TESTING, TESTING....

Uggh. I'm not good at this "code" stuff. Blogger code. Html code. They all suck. For some reason, my comments and my archives disappeared from my blog. I wasted the requisite amount of time looking thru Blogger's "help" section. It was loaded with reports from others having similar blog symptoms. Unfortunately, nothing that i could find helped me figure out what had happened. Since blogger has recently gone thru some kind of update, i tried switching my layout to a new version. When i previewed the page, i could see my archives again and there was a comments section. "Cool", I figured, "It's all fixed." I clicked to switch over to the new layout. I was able to again access my archives but it looks like the old comments have been lost, gone into the purgatory of the ether. That is less troublesome to me than if i had lost the first two years of my posts. That would have pissed me off. Even when i was posting, I didn't usually get many people adding comments. Certainly not like the more modern day ashtanga bloggers, like boodiba and samasthiti, where the comments sections can have as much content, and sometimes more, than the actual blog entry. I enjoyed the comments that i did get, who doesn't like attention? But, it wasn't such an important part of the blog that losing it would make the blog lose it's character.

I also lost the extraneous sidebar stuff that i had cobbled together the first year or so when i bothered to try and play with the layout. Now, no picture of me in the header, no links to old, expired blogs or the links to me doing a couple of asana, no pithy sanskit aphorisms, no out of synch moon phase thingie. Just plain old blog entry text. It'll have to do for now. I'm at work and can't get to any of the photos and I don't feel like playing codergeek anymore. God, imagine if i had to do that all day for a living. Give me a scalpel anytime. I'm glad that there are people who live and breathe that stuff. It makes using the web and doing stuff like blogging possible (with the exception of Blogger, of course). But, all day, every day? I'd rather work at Hotdog on a Stick.

With the new layout, my archives show an interesting pattern documenting progressive sloth: year one - buncha posts; year two - half as many posts as year one; year three - a fourth as many as in year two; year four - one post.

Okay, enough about blogs. What about yoga? Well, I've managed to keep up at the two to three classes a week pace. That's a waay good thing, btw. When I wasn't going and was having various dings and pains, I wasn't enjoying things. The loss of practice, the ground to be made up, it made it unfun. Now, that I've made up a good portion of that ground, and lost a few of those extra lbs., it is again enjoyable to practice. I was frequently looking for reasons to quit practice early: am I sore? am i tired? do i have a bad attitude? is it Tuesday? Now, I'm trying to get in more and more each time. I'm still not ready to go back to doing what I had been. I used to mainly do my second series poses. Now, I do my first series poses and up thru ardha matsyendrasana. I'm going to begin doing eka pada and maybe dwipada sirsasana again, though i think I'm too heavy still to be able to do dwi pada. we'll see. I know i won't be able to bind yet in Tittibhasana B, so that will be my stopping point until I can. Then hopefully i can again begin to work on Karandavasana. I have been given the two poses after that, but they were mercy poses. Even when I was at my peak, I struggled to land Karandavasana on my own. I never, ever had a hint of any lift back up. So, I still have room to improve and roads to re-travel. Maybe I'll learn and be less Sisyphus-ean about the whole process. I could actually work at improving instead of just trying to do it. The "just do it until you can do it" way probably works, but the glaciers are melting faster.

We're back from New York, of course. We missed the torrential weather by a day. I did one more practice before we left, a Saturday led class at Shiva Shala. I was intrigued because I'd never done a led class that did all of first and also the first half of second series. We did up thru Kapotasana. It was a fun practice. There were a lot more people present than from the day before. My back didn't hurt at all. That really surprised me. Every other time I've had that sensation, my low back would be hurt for about three to four weeks. I think the hour long hot bath I took in the extra big tub in our rental condo may have done the trick. I had the same teacher as the day before. I guess she didn't want any part of me since she touched me twice, once in down dog and once in balasana. I don't blame her. It makes sense not to do much in the way of adjusting if someone says they hurt themselves the day before. This class had a good number of skilled practitioners. Nobody that I saw was new or fairly stiff. There were a number of people that I thought had really nice practices. Most people stopped after we got to the second series though. There were only about five or six of us who went on. I din't look around too much, so I didn't get a feel for how people did. Didn't matter. I just wanted to do it myself. I don't remember too many differences from how we do things in my studio. They did do a short handstand session before closing: go up into an handstand and hold for ten breaths. Or not. They also did three drop back/standups after the three backbends. Oh yeah, they did all four paschimottanasanas and three baddha konasanas (we usually only do two versions of pashimottanasana, A & C I think, and the first two baddha konasanas).

My first practice back home was a mysore class. The teacher in the class before had turned the thermostat up to 84, so the room was pleasantly warm when we got going. I finally got a real sweat going. I got my arms thru in Garbha Pindasana with no problems. Only problem with that is that when i then rolled up into Kukkutasana, my legs slipped right back down below my elbows. So, being incapable of getting my hands thru into GArbha leads to me doing a better Kukkutasana. But, it also leads to these great big bruises on my arms. I had thought when I first saw them in NY that they were from me making so many attempts at Bakasana B. After one particularly painful episode balancing in Kukkutasana, however, it became clear what the actual culprit was. In recent mysore classes, I don't feel like I'm going slow, but compared to back when i was regularly doing all of first and some of second, I'm moving pretty slow. I used to get all of that in in less than an hour and a half. Thursday, I ran out of time and didn't get to try Viparita Chakrasana. In fact, to have enough time for a decent Savasana, I had to skip closing and just do the padmasana poses.

I was getting ready to do my Uth Pluthihi when i noticed a friend, Jason, do his. he just had arthroscopic surgery to work on a damaged knee meniscus about nine days before. the stitches were still in his skin. and he was in there practicing. Since he couldn't really do padmasana at all, he did his Uth Pluthihi with his legs held straight out in front of him. And he held it up, steadily, for a long time. A guruji type long time. Try it some time. Amazing. The guy is just an inspiration. He weds in about a week, so no doubt, like me, he'll soon get all overweight and lose all his bandhas too.

Well, this was going to just be a test post to see if the "new" layout, "new" blogger worked. It's time to get to bed. I'm at work. After three o'clock, I'm first call to take care of whatever comes up, so I have to go down now if I want to get any rest. Should be able to practice tomorrow morning. I've got a couple of people I have to see in the morning, including one patient in the unit--she tried pretty hard to die on us the other night--so I'll have to get my rounding done early if I want to get out of here in time to make it to practice. Hopefully, I'll have a chance later tomorrow to fancify the blog a little bit.