You're Doing It Wrong

Yesterday was the big celebration of the end of Holiday’s Yoga Center downtown. This has been my yoga home for 10 years and I’m very sad to see it end.

The celebration was fantastic. A number of people had the opportunity to tell the story of how they came to find the center. The room was packed and we had a bunch of different teachers lead us.

After the practice we had a social time and music and snacks. More people came. A couple who met at the center arrived with their little girl. I ran into people I haven’t seen in a long time.

It was a good lesson in celebrating change.

Since I’m here, I’ll tell the story of how I ended up at the center. I had noodled with yoga for years and years and taken a few classes but never found anything I stuck with. I read a story about Power Yoga with Beryl Bender Birch and when I bought her book, the cashier at the bookstore asked if I was one of Holiday’s students. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Later Beryl came to town and I went to see her at the bookstore and she mentioned Holiday’s name as a great teacher in town. Now I’d heard her name twice. This was also the time I was ending my independent life as a single person and moving in with my future husband and I wanted to have something that was just for me. So I told Bob I wanted to start taking a yoga class.

I’ve been at it ever since.

I briefly thought of doing a Wampa / muffin picture. Boy, put muffin into a search engine for images and see what you get.

The Oregonian hired a new food editor about a year ago, Martha. And although she’s never been my favorite I’ve warmed up from somewhat dissatisfied to neutral.

This week she wrote about rescuing the muffin and how the crap [my word] that you see in the coffee houses today is so abysmal. She doesn’t even touch Costco and I don’t know if they even still make those pallets of muffins but I can’t imagine why they’d stop. Ook. You could wring one out, add vinegar and use the output to dress your salad. Those things were (are) nasty. Martha complains about dry, crumbly and too sweet and she’s spot on but also add oily. Should a muffin be moisturizer?

She also touches on the scone, but that wasn’t the theme of her column but I’ll take it on. Jeez, coffee shops make shittyass scones, too. (Not Great Harvest, by the way.) I had one at a, ahem, popular coffee spot one time and it had this hard sugar glaze. Remember those Hostess fruit pies they used to sell at the grocery store? They probably still do. I haven’t eaten one in at least 10 years. I remember the chocolate one was pretty yummy in a slumming it sort of way. But remember that sugary glaze on those things? This scone had that, only hard. Why?

Martha had some recipes and a good idea which is that since muffins are best baked fresh, making the batter and leaving it in the fridge and then baking as many as you need. I’ll have to try that.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, that writing thing went pretty well. It wasn’t any easier and I’m not sure where I’m going with it, but I liked doing it. So there.

Here’s the Wampa checking out Devo at the Run Hit Wonder. You get him in the right shoes and he can run like nobody’s business.

Wampa helped Erin pack the van when she moved to Utah. She’s back in Cali now. I heard he wasn’t as helpful on the return trip.

Wampa loves hippie music. Here he searches for a hoop while checking out some grooving tunes at High Sierra Music Festival with Matt.

Wampa loves little sausage sandwiches at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.

Wampa lurks outside Billy’s office but nothing can distract Billy from the trusty handheld.

—

Okay, I think I’ve wrung about all the fun and games we can get out of the Wampa. I’ve got a post to write about muffins and then I need to get a chicken a roasting. Wampa loves roast chicken.

Yesterday I had the Wampa visiting the Neuners in Partnachklamm Gorge. I decided to do a whole travel series on the Wampa.

Here he is at the Thanks For Not Buying Fur parade in Portland:

I have many more Wampa travel photos to show you, but it’s going to have to wait because I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to spend the whole day goofing around on the computer. I’m going to do some writing. Yes, you read correctly: writing. Then I’ll waste time goofing around on the computer this afternoon.

Look at the cool box of loot I got for my birthday from Steve and Denise. Somewhere a kid is crying because the Star Wars store is empty.

My favorite item:

The Wampa (from Episode 5, in case you forgot {that’s Empire Strikes Back, the one released second, in case you don’t understand how the numbering works}) He looks like a yeti vampire. I love him.

Yesterday I had a doctor appointment and I would love to tell you all about it but my husband recoiled and shuddered and curled into the fetal position when I explained it to him so I’m guessing you wouldn’t appreciate it either. Let’s just say it’s amazing what the human body can grow in out of the way places that can be removed with a little yank and then stuck in a jar to be studied later, and leave it at that. (The Dr. is going to study it, not me.)

Bob is on spring break and he came downtown with me yesterday and he wandered around while I worked and we met at the doctor’s in the afternoon. I took the rest of the day off so we could have some adventures. First, we went to Henry’s and had a snack and I had a beer.

Nothing tastes better than an adult beverage in the middle of a week day. I’ve said this before but it feels like I’m getting away with something and for about 3 minutes I wished my life could be like this all the time: wandering around having adventures and sneaking a beer in the middle of the day. But I realized if I could have a beer in the middle of the day whenever I wanted (which I suppose technically I could), it wouldn’t feel special or taste extra good.

The real purpose of this post is to tell you without spoilers, about the movie we saw, Match Point, which Woody Allen’s latest. I do not think this is a bad movie but I found it brutal to sit through.

I am an anxious person and go to a great deal of trouble to create a life with as little distress as possible. That’s why I like to be appallingly early to the airport, always put my keys in the same place when I come home and compulsively organize and tidy all my stuff so that I can easily find things.

This movie is a slow, steady burn, cranking up the tension one tiny notch at a time for two hours. I could feel my blood rusting behind my knees and my hair turning gray. This guy makes a mistake and then more mistakes and even more mistakes trying to fix the other mistakes and who’s going to find out when and how? Brutal. If I’d been watching at home I would have turned it off. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Just stop the tension, please. I can’t separate anxiety as entertainment and anxiety, period.

Now that it’s over I can tell you it is a brilliant film. Great writing. Fantastic acting. Jonathan Rhys Meyers (better known as the dreamy soccer coach from Bend it Like Beckham around my house) is especially good. But should you see it? I don’t know.

This morning I sent Rubbermaid a message telling them that their Seal n’ Saver product is flawed. I don’t normally do this, which I explained to them, but after wrestling with the stupid cake saver this morning and uttering my favorite cuss word: godf*kingdamnittohellpieceofsh*tmotherf*ker, I felt they’d earned it. (Technically the epithet wasn’t uttered, it was shrieked at high volume because I was very frustrated and in a hurry to get out the door to work.)

They’ve changed their product and since my dear husband has this very tiny flaw of leaving food savers in the trunk of his car for extended periods of time with food product still in them until even bleach won’t banish the odor thus rendering the item fit only for garbage, we need to replace the older and better designed product, with the new blue-lidded product which is all they have at Fred Meyer (other than cheapier, crapier food saving items.)

And the updated version of the product sucks. As I explained to Rubbermaid in my note, we have small, medium and a cake saver version of the updated verision and they are consistently difficult to get the top on. “This is a design flaw and should be looked at,” is what I told them, which Bob thought was hilarious.

So their reply is to give them the product number. WTF? How is the product number going to help anything? I already told them that ALL products with the blue lid are difficult to close. I am an able bodied person with strong hands and arms. What is a differently abled person going to do? What about my mother-in-law? is what I actually asked them.

I knew it was pointless when I sent my first message, which could only be sent after filling out an extensive data-mining form including needing my phone number to which I replied: HA HA HA HA.

If I could invent something, I would invent, I guess it would be software, that can calculate how stuff fits on the page when its going to be printed and will not print the last page with only one line. Have you noticed when you print stuff from the web or email there is always the last page with almost nothing on it?