Day Off

Ahhh. A bit of time not scheduled.

• Yoga this morning at the center, enjoying being a student. I think that it's among my first times back since surgery and my trip to San Francisco.
• Rode my bike to yoga and back (I guess that goes without saying). Virtuous and fully aware of how out of shape I am. I love my bike. My goal is to work close enough to home that I can ride my bike to work. I do know far more industrious people, or at least have heard tell of them, who ride their bikes on the expressways around Chicago. I'm not one of them. But can I whine about gas prices: Chcago ten o'clock news calimed last night that our gas prices are the highest in the country. Today, 12 gallons, over $40. Wow.
• Sat in the backyard on one of the Adirondack chairs, enjoying the pond (tiny but still wonderful), typing my notes from the integration course in New Orleans into the laptop. I'm conscious that the stuff will never move from notebook to brain unless I either hand-recopy it or type it up. I'm a visual learner, but I also need that physical element of writing the words down in order to get them filed into my brain. When the battery wore down and I admitted that sitting outside in hot weather isn't the most apt way to get through a lot of notes, I came inside and disciplined myself to keep going until I'd finished one day of training. That would be, in my world, about 30 or so pages of notes. In my early life, I was a reporter and a graduate student. I write Everything down.
• Tried to order the rest of my books for therapy training. I love the way they come from India, and this time I'm going to post a picture so that I can show you: wrapped in muslin, with a ribbon tying the package closed, and the address written in large flowery hand, albeit it Magic Marker. Amazon.com, take notice. Failed to complete order as none of the passwords that I could summon up worked. Is there not a better system than passwords? Haven't we all worked our way through the names of our children and our pets, and what then to do? On Law and Order, they always crack the password in under a minute. No surprise.
• Went to the library and found things to read: Dave Eggars' What is the What, a few copies of Cooks' Illustrated, a Van der Valk mystery reputed to be the strangest and the best, Aupres de ma Blonde.
• we are having an almost all Orange and Yellow dinner: barbecued chicken, fruit salad of mango and oranges and apples, another salad of grape tomatoes and parsley and corn with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, Italian bread, and those wonderful frozen french fries that go into the oven for 15 minutes and come out, yup, golden yellow. I didn't plan it this way. On the other hand, it is not that unusual to notice that I've cooked a meal in one color palette. And my older daughter's visiting with a friend. American Idol on, Dancing with the Stars taping. I admit it, I did log on and gave all five votes to Apolo Anton Ohno and his partner.