You Can Find Me…

In Da Club

I am thrilled at the response to my yoga post! Don’t you just love the thought that we are all in our own separate lives, but yet together? I like to imagine you all just adding touches of loving-kindness and asana throughout your day. I think we could have a monthly check-in, with perhaps a mantra or featured pose (asana to do in your kitchen while you wait for the oven to heat up!) or a very short video. In early days of the pandemic, I created a series of gentle yoga videos specifically for my students as a stop-gap measure as we all tried to figure out the zoom life; the quality is pretty bad, and it was never meant for a wider audience, but perhaps someone will find them useful. At the very least, you can see what parts of my Calgary house looked like. Full disclosure: I have not rewatched these as they are a bit triggering, as it were, remembering the circumstances that led me to making yoga videos in whatever space in my house was unoccupied for whatever time I could manage.

If You Get Caught Between The Moon and The Walking Path

The Okanagan valley where I live is famously overcast in winter; this helps keep the temperatures mild and windless, and to me, that is a pretty sweet tradeoff. It does get gloomy though, and often it’s too cloudy to see the astronomical wonders in the sky. Over the last week, though, the clouds have been lifting, right in time to view the Wolf Moon.

On my early morning walk with Rex, I felt like I was inhabiting a Mary Oliver poem as the Wolf Moon fell on my right and the sun rose on my left.

The sun sets close to 4:30 now, which is a solid half hour later than a month ago. I’ve been known to suddenly scream at everyone in the house to look outside, oh my god, look outside, so I am one step closer to my Life Goal of Becoming Judy.

And look at this sunrise! I truly AM living in a Mary Oliver poem. No joke, Canada geese have been flying around me on every walk. WILD GEESE. I cannot make this up.

Please Please Wait A Minute Mr Postman

When we went to Italy, Rex went on his own little vacation to the pet resort. It seems like it was a three week bender. He came back with an eye infection, an ear infection, lice, and an extra two and a half kilograms. His collar was partially shredded and his license tag was missing. Wasn’t that a party…look at the mess I’m in! We should all have such a good time.

It was great timing, though, because I had been meaning to get him a nicer collar, and so I ordered one from Etsy as a Christmas gift, not that he knows what Christmas is or, more accurately, every day is Christmas for him. The Etsy shop MAILED it, even though the postal strike was already on, and so it was stuck in the US lo these many weeks. It finally arrived this week and I think he looks pretty sharp.

December felt very strange with zero holiday cards in the mail; I was a little blue about it but my husband assured me that I would be very excited when the mail started moving again. He was right; who knew holiday cards in January would be exactly what I needed? The mail is exciting again!

Also exciting was my package from Allison, who was my Secret SANta (HI ALLISON)! Allison and I have been friends for about fifteen years, and boy, does she know what I like. Look at this box of treasures!

Every single thing was a complete delight! Fuzzy socks and lotion, chocolates and candies, a bookmark and a gnome!

A gnome cross-stitch card? Omg! Thanks Allison!

Weekly Reading

The Body. A few years ago my friend Leanne (HI LEANNE) introduced me to the Bill Bryson Theory of Diminishing Returns that states that the first Bill Bryson book that you read – any of his vast collection – will be completely and utterly fascinating, and will cause you to excitedly read more and more. The next book – no matter which book – will be slightly less fascinating, and subsequent books will decrease in delight as you go along. I found this to be very true, abandoning the author altogether after Notes From A Small Island. But I saw The Body displayed at my local library; it was the very first Bill Bryson book I read, in 2021, and I wondered if it would be subject to the law of diminishing returns or if it would be as fascinating as when I first read it. Friends, it was the latter. It’s an absolutely incredible study of the human body and its functions and foibles. Now, I will say if you are squeamish at all, or if you even slightly veer to hypochondria or germaphobia, then you should probably give it a pass. I fortunately remembered the horror that was the breast cancer section and the description of the first mastectomies, and so I quickly skipped over that section this time around. Sadly, I did NOT remember the lobotomy section and read it again, which led to the same nightmares I had the first time around. Still, an excellent read, even if I did re-learn that “vagina” comes from the Latin word for scabbard, which, really? Can we have NOTHING for ourselves? It’s bad enough that until very recently clinical trials excluded women on the basis of their pesky old Aunt Flo, which led to inefficacies and sometimes toxic overdoses of prescription drugs for the female body, it’s bad enough that women are constantly misdiagnosed for heart attacks as we present differently from men, it’s bad enough that menopause is only recently being studied and that for hundreds of years women died en masse during childbirth not because of the birthing itself but because of puerperal fever brought on by MALE doctors NOT WASHING THEIR GODDAMN HANDS. We can’t even have that most female of body parts named in a way that isn’t in reference to the man and his MIGHTY SWORD? God, I could flip over a table and scream into the void. TAKE BACK THE VAGINA, LADIES! But back to the book. Modern medicine and everything we know about the body can be attributed to a) dogged, tireless, and often personally hazardous work by scientists, researchers, virologists, and other medical professionals, b) wild accidents, and c) absolutely atrocious and inhumane experimentation on people by Germany and Japan during World War II. A fascinating, if sobering, read. Also? Wash your hands! It’s the single most powerful way to stop disease, not just childbed fever, but almost all disease, including those considered airborne. The description of how a cold virus ends up everywhere is pretty disgusting and I am NOT going to think about it for one minute longer. Pardon me while I go wash my hands.

Don’t Forget To Write. When I was mired in emotional instability brought on by the beautiful but haunting Moon Road, my friend Hannah (HI HANNAH) suggested this as an antidote. It’s just fun; a story about a young woman in 1960 who gets caught making out with the rabbi’s son and gets sent to live with her great-aunt for the summer. This great-aunt just happens to be a matchmaker, and capers ensue! Sassy comebacks abound! There was a surprise ending that really was a surprise – I usually can see these things coming but I did not. Is it believable? Absolutely not! But it’s a perfect diversion from life.

Home Stretch. The day before a wedding, in small town Ireland, there is a terrible accident that kills three people – including the bride and groom – and seriously injures another. Two others are able to walk away, one of them being the driver, whose life in this small town is now ruined. This book is a perfect example of how to write compelling character-driven prose. Secrets abound and while some can be guessed at, the reader is compelled to keep going; it’s an un-put-down-able book that spans 1987 to 2019, from Ireland to England to New York City and back again. It’s a great story of choices, secret lives, and redemption. Thanks to Lisa (HI LISA) for this recommendation!

I hope you all have a beautiful week filled with fun mail, pretty skies, and, of course, yoga moments! xo