Saturday, March 12, 2011

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 208

Today's Daily 5:
  1. slow waking and blogging while eating breakfast in bed to start my day
  2. a perfectly ripe banana - still that combination of tangy and sweet - not yet at the overripe stage, but not green and hard anymore either.
  3. A great yoga class - every class is different, depending on the instructor, and this instructor makes us work a bit more than some, and seems to heat the room a bit more.  I was grossly sweaty, but so relaxed when it finished.
  4. A good appointment this afternoon
  5. Being able to just crash for the evening after a draining couple of weeks
  6. Blueberry coffee cake
  7. Video discussions that are adding to the many thoughts surrounding a book I'm presently reading
  8. Warm enough weather that I could trek across the city wearing a skirt today (with 3/4 length leggings underneath, but still a skirt!)
  9. A great quote from a video on entitlement and expectation and gratitude that I was watching "Expectations are premeditated resentments."
  10. Knowing that tomorrow is a fresh day with, (to quote as I'm known to do, Anne of Green Gables), "no mistakes in it yet."  A day in which to practice resurrection.

Saturday Randomness

I'm laying in bed at mom and dad's, getting ready to face the day.

There is a muffin and a banana on my bedside table.  On Saturday's especially, I eat breakfast in bed.  This is solely because I don't want to get out of bed any sooner than necessary, and on Saturday's it is imperative that I eat my breakfast by a certain time.

This is because I take a "warm yoga" class.  If I haven't had an hour or so to digest before that 11 am class, or if I haven't eaten, it's not good.  Somehow, I don't think keeling over, or puking in the middle of 90 minutes of exercise would be the healthiest thing around, so I make sure I bring some breakfast downstairs with me when I go to bed on Friday nights.

And, speaking of yoga, I cracked up on Thursday night, when, just as house church was getting ready to start, my phone buzzed with an email.  I checked it quickly and had to laugh.  It was an invitation to an event from my yoga studio, a fundraiser for a woman going through cancer treatments.  An invitation to ladies only, candle-lit, naked yoga.   Umm, I'm pretty comfortable with my body, but I think I'll pass.  No one needs to see that!  And I don't need to see that either!  I'm still laughing just imagining the concept.  I don't think even candlelight could make that sexy!

Today is going to be one of those days with lots of time spent on a bus as I transit to and from appointments.  I have a book I'm hoping to finish up, and then a novel.  I think I'm very informally shooting for reading the equivalent of a book a week this year, and novels are what will help me make that goal!  They are the books I can plow through in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks.  The brain candy.  I had stopped reading novels for quite a while, almost two years, actually, as I began to discover some interesting effects that a steady diet of brain candy was having on my emotions.  (That, I think, is a whole separate post, for another time.)  When I finally came back to them, I tried to do it (and still try to do it) with a level of balance.  I pick up novels that still teach me something.  Or I read ones that I know are "healthier" for me.  And I make sure to balance them with books that have more edifying and challenging content.  But today, after a couple of really full and challenging weeks, I think I'm going to finish up my more edifying title, and then dive into a novel on the bus.  (And, I'll just comment that novels can also very much be edifying and uplifiting as well.)

I'm tired these days.  Sleep has been more spotted with dreaming again, and I've had more early mornings than usual as school obligations have picked up speed.  And, honestly, right now, I'm just kind of traveling from one day to the next, making lists and hoping to tackle at least a portion of what they require from me in a given day.  I'm usually multi-tasking, though I'm also discovering the beauty of single-tasking as well.  This coming Monday, night, for example, I have three hours at home slotted out for some truly brainless entertainment.  It's on my calendar.  But I also know that while that is going on, I will be doing a load of laundry, and maybe some filing, and definitely some emailing.  Yesterday, though, when I needed to study, I simply closed all the windows that would normally distract, limited my ability to "cheat" and open them again, and surrendered to the lovely beauty of letting one thing have my complete focus. 

And that singular focus is perhaps my argument for bus reading - though these days I'm not so much doing the formal "bus reading" as squeezing reading in on my multiple trips around the city by bus.  But that is working, too, for now.  And really, depending on the number of places I need to be in a given day, it's not totally uncommon for me to spend up to four hours a day on a bus as I transit from place to place.  (Audio books are also lovely for this sort of transiting, since they don't have to be stopped for transfers, walking and the other things that come with a lifestyle where city transit is your main form of transportation.)

And now, now that I've rambled lengthily, clearing my brain a little for the day ahead, I'm off to prep for yoga, and for the rest of my day!  See you tonight for the daily 5!