Author: Elaine

This morning our personal weather station reported that it was -7F at the lowest temperature. When I took this photo around 11:00 am, it had risen to a balmy 20F. This has been a winter for wild temperature swings: on Sunday the high was 60F.

For two or three weeks starting the week before Thanksgiving Rion had some very scary symptoms, starting with some infected wounds close to his eyes, and including lethargy, high respirations, and refusing to eat. (Oddly, he kept drinking and never became dehydrated. His blood work wasn’t that far off normal, either.) He had six or seven vet visits in that three week period, ending with a thorough follow-up exam when he didn’t react to any of the palpitations and manipulations.

While I was nursing him, I swore that if he survived, I was going to have the groomer do a full clip, because the long hair of his eyebrows and beard really interfered with medicating his eyes and giving him oral drugs. At the last exam, his vet said that I could take him to the groomers.

It is so much easier to administer his medications now.  It’s also easier to clip his nails. I rather like the look, now that I’ve gotten used to it.

Back in August, I decided to start a morning practice of yoga, with the goal of doing at least a little yoga every day. My craft room has enough empty floor space to put out a yoga mat, and a door to keep the dogs from joining me. (Sometimes I let one in, but it’s very hard to do yoga around a dog.)

I’m not sure how I discovered Adriene, a Texas yoga instructor who has a million instructive yoga videos on Youtube, but I decided her 30 Days of Yoga would be a good start. She has several thirty-day programs, recorded in different Januarys, that are sequences that build on one another.

Her style(s) seemed quite similar to the instructor of the small yoga classes I attended in person a couple of years ago. My initial rule was to stick with the whole practice, even if I had to considerably modify things depending on how decrepit I was feeling on a particular day. I was quite pleased at the end of the month because I practiced every day but three. Two of those days involved our trip to Nebraska to see the eclipse.

In September, I changed the rules a bit: if I wasn’t getting into a particular practice, even with modifications, I could quit after fifteen minutes and still consider it a success. I enjoyed the 30 Days of Yoga program so much that I repeated it, and practiced every day in September.

In October, I changed the “rules” again while doing her Yoga Revolution thirty-day program. On days that I didn’t feel like doing the practice from Yoga Revolution, I would switch in one of her other practices. I practiced every day but one in October.

In November, I fell on ice early in the month and my upper back went into a spasm for over a week. I had to find some very easy practices that didn’t involve the neck and back much. I had planned to do the thirty day Yoga Camp program, but have only done a handful. I’ll probably pick those up again in February. So far I’ve practiced every day in November one way or another.

After years of wanting some sort of daily yoga practice, I am very pleased how I am doing now. With a few exceptions, I practice first thing in the morning, before I feed the dogs. I have a much better chance of getting it done before the day starts.  I usually finish up with five minutes of chavasana after the practice ends.