that I imagine it to be. Does it matter that it's a really nice food court?)

I don't want to ruin the movie for anyone but: it was horrible. Laughably horrible. So so so bad. Seriously.

I mean, why was Christian Bale doing his ridiculous Batman voice for most of the movie? And who really expects us to believe that any human is going to be able to hold his own even for a moment in hand to hand combat with a terminator? And why does none of the plot or timeline make any sense with the other Terminator movies? And has Helena Bonham Carter always had such a big butt?

Clearly, the movie raised a lot of questions for me.

The stirring syncopated percussion of the theme endured, however, and I think the highlight of the evening for me was watching a dorky middle aged guy in the row in front of us do a jerky dance with his shoulders as the credits rolled. He really got into it! And I thank him for it.


*Since he's not, I'm not sure what he's doing. Probably nothing very interesting.