Yoga

I've been doing yoga every week since December.  I think it reduces the number of times I threaten my 2-year-old with Dire Consequences.  Sometimes he does yoga too.  This is his downward-facing dog.

When I only have a few minutes to get some yoga in, I like to do this Tara Stiles routine for flexibility. It's for beginners and it's quick.

I also like the 30-Day Yoga Challenge videos with Erin Motz.  They're relatively short and I like the variety.

My favorite free yoga videos, though, are from Yoga with Adriene.  I like her yoga philosophy ("find what feels good") and her explanations (finally I know what it means to breath into the backs of my legs) and her videos (lots of restorative yoga).

The best offerings from Yoga with Adriene, for me, have been
the Energizing Morning Practice,
Yoga for the Winter Blues (or the Spring Blues in Canada), and
the Bedtime Yoga Sequence.

Also good for me--not eating all the desserts confiscated from The Bairn after he grabs them off the potluck table.  Lesson for next Labo(u)r Day.

Fitness (Or the Lack Thereof)

The City's benefits fair was today. It's a good time. You get some free stuff, you eat low-quality pizza, you listen to the Parks and Rec guys' wives talk incessantly about toddler jeans from the Gap for 40 minutes while you wait in line to get your flu shot, and you weigh in for the holiday health incentive program.

I do not weigh as much as I thought I did. I was pretty sure I'd packed on a good 10 pounds here recently because I have not been exercising at all. My parents visited for a week, so all my free time was spent with them, and before that I was struggling because it's difficult to walk in my new neighborhood. It's possible, but it involves braving a busy turn lane (when the sidewalk briefly ends), crossing the intersection of two major roads, and cutting through a gas station parking lot. (I can sense my mother tensing up and making that sound she makes when she disapproves, even from 2,000 miles away.) Also, I'm a lazy slacker.

A couple of weeks ago, my roommate proposed that we go to the gym after work. I proposed that we go home and watch Pushing Daisies. I won. That same week, I actually felt like exercising, but I was reading and couldn't stop long enough to walk downstairs and across the parking lot. I marched back and forth across the living room with Max at my heels for 20 minutes, while I continued to read. That's as good as it got that week.

At least today I had good excuses for not exercising. I had to recover from my flu shot. And I have a cold. And I needed to come home and bake cookies. When I feel better and I have no baking needs, I'll exercise.

Health

Today I attended the city health fair to have my BMI calculated and my blood pressure taken and my glucose and cholesterol checked. My blood pressure was a little high. The nurse asked if I was relaxed. I said yes, because I do that when asked any question. But then I thought, No, I'm not relaxed! I just came from the reference desk, I have nightmares about my lawn, and being the RS pres. gives me a headache.

The big problem with my health screening, though, came about at the Glucose Station. I sat down and the Blood Taker told me I was the first woman she'd seen all day. Interesting. The woman started prepping my arm to take blood. I thought this was very odd as the person at the next table was just getting her finger pricked. I figured, though, that if someone had given the Blood Taker Woman the equipment to suck blood out of my arm, she was probably qualified to do so. She took a whole big vial of my blood and then it went down like this:

Blood Taker: Oh, do you have your receipt for payment?

MBC: Was I supposed to pay for this? (I was pretty certain all my services were supposed to be free.)

Blood Taker: Oh yes. Go over and pay at the cashier's office.

MBC: What should I tell them I'm paying for?

This is the point at which a nurse heard us talking and jumped in. She looked at my paperwork. She crossed something out. She shook her head.

Nurse: You don't have to pay for anything. We're just using your blood to test your cholesterol and glucose. (Turning to the Blood Taker) There's only a charge for the prostate screening. (pause) She doesn't have a prostate.

That's right I don't have a prostate! And I'm glad too. And I promise never to mention prostates on the blog again.

Running

I really want to be a runner. It looks calming. It looks healthy. When I get home from a walk, I look mildly invigorated, but when people finish a run they look like they've really accomplished something (evidenced by the sweat coursing down their bodies). And I always imagine that if I were a runner, I would be less susceptible to the Rage Cycle of the Librarian. I imagine that if I were a runner, I wouldn't plot the assassination of problem patrons. And in the grocery store when I see Beautiful Shallow People selecting cheese, and they take the cheese they've decided not to purchase and toss it into the meat section, because they're too lazy to reach their arms the one foot to hang the bag of cheese back on the cheese rack, it wouldn't make my blood pressure rise and I wouldn't clinch my fists and consider grabbing the girl by her Barbie hair and beating her with a frozen pizza. No, if I were a runner, poor grocery store cheese etiquette would not enrage me. I would have a runner's inner Zen-like calm. My rage would dissipate through my healthy, physical exertion.

For all of these reasons, every few years I decide to take up running, and every few years I remember that I HATE to run. My brain bounces around in my head in a way that I'm certain isn't good for me. I feel like I'm giving myself a concussion from the inside when I run. This is the year that I would normally try running again, but I KNOW my efforts will fail, so I'm looking for running alternatives. Any ideas?

Getting Fit

The city for which I work cares about the health of its full-time employees. Apparently, they care considerably less about the well-being of their part-time employees, because when I worked for them part-time I wasn't getting the flu shots or health counseling or incentive programs that I receive since moving to 40 hours a week. In fact, even though I was doing basically the same job when I was part-time, I didn't have to sign anything saying I'd undergone safety training or that I wouldn't steal office supplies or use my computer to look at porn until my hours increased, either. Well, joke's on them, because I couldn't convince anyone in my department to give me safety training, so I never returned my forms to HR. As soon as I figure out how to use the copier or microfilm machines unsafely, I'm gonna. I'm still as unsafe as I was when I worked part-time.

Annnyway, now the city cares about me, and today I participated with some of my co-workers in a personal training session at the city gym. It involved some painful exercises that required me to hold weights over my head while lunging across the floor. I exercise, but my weak little arms were not prepared for this. Several years ago, I sustained a shoulder injury and when I got new health insurance later that year, my shoulder was excluded from coverage, so if I injured my shoulder playing sports or exercising, my health care would consist of my insurance providers standing around saying, We told you so. So, my shoulders are weak.

It was kind of nice having such a legitimate reason to excuse myself from sports. It's so much easier to say, I can't play on the softball team, because of a shoulder injury than I can't play on the softball team, because as a teenager I played on a co-ed team with this one kid who was such a misogynist in the making that I never really got over his ball-hogging, girl-patronizing ways. And I throw like Madame 5-yr-old. I also have lasting volleyball trauma from the 2nd grade, when the entire 2nd grade was regularly made to play volleyball together--50 kids on one side of the net, 50 kids on the other. We each stood in our one square foot of space and prayed that the ball would stay far away from us, because we didn't have enough room to move our arms and hit the incoming ball.

But back to today's training session. It was at noon, so I had to come to work flushed and sweaty, change clothes in the bathroom, and go straight to a meeting. It was very much like junior high gym, which is not really an experience anyone voluntarily revisits.

The end.