Good News, Sad News and then Diego in Everyday Ramblings

Oh wonderful abundance, it is hard to choose which photo to put up. This is a house about two blocks away just after sunrise Sunday.

I was going to go to the gym to do my leg presses this evening but apparently there is a problem with the building the gym is in. A big crack appeared in the side of it this morning and they evacuated all 10 floors to be safe. They are now saying that it looks like there is no structural damage but we don’t know when the gym will reopen.

The next closest gym is too far to walk in any reasonable time frame, which means I would need to take Uber or Lyft or the bus. I have a four-week pass to get Uber rides for a flat $5.00 fee in the metro area so I could do that but it seems crazy to take a car to the gym to me.

I did take advantage of that flat fee to go out and sign my taxes and talk to my first ever tax consultant in the middle of the day today. Taxes are insane here in The States. Stressful and insane; about as complicated as they can possibly be.

Anyway, she is great and because of the extraordinary amount of money I spent on my mouth last year I am getting four times, (four times!) as much money back as I expected. Yippee.

That is the best news I have heard in months.

Of course I am going to sink almost all of it back into the dental work I need done the rest of this year but I am also going to go crazy and pay for my physical therapy (which I have been fretting about paying for with no idea how much it was going to cost) but I may order some spring/summer clothes and…

A new iPad! Oh boy.

My job is pretty stressful right now. I have been asked to do something I don’t exactly know how to do and given no resources to do it with and I am having these dreams about my anxieties about this all.

I am figuring it out and making some progress but everything feels way more high stakes than is comfortable and pressed right up against the edge of my limitations. Reminding myself that I have been through this sort of thing before is somewhat helpful when I am able to get some perspective.

Teaching yoga is so useful during times like these because I am so focused on the students and communicating effectively that it is like taking a vacation from all the work “stuff”. It is always there waiting but I have this buffer in between.

When I was 17 I was living with my oldest sister and her two small children. We had a fight (she was totally right I see now in retrospect) and she gave me an ultimatum trying to get me to stop floating around the place like a teenage hot air balloon and not doing anything useful.

Much to her surprise I called her bluff and moved out. No job, I wasn’t going to school, I got in touch with the son of her best friend who was setting up house with his girlfriend in a falling down spacious place in the next neighborhood over. They let me move in with them. And soon, within weeks another couple maybe 19 or 20 years old moved in with us.

They were all for me what other people experience as college friends. All four older but I held my own. I lived with the four of them for the next two years. It was an amazing rich time full of all sorts of wild and funny memories.

The woman who was in the second couple died today. I haven’t had contact with her in years but she was in my oldest sister’s orbit and was very kind to my sister when she was sick. She had a chronic lung disease.

This is so sad. She was well loved and after all these years I still remember the date of her birthday.

On a lighter note, Diego, who was interested in his dinner this afternoon, was sitting in front of my work screens (as he is wont to do) and I was keyboarding around him. He managed to hit Control and Delete at exactly the same time I hit an arrow key and the work on my monitor all rotated sideways.

I finally had to call the Help Desk to figure out how to fix it. The guy that answered couldn’t stop laughing. He said it was by far the best call he had had in a week.

Last updated April 12, 2017