Category Archives: doing it wrong

Subtitle: Technology That I Don’t Get or Can’t Figure Out How to Make Work for Me. (Generally meaning I tried for about 3 minutes and then went on to something else.)(Not intended to be a complete list.)

podcasting
RSS
sound files
hands free
my phone at the office
BBEdit
del.icio.us
social network websites (probably due more to my relative decrepitude)
Flickr Tags
any sort of scripting or setting up hot keys for frequently used computer actions
virtual pets (yes, I realize this is so 10 years ago, but I found my Yoda pet recently and I never could figure out what to do. I killed Yoda.)
any sort of digital watch programing
anything on my cellphone not directly related to making and receiving calls

Things I Can Work
anything on my cellphone directly related to making and receiving calls
DVR
load the dishwasher like nobody’s business (doesn’t really count in this context but I’m throwing it in anyway)
FTP (I can FTP, that must count for something.)

I swear I had a post earlier this week with these three pictures. I can’t remember what it was about but I bet it was really good. And it vanished. I’m very confused how this could happen.

On Wednesday I found out that Holiday is closing the yoga center at the end of March. I don’t know all the gory details but it has to do with the lease and the building. The building apparently thinks it can get bigger, higher paying tenants and Holiday doesn’t want to wildly raise the price of classes. She’s looking for alternatives but the studio as we know it will be no more.

I started studying with Holiday 10 years ago in March and I don’t think I’ve ever been away from the studio for more than 2 months, and even then, just a couple of times. It’s hard to convey, without sound like a cheesy women’s magazine article, what a huge part of my life this has been. Our culture loves to stupefy everything in big dramas about how something (yoga, Prozac, TiVo) changed someone’s life. But yoga has changed my life.

I’m not going to elaborate because that would be boring and stupefy it, but commit yourself to some sort of intense regular self-study over a 10 year period and there’s bound to be changes.

I have a solid home practice so I look to class for continued inspiration and to remind me about poses that I avoid at home. And also, during the weekdays it’s usually my only time to practice. Upon hearing this news I thought about alternatives.

I also attend classes at Yoga Bhoga and I figured I’d shift to more classes at this location. The attraction to both of these studios is the teachers but as luck would have it, they are both optimally located to the office. Once my car is parked downtown, I don’t have to move it for class.

This weekend I attended a workshop with Bob and Ki and while I was there I learned from a classmate that Yoga Bhoga is moving across the river at the end of April, also the victim of a building lease problem. As Auntie would say: fukola-dola.

Now I need to find a new yoga base. One woman at the workshop teaches at Shanti Yoga in Vancouver and that sounds like a good fit so I guess I’ll start there and see what happens.

Last night I finished my book: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. How to describe this book? It’s funny, induces squirming and is super interesting. I learned a ton.

I did not know that cadavers are used in auto safety testing. I did not know embalming is very temporary. I did not know a whole lot of gruesome details about early medical procedures (used to illustrate how doctors learned about medicine without cadavers in the olden days) and I could have remained happily ignorant on that. There’s a bit about studies of guillotine victims and whether they have any consciousness after the big separation. I’ve always wondered this: do you die instantly or do you feel your head bounce around in the basket?

There’s a chapter on cannablism which includes a hilarious scene of the author visiting China to track down a story of a crematorium worker who allegedly whacked off a bit of flesh here and there and gave it to his brother who made it into dumplings at a popular restaurant around town. Can you imagine you and your translator getting a meeting with the director of that funeral home to ask about this story?

Before I read the book I was not excited about the idea of donating my body to science. Just the idea of people poking around my saggy dead boobs and shriveled privates and making jokes made it unappealing. Both the author here and the author of The Undertaking (Book #18) point out that once you die, what happens to your body is irrelevant to you so no point in getting worked up about it. Also, there is some good work to be done, like research to help develop protective gear for people who work around land mines. My cadaver could do that.

And then there’s plastination — my cadaver could be made into a big rubber model that would last for 10,000 years!

Actually my favorite is the compost. Freeze dry, shatter and throw me in the garden. After a long healthy and happy life. That would be my first choice.

SomethingAwful.com has hilarious Star Wars valentines. You should go to their site instead of hotlinking here.

I still felt crappy when I woke up this morning and I was thinking: enough already. That headache.

I did some yoga and took a shower and ate the rest of my peaches and felt closer to human. I dragged my butt to the grocery store so we’d have something to eat.

You know how you should avoid grocery shopping when you’re hungry because everything looks so good? Pop Tarts, yum! We should eat franks and beans! Tater tots never sounded so delicious. Let’s get a 2 lb. bag!

Well how about shopping when you are not and haven’t been hungry for a week? I had a list so I did put food in the cart. I skipped the entire deli aisle. Cheese? We’ll never eat that! Later I told Bob this and he agreed, who wants to eat cheese? I should explain that under normal circumstances, Bob and I eat tons of a wide variety of cheeses every day. But not this week.

We still had a lot of food in the fridge because we hadn’t been eating much. I had to clear out some old icky stuff. This is something I am pathological about: a cleaned out fridge. I don’t want anything close to past due hanging out in my fridge.

When I came home from the grocery store I was exhausted and rested on the couch for a few hours. But I’m coming around. I’ll be at 100% tomorrow.

I love the digital camera. Since the weather turned nice I’ve been leaving the office in the afternoons and wandering around taking pictures which is a nice break for my brain.

Yesterday I felt a wee bit sketchy as I was driving to work but I thought I might be imagining things since Bob had been sick and I figured once I drank my tea and started working, I’d be fine.

I held onto this notion, even as I felt gradually worse and worse. I had one project I wanted to finish and a couple things to follow up on. But I felt tired and headachy and not hungry so I figured I’d cut my losses and go home early and go back to bed and I’d feel fine on Thursday.

By the time I had gathered my stuff and was leaving the office, there was nothing wee bit about sketchy. As I drove home I developed a rapidly escalating fear that I was going to yak in my car. The speedometer crept up to 70 – 75. I passed on the right. I rolled down a window. I assured myself that I was fine, but hurry.

Drama for nothing. I arrived home intact. My innards continued to roil but since I hadn’t eaten anything, no action. I put my jammies back on, sipped some water and collapsed onto the couch with a pile of blankets and commenced to be achy and fevery and unhappy.

This morning I felt better except still a bit achy, a wicked headache and weak from not eating. The idea of food has become interesting again, but the actual eating part not appealing.

I found some bread and thought: hey bread, that’s neutral. I had two bites and that was enough. Later I opened a can of peaches and picked at a toddler sized portion before putting the rest in the fridge. Maybe I’ll try some soup later.

Vancouver WA cow

Somewhere I have a picture just like this of Bob in Germany posing with a cow. I’m going to look for it this weekend.

Bob went down with some horrible non-Superbowl related flu on Sunday. He’s been staggering around here with a sad look on his face. One more day at home and he should be back in action.

This morning I finished my book The Dirt by the band Mötley Cr&#252e. I was a big Cr&#252e fan back in the day and saw them when the Shout at the Devil tour came to the UCSB campus. I would love to have been a bug on the wall in the ECEN (the venue) admin office the Monday after that show. I’ll bet a few heads rolled. My own personal experience of that weekend lived up to the Cr&#252e search and destroy ethos and was fun the way that the irresponsible and inconsiderate asshole behavior is when you’re 20 years old. We’ll leave it at that.

At one point, I owned every album up to Girls Girls Girls. I didn’t think I had any of them any more but I was wrong. I still have Too Fast for Love AND Shout at the Devil. I listened to a little Shout at the Devil yesterday afternoon and it sounded fantastic.

The first 100 pages of the book is hard to read without running to the bathroom to take a shower. A phrase like pure unmitigated debauchery doesn’t begin to cover it. And they went on like that for years. Drugs, booze, women and destruction. And they’re pretty straightforward about their personal shortcomings.

But after awhile they’re just whiny and come off as addicted to their own victim-drama. How sorry am I supposed to feel for a filthy rich and famous rockstar who’s indulged himself in every urge to please himself at the expense of everyone around him? Like it’s a major personal insight that life is hard and less of an insight that they brought a lot of it on themselves.

After I finished the book I did a quick trip through the NY Times and there’s a story about Jay McInerney and he’s going on about what it was like being young and successful and famous and how hard it was to hold it together. wah.