40 days of yoga week 3

day 15: this morning i did child's pose in bed before my shower and wanted to get to a class tnnight, but i think it's going to be a late night at the office...don't want to start week 3 off badly so i *will* pull ou...t one of the dvds when i get home. 

day 16 - 17: didn't start week three all that well, continued my busy/lazy streak from the previous week, although i did *think* a lot about yoga on these days.

day 18: sat a.m. beginner's class in shadyside with dominique. it was cool to have a little more explanation of how to do each pose... and the slower pace was n...o less challenging - holding poses for longer made me sore in different ways. it was an awesome start to a sunny saturday.

day 19: p.m. yoga on dvd 

day 20: sun salutations before bed :)

40 days of yoga week 2

day 8: my dvd player is finicky and neither it nor the dvd drive on my computer were working last night so i was forced to do a self-directed sequence of poses as best i could remember from the classes i've taken. it was challenging... i think i spent about 15-20 min max. 

days 9 - 14: FAIL. i am ashamed to say that i haven't done anything but savasana for the past 6 days...  

40 days of yoga

a couple of weeks ago a friend suggested that we try a 40 day yoga challenge and i decided that it might be fun. i've been dabbling in yoga - never having felt a strong urge to do it before a few months ago, despite so many friends raving about its mental and physical benefits. anyway i've been doing heated vinyasa flow mostly, with other random classes mixed in... once or twice a week at most and sometimes only once every couple of weeks, so the idea of doing yoga every day for 40 days was intriguing. here’s the introduction to the challenge for everyone who agreed to participate.

"Yogic science teaches that it takes 40 days to create or change a habit. A 40-day commitment to change can provide the shift needed to develop a healthy habit or to drop a destructive habit. A first step in experiencing the challenge and the satisfaction of lasting change is to commit to 40 consecutive days of yoga practice. A 40-day practice is demanding. It is difficult. But you can do it. The 40-day practice gives you the experience of discipline and it teaches you that you can go through the challenges in life and create the change you desire. There will be days when you don’t want to keep going. But as Yogi Bhajan, the Master Teacher of Kundalini Yoga, always said, "Keep up and you will be kept up!" Keep going and, at the end, you will have truly accomplished something."

today starts week two, or day eight. here's how i did in week one:

day 1: yoga for back hair... er, back care. boy did it feel good - i am still so sore from shoveling my car out on monday.

day 2: attempted meditation while listening to sleep experiments play at espresso a mano, but i've never really meditated, so i mostly just zoned out and felt the music.

day 3: mountain pose at cantina (thanks to a tip from rachel, ha!)

day 4: 20 min p.m. yoga

day 5: 30 min yoga for back, neck, and shoulders (i love "feet ......up the wall" pose!)

it's great to have a housemate (jennifer) equipped with with willpower *and* dvds that have managable routines we can do at home :)

day 6: yoga flow shadyside (very pretty, new studio, at least twice the size of the aspinwall one!)

day 7: no yoga. and i already used mountain pose as a pseudo-practice on day 3, so i feel like i can't use that as my get out of jail free card for yesterday. oh well.

egg nog recipe

i finally located and scanned the egg nog recipe i made several batches of during the holiday period. thanks to andy, a LIRR guy i worked with in NYC, for giving me his instructions for making this yummy concoction. now you can make it too!

resolutions?

so i was sitting at the bar chatting with a couple of friends on sat night and someone threw out an unsurprising question with an unusual twist. typically this time of year people ask what your resolutions are and this was the gist of the topic, but although i can't remember exactly how the question was posed, it was qualified somewhat like this, "none of this i want to lose ten pounds bullshit, i'm talking real overarching, big picture, life goals for 2010." not that losing 10 pounds isn't a valid target and informally i had thought about trying to do certain things like read more, exercise more regularly, and re-organize myself and my stuff in 2010, but i actually had to sit there and think for a while about how to answer the question. i tried to articulate some ideas a couple of times with minimal success, until i finally came up with something that made sense. yesterday i actually wrote it down, or typed it, anyway while gchatting with a friend, so i thought i'd put it here (ya know, since publicizing things on the interwebs somehow makes me feel more accountable)... so here goes:

"i was sitting there thinking about it... trying to focus my thoughts on goals for the coming year (since 2009 was loosely about restoring the things in my life that bring me joy, but that wasn't really pre-meditated, it kind of formed as a theme as the year went on). and what i came up with was that i'd like to focus on relationships (friends, family, whatever) that are fruitful, not ones that bring me frustration and angst. and to accept that not all people nor my interactions with them will reach the potential that i'd hope for, but that's not anyone's fault, and it's not something i have to fix."  
and there you have it.

cars (and people) can be a pain in the butt

for the second time in 6 months, i have found my car damaged in some way by an unknown person who caused the wreckage and then up and left without so much as an "i'm sorry" note. the first was my side view mirror, broken by someone tearing up 38th street when my car was parked on the street in front of my house (repair = $270). the neighborhood kids were nice enough to place the mirror on my front step so that i knew something had happened as soon as i got home from work.
the second is a pretty significant scratch/dent in the rear left part of the car, above the back wheel, where i'm guessing someone opened their door into my vehicle (with significant force, enough to impact the metal, not just the piece of crap plastic bumper), while it was parked at the mon wharf. this happened yesterday and it really bummed me out. 
my feelings and conclusions about the whole thing: 

1. people are inconsiderate and don't take responsibility for their actions: maybe you don't have money to pay for my car repair, but i would have appreciated some kind of acknowledgment of remorse for messing up something that belongs to me.
2. i love good public transit: yes, single occupancy vehicles make life convenient in some ways, but the cost of gas, insurance, etc.  not to mention the hassle of maintenance and repairs really tip the cost-benefit scales for me... none of this was part of my world when i lived in a place that had trains and buses to take me from virtually any point A to point B to meet my quotidian needs in a relatively timely fashion.  those were the days...
   
3. i always blame myself for things that are not my fault: all that went through my head after seeing the damage was "i shouldn't be driving to work," and "i shouldn't have parked at the wharf," or "did *i* hit something?" why the heck do i always want to point the finger at me?
   
4. hardship is relative: after considering the financial impact and how i might have to adjust my budget for other things in the coming months and how annoying that is, i thought about the earthquake in haiti and how i should count my lucky stars i'm alive and healthy, able to get from one place to another at all.
   

so i'm just going to file a claim with my insurance company and stop feeling bad about my life's woes.

2009 in fortune cookies

i found a bunch of fortunes collected from fortune cookies last year and saved in various places (on the fridge, at my desk at work, in the change purse of my wallet, etc.). presumably if i kept them, i thought they were relevant to my life in some way, so i thought i'd summarize them in a sort of retrospective of 2009. fortunes and captions can be found here.