Thursday, Thursday, What Up?

8:10

Sunrise, One Year Ago

It's 7:40 and I have been up since 6:30, doing my usual, spending my first couple of hours drinking coffee, listening to NPR, and reading my email, visiting Facebook, then searching through the New York Times for interesting articles, then writing my Blog.  It's an overcast morning, no streaks of color of light, just the more typical morning of gray on gray.  It's 15º out at the moment, a couple of guys are out fishing mid lake.

It was good to get out of the house yesterday for a few hours in the morning as temperatures rose to the double digits.  While Evie stayed home and made some Turkish lentil soup, I drove into Lakewood, to Eight Limbs Yoga, to start yoga up again for the winter months. It felt good to be back in a familiar place, recognize a couple of other students, and pay attention to my breathing and move the various parts of my body in unfamiliar and strange ways, a definition of yoga in a sense.  Class was well attended, all older women though perhaps not as old as me, a number of new faces.  At the end of class, Elise, our teacher, mentioned that she can tell I have attended Dariel's classes at Westfield's Studio at Pantera this fall, as I have improved quite a bit.  How nice to hear encouragement.

Woodlawn, 1/08/2012

After yoga, I stopped at Ryder's for an Americano (remember seeing someone order an Americano on TV and wanted to try it), talked a bit with Joyce, the proprietor, always friendly, then spent about forty five minutes walking around the newly configured Wegman's, trying to find the wax paper, used to be in Aisle 4, now in Aisle 10!  How do you reconfigure your brain, throw out the old patterns, import the new.  Not easy.  I have to metacognate, think about my thinking, make sure I note that product A is now in Aisle 7, not 5.  It's the only way I can remember...to remember to remember.  Evie usually makes a list, texts me something she forgot, and if I remember to look at my phone, I almost manage to get everything she wants, not always as I somehow manage to overlook something at least one out of three times.  Men!  And I always buy something not on the list, Perry's Bittersweet Sinphony ice cream (good idea), an 8 pound pork shoulder (so so idea).

Lunch was mercimek corba (lentil soup), hearty and delicious, with a hint of lemon juice, perfect for a cold afternoon.  Fortunately, Stewart and Colbert are back so we now watch them during our lunch, from 1:00-1:45.  I spent the afternoon wading through WOLF HALL, not as easy read but interesting and about 4:15, I found my mojo and went cross country skiing on the lake for about forty five minutes, just as the guys were marching out to fish from Victoria.  The lake had a thin crust of snow, but much of it was icy, making skiing a bit dicey.  I did ski as far as Sandy Bottom, then back to the campground, at times slipping because of the ice.  But it was good to be outside, in the cold 18º weather, with little wind, which made it pleasant and I even worked up a sweat.

For dinner, Evie made some cole slaw and heated up some of Trader Joe's ready to eat ribs for our dinner.  The ribs were quite tasty but the portion seems smaller than before though the price for them is the same.  We watched the final episode of Orange is The New Black, were shocked to see Piper's fiancee call off their engagement and Piper beat the daylights out of one of the crazies who was threatening to kill her for blasphemy against God's plans. We will have to wait a few months to find out what happens to Piper, to the other inmate.  We also watched two more episodes of Justified; neither of us our taken with it, kind of a 1950's western set in modern times, with the good guy gunning down a bad guy at the end of each episode, like Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke.