Mostly AWOL

I’ve been NotPosting because I’ve been trying to get things sorted out with our house sale – not fun and definitely not anything I wanted to blog about. Still have some things to add about Santa Fe but I’m also making a trip to Michigan this week. In related news, I’m also working on a different hosting solution for the blog so we’ll see how that shakes out.

With any luck, posting returns to normal this week!

Today is blog re-design day.

I was bored with the old layout so I changed it up,  even dipping the tiniest of toes back into the CSS tweakage.

My car gets better gas mileage than I thought.

Our guests are gone. I have returned from Glenwood Springs. I have to work this afternoon but I totally promise that blogging returns to normal tomorrow. Probably I’ll link to photosets rather than posting a lot of pictures (because I’ve taken a lot) but I’m going to try and catch up the Daily Leadville and 52 weeks.

Piper fantastically spilled a mini-bag of dog food ALL OVER the back end of my CR-V. My car will smell like dog food forever.

In the meantime, I’m contemplating a nap before work.

New blog design

New fonts, new colors, new header photo from my new backyard. I am doing this instead of anything productive. If I were really ambitious, I would tweak the .css but I am totally and completely not.

I *did* get grocery shopping done! Also, my new bank card AND Colorado driver’s license arrived in the mail today. The picture is miles better than my last one, though I can’t get past how the Colorado licenses look *fake* They’re thinner/lighter material than the MI licenses and the hilarious font lends itself to printing it in a basement. Here’s an example:

Not really sure why this guy is broadcasting his address to teh intarwebz, but it keeps me from having to scan (and blur) my own...

What is WITH that font? It’s just… cheesy – for lack of a better adjective. Hilariously, found this image in a post complaining about the exact same thing. Us non-natives are a critical bunch. See the heart in the lower right corner? When you get your license they ask if you want to be an organ donor and then they print it right on the card! No messy stickers like Michigan. In extra efficient style, they also register you to vote while you’re there. Verrah nice.

Also?

What the shit is going on with wordpress today?

Progress, at last! (Plus a PSA)

The master bedroom and basement are completely packed up. As in, I don’t have to go in those rooms ever again packed up.

Tomorrow we will finish the guest bedroom. That leaves only the office. We will SO be done by the end of Thanksgiving weekend. I am completely and utterly relieved. Unfortunately there will be almost no room in my car for people.

In unrelated news, this blog has gotten over 5,000 hits. A large number of them (possibly a disturbingly large number) are searching for ‘naked family.’ A lot of Ariel Tweto fans have stopped by (as well as Ariel!) and True Blood fans. I’m pretty consistently surprised how many people are looking for yoga playlists. My playlist page gets a regular number of hits, so I’m hoping people like the mixes.

Once I get moved all the way out west, I’m sure there will be more yoga blogging because I’ll have more time for it (yoga and blogging). There will also be lots and lots of pictures.

For those of you with RSS feeds, you may have noticed a domain change. I’m actually at yoga-grrl.com now (though the wordpress link will obviously still work).

Mondays!

First, I cannot believe this blog has gotten over 4,000 hits. I’m just shocked. I believe that it happened on the backs of Ariel Tweto, Naked Family, and True Blood. Whatever. I have no idea how many people actually read this regularly and I suspect that most people trip over it on accident.

I should be packing a computer tower, a stereo receiver, and loading computer monitors into the back of my car. Obviously I am doing none of those things. My couch is feeling very comfy and I was even considering a nap.

My yoga class this morning was small but nice. My schedule changes this week and I’m picking up a set of out of town sessions on Wednesday nights. I am continuing my search to locate a replacement teacher for my classes in this area.

True Blood was awesome again this week. I’m loving the sort-of reformed Jason, his new crazy girlfriend, and the super-chipper Sookie. Tara also makes my head hurt because I like her so much and she’s so incredibly broken. Lafayette continues to be my favorite. There is something about Bill (possibly his bad accent) that really prevents me from liking him as a character. I don’t know if they’re telling him to play it stoic, but I have a hard time buying him invested in any of the drama that’s currently ongoing. I WILL say that I’m STOKED about Alexander Skaarsgard. Love him!

I’m trying to avoid political talk here because, well, I don’t generally talk politics with complete strangers unless they bring it up. Same goes with religion. Maybe I’ll change that policy once the election is over. I’m not sure (feel free to weigh in, if you care).

Today we didn’t do a single sun salutation in class. I had a request for ‘gentle’. It was more like ‘mellow’, though I gave my usual admonitions about how you can work harder but don’t have to. The class was pretty well-received. I think after Thursday evening’s class, my students are going to take my ‘make requests’ policy seriously. If they ask for something, I do my best to deliver. Most of them don’t ask. Since Thursday was almost all plank, all the time, I think I’ll get more suggestions this week.

For my birthday

Charter Communication gave me complete and utter FAIL as an internet provider. I haven’t had internet service for more than 36 hours. I’ve had to do crazy things like READ BOOKS, talk to FRIENDS, and go to sleep WITHOUT CHECKING EMAIL. I can’t believe I haven’t gnawed my arm off yet.

So I’m at Barnes and Noble, partaking of their not-so-free wireless and catching up on the 120 emails that accumulated yesterday.

For my birthday, Carly engineered a surprise attack on my yoga class by coercing/bribing my friends to all show up. Spouse was supposed to join them but he was BUSY ACCEPTING A NEW JOB. That’s right. My bestest birthday ever was capped by an out-of-state job offer. He gave his 30 days notice TODAY.

Now I just have to sell the house. Gulp. This will be further complicated by the fact that Spouse gave me Guitar Hero for my birthday. My need to move will be competing with my need to crush the video game. We’ll see who wins.

Now I have to catch up on blogs! Thankfully the twitching in my right eye has already subsided…

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Dilemma

I’m not sure if I should be amused or disturbed at the number of times “naked family” has been used as a search term to find my blog. I think I’m going to lean heavily on amused with a side of denial.

On the other hand, “purple camel lawnmower man” has been used quite a lot. I must not be the only Psych fan out there. For those who don’t watch, the context is that Shawn (the fake psychic) read someone’s lips to get important information. His partner, Gus, wants to know what was said.
“That’s easy. He said ‘(blah blah blah, I can’t recall but it was actual intelligible dialogue)’ and then he said ‘purple camel lawnmower man.’”

That line slayed me.

We watched Rambo this weekend and WOW was THAT chock full of blood and violence. I mean, I like action movies as much as the next girl (okay, maybe a little more) but WHOA. I don’t have a high need to see that many exploding heads and severed limbs. Not only that, but the copious amount of blood and guts was amplified by bad CGI graphics.

Spouse thinks it’s because, during a time of war, the filmmakers didn’t want to romanticize war. I will tell you RIGHT NOW that Rambo doesn’t do that. It was pretty much disproportionately violent compared to everything I’ve seen except for maybe Saving Private Ryan with the added benefit of most of the slaughtered characters NOT being in uniform.

And if you think renting My Blueberry Nights will be a romantic and uplifting film you will be wrong AGAIN. Although I didn’t think it was as bad as Spouse (“THAT’S two hours of my life I’ll NEVER GET BACK.”) it was definitely not what I thought it would be. Natalie Portman was adorable (given) and David Straithairn was heartbreaking but otherwise forgettable.

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Golf was hot. And slow.

Seriously? THREE HOURS for 9 holes. I wanted to shoot myself. I am a hot sweaty mess.

On the other hand, I had the best round of golf I’ve played all summer. BY TEN STROKES. For those of you who don’t golf, that’s a vast improvement. Even though you don’t care. Turns out that Wii Golf is good for something! It’s possible that today’s round is keeping Spouse’s LPGA dream for me alive. He would someday like to be a kept man and is mostly convinced the LPGA is the way to do it.

We golfed with some really nice guys, so despite the horrendous backup on the course we at least had good company. Not so much beer though.

Someone had the fantastic idea of ruining Lemon-Lime Gatorade by putting STRAWBERRY in it. Except instead of coloring it pink – as you would expect a strawberry beverage to look – it still looks like Lemon-Lime. I did not discover this terrible desecration of my favorite beverage until TOO LATE.

Lemon-Lime Gatorade is the only Gatorade I will drink, so why? Why ruin a perfectly good thing?

Today is the last day of WoYoPracMo. I’m pretty happy that I managed to post every day (and totally made enough posts to count for every day). Alas, the majority of my posts were not-so-yoga-related. I’m totally shocked that I’ve gotten more than a thousand hits this month. I found a lot of blogs I like reading (links to the left) and watched too much reality TV. I managed a couple new playlists for classes and also got them loaded on imeem (which was more of a challenge than I expected). I’m doing quite well in Anatomy and Physiology as well, so I guess my time management and Procrastinatory Posting haven’t been as awful as they could have.

Thanks to everyone who’s stopped by to read!

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Why am I posting instead of studying?

Because I am a WORLD CLASS PROCRASTINATOR. If I got extra credit points for the amount of time spent procrastinating, I’d ace every class. Alas, that is not how the education system works (thankfully).

Hello to anyone stopping by via dooce! There were a LOT of you yesterday but maybe not so many today.

I think the WordPress comment system is weird. It’s probably because I’m used to Livejournal, where everything threads together and you can tell when someone has commented on something in particular, but it took me a SILLY amount of time to figure out that in WordPress I have to go to the dashboard and look at “my comments.” It’s not an incredibly practical way to foster blog communication but I suppose it is what it is. Doesn’t seem to stop people from posting (or commenting) on WordPress blogs (thankfully).

My 80s mix went BRILLIANTLY last night. As predicted, just about everyone in the room cracked a huge smile when Final Countdown came on. LOVE IT.

In another fit of procrastination yesterday, I broke out the Wii and Wii Fit. I have to tell you, they are AWESOME. Wii golf is so much better than regular golf! Plus there’s bowling and tennis. My favorite Wii Sport is clearly the boxing. I totally worked up a sweat in no time. Of course I can break a sweat BREATHING, so I’m not sure that says much.

Wii Yoga is a little weird. First of all, when you start you only get access to like 4 exercises. That doesn’t make a LOT of sense to me, especially because not all of the yoga asanas are what I’d call ‘advanced.’ The difference between being on a yoga mat and the balance board is most obvious (for me) in tree pose. On your mat, there’s no one charting your center of gravity – you’re just worried about standing up (let ALONE standing still). I discovered that as soon as my gravity center was where I wanted to be, I started to wobble. Not really WOBBLE so much as the weight distribution on my foot went all wonky.

My BEEF with Wii Yoga at this point is Warrior II (Virbadrasana II). The Wii trainer has you put your knee in PRECISELY the position it SHOULD NOT BE IN. I can’t really come up with a good reason they’ve done this but it really puts extra stress on the knee joint that you shouldn’t have. They also emphasize the ‘heels should line up’ alignment idea of which I’m not a huge fan. Everyone’s hip girdle is slightly different. Some have a deeper acetabulum, the ligaments have limited flexibility (and not everyone’s ligaments are the same length), not to mention that everyone’s muscle and tendon structure is slightly different and the particular position they espouse can put pressure on the lower back as a result.

Um. Yeah. Otherwise it’s great.

*coughs* *removes yoga rantypants*

I really love it. It’s going to be fantastic for Spouse, who doesn’t really want me to ‘train’ him and doesn’t like going to classes. It is clear that we are all going to have a blast with it, especially once the beer gets involved.

Now I REALLY have to study before I teach at 9.

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Holy Monday, Batman!

So this weekend was kind of a drag in some ways (dad’s deathaversary) and good in some ways (Saturday’s class, Marsha’s wedding celebration) but it was a general downer in that my sleep hasn’t gotten better (bad dreams/nightmares for the last week).

This morning I decided to wake up, make a smoothie and do some studying for my exam tomorrow. But before I could do those things, there was a ring at the doorbell. A few weeks ago, through a complete fluke, I won a Wii and Wii Fit from dooce.com. Today they arrived! Clearly the gods do not want me to study for my exam. Fie on them! Instead of preparing for the Drunken Wii Fit Invitational, I WILL study anatomy and physiology. Really.

I also made my smoothie. Today’s blend: handful of almonds, handful of dried cranberries (blend those first), 8oz OJ, 1/8 of a block of tofu, frozen smoothie fruit mix (pineapple, strawberry, mango), one plaintain (because it was black), handful of blueberries, 10 baby carrots, large spoonful of plain yogurt, splash of skim milk. I totally forgot the flaxseed/bran but it’s pretty delicious anyhow and the almonds give it some texture.

AND, because it’s a super double spectacular Monday, I ALSO have a a new music mix! This is an 80s mix (66 minutes) that I’m going to use in class tonight. My plan is to have Madonna play *before* class so that it works right into the hourlong class time.

Things to do this week (in blogging) review the podcasts and Wii Fit Yoga!

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