S.C.U.M.Y

It's going to be a SCUMY weekend for Mensa Boy and our oldest son Nate. They are going to the beach for the South Carolina United Methodist Youth Convention. Preacher Tony boy is going along as a chaperone, too. The youth group at church has really grown. I have no idea how many kids are going, but I know it's in the double digits. Pretty good for a small church like ours.

So Taylor and I are batchin' it this weekend. I bought King Crab Legs for supper as a surprise. I did this a couple of years ago and we had them with neighbor Mary. This year Taylor's buddy Freddy may be with us.

Earlier this week Nate did some job shodowing with a biology professor at the University of South Carolina-Lancaster. He liked it a lot. Didn't come home saying he wanted to teach at the college level, but he did think that whole teaching thing was pretty cool.

My buddy who works for the county picked Nate up that morning and took him to work with her, and then ran him over to the campus at 9:30. During the 40 minutes they were in her office, she had him do a task for him. Stuffing envelopes. Here's what transpired:

"I'm not licking these shut, right?" Nate asked.

"Nope. That's someone else's job," she replied.

"Well, I guess I'm done then. What else would you like me to do?"

"There is nothing else. You should have paced yourself."

"Well, what else do you do all day?"

"Hmmm...at 11 I go pick up the mail." (it was 9 a.m.)

Off, On

School.

It began with the power unceremoniously blinking off at 6:40 a.m. One never knows the extent of an outage until the cold is braved and the neighborhood is scoped out. It was obvious from the start that it involved at least our street...everyone's porch lights were out.

Mensa Boy left for work and when he called a few minutes later I asked if he could tell how far the outage went. "Just past the school," he said. The building had some emergency lights on, and the traffic signals ("red lights" in southern-speak) were out.

Then buddy Rena called. "No school today," she said. "We can take the kids to school but they will sit in the gym until the power comes back on around 10 or so." She said if the kids don't come today they will not be counted absent. She took hers back home.

So I decided to go to the school to pick up Fred, the little guy who comes to my house after school each day. I knew his mother had dropped him at school.

But when I arrived, the lights were back on. Everything back to normal.

So I called Rena. She was just leaving the house and circled back to the get her kids again. I picked mine up and took them to school. Passed Rena at the 4-way stop by our house. She was delayed getting her kids back to the school because she'd already had them change into play clothes. "I told them they could wear those school clothes (uniforms) tomorrow, so to change to play clothes," she said.

So now it's 8:40 and things appear to be back to normal. Except that I appear to have pulled a muscle when I tried to keep the garage door from sliding down on my head.

A.M. and P.M. Yoga

I wrote about Candelight Yoga the other day. I still don't have that DVD...it's supposed to arrive at Barnes & Noble sometime today (and since I'm such a procrastinator, I'll have to get the guys' Valentines when I go pick up the DVD).

I was very stiff and sore Friday night and just felt like I needed to get some sort of yoga thing going before the other DVD came in. So I checked out several on Amazon and found that this one is the top-selling one. Lots and lots of great customer reviews.

And every one of them is well-deserved. This is truly a wonderful DVD.

The A.M practice is done by Rodney Yee...the guy on the cover. The P.M one is done by Patricia Walden. The music is very good and I've found myself leaving the disk in the player turned on and letting it loop as I get ready for bed. Both instructors are a joy to watch and have great, soothing voices with no weird stuff. They don't get into a lot of mystical conversation and they don't have funny ways of pronouncing words. Yee is on a beach in Hawaii and Walden is in the desert, so the scenery is very relaxing, too.

What I like is that the practices are really part meditative as well as the physical stretching. Julie and I did a meditation CD while I was there and I found it to be very relaxing (although we had a hard time not cracking up at the way the guy said the word "warm"). But you'd have to carve out time to do the yoga and then time to do the meditation. This DVD pretty much wraps it all together and you can get done in 20 minutes.

Pulling the Plug

The other day I received copies of Mom and Dad's wills in the mail. I was talking to Mom on the phone and I had asked her if Dad happened to mention that I was hoping to get 2 of her 10 wineglasses that she brought back from Germany. She said he'd mentioned it, but that she didn't want to part with any of them.

"You can't take them with you, you know...," I said.

"I know. But I want them for as long as I'm around," she replied.

I told her I would be too old to taste wine by the time she kicks the bucket at 110. She said she didn't care.

So later in the conversation I said that the wills had arrived.

"No living wills?" I asked.

"No," she said.

"I wish you had done those," I told her. "I won't have trouble with the other two when you are cold and dead in the ground, but I'll have to work hard getting them to let me pull the plug."

She agreed that they should do those.

"I'll be rushing to get that plug pulled, you know," I said.

"Why?" she asked.

"SO I CAN GET THE WINE GLASSES!" I told her.

My New Fun Thing-Yoga

While I was visiting my friend Julie, we tried out a couple of yoga DVDs. We'd talked about it before I came...plotting to attend a class or two during my visit. But we weren't able to find a class that fit in with our schedule. What does that tell you? We didn't have a schedule! The yoga options in Rochester, Minnesota are kind of limited.

Anyway, after we had supper Friday night, Julie remembered that she'd not checked the mail. When she opened the front door, she found a gift from some one of her husband's coworkers...a yoga DVD called "Candelight Yoga." What great timing!

So, despite our having full stomachs and at least one glass of wine already, we trooped down the family room to give the DVD a go.

It was EXCELLENT! I've ordered my own copy from Barnes & Noble now.

I've only done yoga a couple of times. There is a small class that meets here in Indian Land at our Boy Scout hut on Mondays at 3:30. But that time does not work really well for me. And I kind of hated to get all excited about it because it only meets once a week. The class was quite hard, too, as it's an hour long and some of the stretches are held for very long periods of time, which tended to make me sore at the end.

This practice is 43 minutes long. I'll use it for days when I don't go to Jazzercise as a "long practice." It was easy to follow and the instructor is not annoying. She's in a class so you can see other students, some of whom are doing slight variations based upon their abilities. There is also a short "energizing" practice that I liked, too.