You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2007.
I finally made an appearance at the Yoga Lounge for hatha class. The day I was discharged from the hospital, I walked in to see Susan, and told her I was coming back. Contrary to the sound of the name, it’s not entirely about relaxation. I keep thinking I’m in prety good shape these days, and then I find that I still have some work to do.
The sad fact is, I’ve got a lot of work to do. This was immediately obvious the other day when I walked from Sass’ place to her local convenience store. There is a small hill to walk up, and the last few times I’ve found myself huffing and puffing by the time I reach the top. My heartbeat has been up a few bpm, and it’s plainly obvious that I could be in better shape.
Same thing at the yoga studio. I suspect a lot of people could stand on the sidelines and watch a bunch of yogis do their asanas. They might think that there’s not a lot of effort involved because the pace of things can be a little slow. They might think that yoga is just ”girly exercise”. After my first session back at the studio in several months, I can say without reservation that they don’t know a thing. I still recall Michael the pilates teacher laughing about a bunch of jocks being unable to do an exercise called the roll-up.
My hatha yoga teacher is a small woman who probably weighs 120 pounds soaking wet, and yet her strength and flexibility is amazing. All of the other women in the class (I was the only guy today) appeared to move from pose to pose fairly easily, and there I was shaking and trembling as I tried to maintain some of the postures. It’s been a few hours since the class and I find my forearms are a little sore from holding myself up in plank and downward dog for a few extra seconds during the sun salutations. Girly exercise indeed. I’d like to see some of the beer-gut carrying hockey jocks I used to loath as a young man handle a hatha yoga class.
I would never admit to being a real sports oriented guy. During my high school career, I usually pursued sports that were solo events rather than team sports. I joined the track and cross country running teams. It was just me against the clock usually. That’s just fine with me, because while I enjoy sporting and gamesmanship, I’ve never been too keen on the idea of competition. The bragging and the BS that accompany success in the arena has never set well with me.
Being tested is not the issue, because I’ve never felt inadequate in group sporting events. I just don’t like the whole winner versus loser mentality that goes along with team sports. If I ran a good race and my time was an improvement or my standings in the pack were in the range I wanted, I was happy. The only person I had anything to prove to was myself. (I could run faster than the hockey jocks anyway!)
I think that’s why I prefer pilates and yoga rather than competitive sports to keep fit. Ultimately it’s just me that I’ve got to prove anything to. There’s no score kept at the end of it all. You just have to be satisfied with your own work. If you like working out in the company of beautiful women who arent competing either, that is a bonus. I have always been well received by the women who attend classes with me. On several occasions a few have mentioned they’re glad I’m there, because they wish there were more men around. I can’t say I disagree.
I was yapping with Sassinak just last night, and she reminded me that I’ve been practicing pilates for three and half years now. In that time, there have been a few instances where some other men have shown up for classes but I seem to be the only regular participant. The same is true for the yoga classes. When I’ve been going regularly, I have noticed that I’m usually the only man amongst classes of eight to ten women as well as the female instructor. In some social settings I’ve met a few men who practiced yoga and pilates, but I keep showing up to class and usually, I’m the only guy there. Oh well.
I’m sure the soreness in my forearms will disappear, but the desire to improve my own performance will stay. That’s not such a bad thing. If I keep at it, I’m sure I’ll be able to run up the hill from Sass’ place to the store without a problem. I can leave all the jocks in the dust, and all the “girls” can keep pace with me.
Sass and I did something really retarded the other night. Warm weather in early spring will do that to a cold-addled Canadian y’know.
As you can see from the above picture, I made myself dizzy trying to blow up a Pilates ball by myself. Between fits of laughter, and riding the elevator down to Sass’ garage, she snapped this picture with my shoephone camera. Eventually, we plugged the campy air mattress pump into the cigarette lighter of Sass’ trusty late-model Honda. Once we realized we were asphyxiating ourselves with exhaust fumes (it took a few minutes to figure that out) we made a beeline for my car parked on the street instead.
We stood in the street for several minutes while the pump whined and feebly tried to fill the ball to it’s capacity. After we got kinda bored just standing there, I had the brilliant idea to drop the top on the convertible. We put the ball in the back seat to continue filling while we cruised around the ritziest neighbourhood in Toronto.
Picture this: It’s the dead of night and the temperature is only about 8 or 9 degrees celsius, and here are two weirdos driving around with a pilates ball in the back seat of a top down convertible. We made the rounds of Sass’ new neighbourhood, and then part way downtown in our slightly conspicuous manner. I’m sure we raised a few eyebrows.
I know we wasted too much gas because Sass’ ball never did reach full pressure, and the pump was starting to smell funny by the end of this manouvre. By the end of at least a half hour of pumping, Sassinak drove my car back to her place while I stopped off at a customer’s home to fix his wireless internet connection. He couldn’t quite figure out what I was babbling about when I explained my reasons for being in his neighbourhood with a convertible, a pilates ball and a stupid grin on my face.
It’s springtime, and people do all sorts of goofy things when the weather improves.
I went to hang with my mum and dad yesterday. After we had a fabulous dinner at Tony’s Iron Skillet, I went over to visit my best pal Hoggy Dog. To all of you who know and love Hoggy, I’m pleased to report that he’s in fine shape, and life is good to him. He’s working hard plowing snow and tuning skies again this winter. It’s the Hoggy way. He’s even become a grandfather to Hannah Banana.
Hannah is just a little over two months of age now and I’m rather surprised to see her following people and objects around the room. She has great focus for an infant her age. Most babies that age don’t really get this much visual acuity until their third month. HB is ahead of the curve. And of course, like all babies her age, she’s quite adorable.
While Hoggy and I were content to guzzle Stella Artois and Negra Modello like it’s going out of style, his three sons, one of them his real son, were heavily into their March break project. It was quite elaborate by the time they were wrapped up for the night. J, his true son, and D and J, his two almost adopted sons were filling recycling bins with wet packing snow to make large blocks. They then stacked them up making a platform about 2.5 meters in height with three ramps leading off. Then, at the bottom of the center ramp, they built a small berm.
Then they revealed the reason for this massive pile of snow. They had taken a defunct skateboard, and mounted a ski on the bottom of it. They proceeded to ride this odd hybrid down the three different ramps. Two of the three ramps were virtually impossible to negotiate without falling into the snow at the bottom. The middle one with the berm was the best. The skateboardskier had a nice long ride down the ramp to be diverted around Hoggy’s favourite little tree by the berm.
We adults were mostly too wobbly to attempt a ride except for Gonzo. Gonzo made it most of the way down the safest ramp before he lost his balance, nearly wiping out. It was a pleasant early spring evening to huddle around Hoggy’s woodstove and admire the work of his three determined sons.
***
On my way south this afternoon, the sun was blazing quite nicely here in Ontario. The spring runoff has begun, and the meltwater is carving channels in the still snowbound fields. The rivers are starting to open up a bit, and Nottawasaga Bay has large open channels surrounding fairly large floes of ice. The ice in the bay is breaking up and drifting north into the center of Georgian Bay. Pretty soon the greenery will return. I think my mum and dad’s poplar tree is starting to throw some buds up already.
It may not look like spring, but it is obviously just around the corner.
Who really needs four monitors on their desk?
I finally got my new PC. It’s loaded with 2.5 Gig of RAM, a DVDRW, WiFi, and a 3.4 Ghz CPU. Not bad at all. I’m a happy man.
I didn’t expect to see it today, because Mother Nature is being bitchy. She dumped a pile of snow and sleet on our heads this afternoon, and while I was slowly making my way home from my customer, I figured the courier would arrive to find me gone.
Oddly enough he did. But, to my relief, he made a second attempt to deliver at the end of the day. How nice. My faith in courier companies is redeemed. Now if only Microsoft can meet my expectations and send me my Vista upgrade soon. “Yeah Right” I hear everyone collectively saying.
For the time being, the new box is chugging away with WinXP and only 71 newly installed security patches. There’s too much to do before I abandon my old PC and migrate to the new one.
My desk looks pretty ridiculous now. I’ve got a Mac Mini at the right end, my old dual headed PC in the middle, and the new one at the end. Four monitors in total to spray photons at me and boggle my poor sore eyes. I need my noodle examined.
I’m going to turn the old PC into a full time Linux box and attach the second monitor to the new Windows machine. I may as well walk the talk and have an equal opportunity computer environment in front of me. You just never know when a different Operating System will have to pitch in. It sure looks neat having four monitors in front of me.
***
I got another surprise today in addition to my new computer. I’ve been working on a web site for a customer. They basically bullied me into doing it, because their existing site looks like crap, and they couldn’t find anyone else to do it. Call me a sucker for punishment.
I finally created a sample of the web site for the customer to look over. It’s pretty raw, and in my message to them, I explained that it would need a lot of tweaking. I was throwing it out to solicit an opinion.
Much to my chagrin, one of the people I’ve been dealing with described the sample page as a “travesty.” I’ve likely disappointed a few people in my life, but I’ve never had my work described so badly. A travesty is what is happening in Darfur. What I created was merely an ugly and unfinished web page. So much for constructive criticism!
What’s a man to do? Even when I offer a reasonable explanation, and ask for input, all some people can do is lose their composure and hurl invective. Jeez.
If you asked my good pal Icky, this customer probably didn’t get any nooky last weekend.
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