Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Considering Commitment – How to Choose?

    I must confess, I have been an exercise dilletante. I am following my whims and switching between my Iyengar-based Yoga for Scoliosis DVD, cycling outdoors or spinning at Vie, and then rope yoga at the Ann Arbor RussaYog studio. I’ve been attempting balance – the scoliosis yoga once a week, and something else (Russa Yog or spinning) once. And in between, I might binge on stress or food or computer work or volunteer work or all four together.

    I talked with Jasprit at RussaYog yesterday. He said that if I was to focus on RussaYog, I should do it three times a week. I recall when I researched the requirements to teach Iyengar Yoga, I read I needed to be in three classes a week to prepare. What’s magic about three? Three seemed impossible to me at the time, but with other life changes, it might be do-able, if I focus and work to eliminate another obligation or two…But it would soak up any time I’d otherwise give to a cardio activity.

    I also have the sense that yoga elongates me, stretches my body, and derotates the spine, but spinning is good for my heart and being more vigorous, it releases pent up nervous energy. Spinning does aggravate my neck, tho. I am leaning towards yoga in some form, but I am concerned about missing any cardio. I do walk to work, and I suppose I can go back to walking up the stairs to my 5th Floor office….

    I’m doing a little reading online, and the argument is perhaps alternating between the two – so three times a week of EACH yoga and of spinning, but I think jumping from twice a week to six times a week is simply impossible, especially with work and other non-athletic volunteer/service activities. Sigh. Hard to choose.

  • Writing a letter to my five-year-old nephew (gratitude #42)

    So, my nephew is sad when he doesn’t get mail, and my sister asked if I would write him a letter. I was happy to, as he’s one of my absolute favorite humans, though I was also mildly stumped. What should I write?

    Kite tail

    I decided a letter at all was more important than the perfection of its contents, and I let my editor relax a bit.

    I know he just moved, from the Atlanta suburbs to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and I’m going to visit in early December, so I asked him how his new school was, and what he could see from his bedroom window. I asked him if he was an Atlanta Falcons or a Tennessee Titans fan. I told him how much I was looking forward to seeing him, and I asked if we could go on a walk together when I arrived.

    It was sweet to write him and I am excited to mail my letter tomorrow. My husband will send one in maybe a week.

    I was reminded of myself as a child, how I envied my parents getting their junk mail and bills. I longed to get mail as a sign that I was alive as well. And I was reminded of the letters my grandfather Heinrich wrote me. He used to write me handwritten letters that I was thrilled to receive, and I was touched by his thoughtfulness. My sister mentioned he used to give us stationery. I forgot that part, but I still have the letters he sent me. Maybe it is time to review them and learn how to write a letter to a child you love, so I can pass along that tradition to my nephew.

  • Grateful for dial-up – the pleasure of not being connected (gratitude #41)

    So, this past weekend we went up north with some friends. It was a brief trip, much too short for the length of the drive, but it was nice to get away, get up north and relax.

    Breathe in. Breathe out. Appreciate the scenery. Repeat.

    In the summertime, we share DSL and a wireless router with the neighbors. But they locked their place up for the winter, shut down the DSL/wireless, and they won’t be back until the spring. We go year-round. I really love it when it is quiet and the winter woods especially are quiet.

    I did have a bit of work to do, so I had to reinstate our old dial-up service, through Bruce Municipal Telecom. I discovered a few fun facts:

    • My space-age Macbook doesn’t even have a place to plug in a phone line, but
    • My husband’s Dell laptop did.
    • Neither of us had a thumb drive to transfer the file I’d painstakingly prepared to send to a co-worker for the Monday I’d be out.

    I borrowed Dave’s laptop, recreated the spreadsheet on his computer, and dialed in to get stuff into Basecamp for my colleagues. Hooray for connectivity.

    Yet, dial-up definitely put a damper on my online activities. Because I didn’t have connectivity, I let a few things go. I put off work email, Twitter, uploading photos to my flickr account, personal email, blogging, working with my MiUPA colleagues to set up the chapter meeting we had the Monday evening I returned, etc. I could answer some of the email on Tuesday morning during working hours, the MiUPA team is all-powerful and organized without constant input from me. I could upload the few photos I took late Monday. My twitter friends didn’t need instant reporting of my hikes and naps and the weather at Gillies Lake.

    It all worked out just fine. So, even though I’ve loved having the wireless broadband up there, it is nice to disconnect for a while. A real vacation after all. A chance for downtime, not uploading.

  • Fall chores

    Today was a day of fall chores: sweeping out the garage, tidying it and getting it ready to store the table and chairs for the winter, raking leaves from the back yard, and pulling in all of the “tender” bulbs (voodoo lily and calla lily) that I had planted in pots on the deck and porch. They’ll slumber in peat in a bin in my basement – cool and dark – until it is time for them to grow again in the spring.

    Nice to feel I’m ready for the change of season.

  • My desert island item – a stack of freshly laundered kitchen towels (gratitude #40)

    You might think I’m reaching the dregs in the gratitude barrel, but no, this is actually one of the things for which I’m actually, sincerely, really-really grateful.

    I’m not someone who stockpiles; I’m an under-buyer. Normally, I tend to run out and go run an errand to refill my supply of (important item here). But, along with piles of books, I stockpile kitchen towels. There are few things better or more satisfying to me than a stack of freshly laundered kitchen towels.
    dishtowels

    I haven’t actually bought many of them – several were gifts from my mom, others from friends with various wedding (yes, 8 years ago) presents, my husband’s grandmother wove some of what I use, my mother-in-law likes giving tea towels as gifts – so I can use the excuse that I didn’t intentionally acquire the set I have now. I blundered into my stockpile of dish towels. And they give me a disproportionate happiness. Yes, dishtowels.

    There’s just something abundant in the waiting stack. I like having a stack because in a weekend of a lot of cooking, say my canning fun, I can keep on tossing dirty and sodden dishtowels down into the basement (our staircase is our laundry chute) and reload the oven handle with another clean, dry towel. So, after my weekend of canning, I’d exhausted my stack of towels and needed to launder the set. There was something abundant about that too. Felt like an accomplishment.

    I use one to line underneath the bins that hold the potatoes, onions, and garlic. One is always looped over the handle of the oven, for drying washed hands or wiping up the counter. When we’re cooking, one of us has a dishtowel jauntily tossed over one shoulder, at the ready for drying a hand-washed dish or grabbing a pot handle. I suppose they’re some kind of tangible reminder of the joy we take in our kitchen, in cooking with and for friends.

    So, want to make my day? Give me a dish towel.

  • Going to Podcamp Michigan!

    So, just the other day, with some of my Michigan Usability Professionals Folks, I was wondering about local social media folks that I hadn’t yet met. You know, wondering about who might be good speakers to invite to talk to us, that kind of thing.

    Podcamp Michigan 11/8/2008
    Podcamp Michigan 11/8/2008

    I didn’t even tweet it, though I should have. But, I did find, in my inbox this morning, a twitter notification from, of all things, Podcamp Michigan. Ask and ye shall receive. Or, in this case, “receive even though the ask was inchoate and unarticulated.”

    A podcamp is an unConference focused on blogging, podcasting, and social media. Should be fun. I’m planning to attend. You?

    Coordinates: