New and Different in Everyday Ramblings

As we normally now have so little light I find it a challenge to get pictures of the birds I see with any of the cameras I have so I was thrilled to get a relatively decent shot of this handsome male house finch at my tube feeder yesterday afternoon.

What you don’t see here is his fledgling that just a minute before I took this was standing on the rail flap flap flapping his wings, mouth open while dad fed him sunflower chip bits.

Ah spring.

I saw a Killdeer on Saturday (Charadrius vociferous, a kind of plover) hoping around on a piece of scrubland it was sharing with a homeless tent. They are ground nesters, the birds, I am not so sure about the occupants of the tent. I’ve never seen one on this side of the river before. I was happy that I knew what kind of bird it was.

It is interesting to think about what to write about here.

I spent a few hours yesterday working on very fine alignment details of shoulder stand, a pose I do myself on occasion but don’t teach because it is not appropriate for most necks. And I spent a few more hours working on the class I am teaching tonight that is all about gently working to counteract the effect of gravity on the vertebral bodies of the spine, getting long, making space.

The poses I am teaching modifications of are too challenging for the majority of my students so I break them down into their component attributes and we think of them as being aspirational.

One of my students said recently, (she has loose ligaments in her hips and an unusual degree of flexibility even though she is significantly overweight) that the classes aren’t as challenging as they used to be. She wants to do the showy hip poses that feel good that she doesn’t need. What she needs is strength and stability in those areas.

What usually happens when I design a class with a particular student is mind is that they inevitably cotton on to it energetically and don’t show up. :)

We got to talking about dating in class a few weeks ago. This was a small class and everyone was over 60. We were standing and rolling our feet over dog balls and I was ready to move on and they are like, no wait, this feels good and I laughed and said something about how putting into your dating profile that without having a fetish you enjoyed rubbing your partner’s feet would be quite the hook. And one of my students, a former nurse, said she thought the best ever first date was giving blood together. That made us all laugh.

She seemed to think that even though I had a serious case of infectious Hepatitis when I was 17 and have never been able to give blood that they might take it now. I’ll have to ask, as I feel like a slacker not being able to.

They are saying we are going to have a record breaking hot day. I know I actually got sweaty yesterday walking up to The Chart House. That felt new and different after so much cold rain.

Last updated April 18, 2016