Woo. First time doing yoga class in like a month – I’ve been away at cons, or just back from a con and too exhausted to think of leaving the house in the morning, for weeks. As usual, I pushed myself to near my limits, just to figure out what the hell they are after all this laxity. Turns out there are a few things that have definitely changed for the worse, and my stamina for holding poses feels less, but there are other parts that are still pretty flexible.

It’s gonna take a while for my spine to fully unkink after all that travel and sitting, though. Pop pop crackle.

There’s a new yoga teacher at the Y, with a different style of class, and a very citrus-y perfume. But it’s still mostly about taking the same poses and holding them.

I’m going to miss having the more extreme stretching and exercise of pole class; the Y is adding barre and high-impact intensity training, and I’m hoping those two things will fill in that gap for a while. I’ll start hitting those classes sometime this week or the next; it depends on how pooped I feel after just starting to do yoga again after so much of a break.

(Also annoyingly my pull-ups have decreased a LOT over this enforced break; I could casually do 5 or 6 when passing by the bar at the bathroom door, and now I struggle to do 3. It’ll return with regular practice, though.)

I really need to start doing some kind of exercise when I’m away from home like this, so I don’t have this total drop of flexibility and strength when several cons come in a row in the future. (I also need to avoid that if I can. But still.)

I’m having breakfast at Portage Bay Cafe. The dining room has this unusual split-level arrangement; half of it is higher than the other, with a low wall that comes up to about waist height for the people in the upper half.

I was seated right next to the wall, on the lower side, enjoying a really tasty ham scramble, when I see a hand casually slide over the wall and just dangle there. As if its owner was draping it out a car window.

Every now and then he’d kinda pick at one of his fingernails. Kinda gross, when you’re right below it.

After a bit of thought, I picked up a packet of sugar and slid it into this hovering hand. Fingers closed reflexively, and my gift was accepted. The hand drew out of sight.

A moment later, the old dude it belonged to poked his head over the wall. I waved. He said “Thank you!” and vanished.

And took his dangling hand with him.

Oh hell yes. I just had a salad made with local tomatos and locally made spicy cheese for the first time in like a month. It was exactly the right amount of food for my appetite, rather than a too-large portion that I don’t want to eat later but feel weird about throwing away.

The greens came out of a bag from Trader Joe’s, but everything else came from the local farmer’s market. Which is on Saturdays, and, well, cons happen on weekends, so I haven’t been able to stop by for the past three weeks. I was finally home on a Saturday morning again this past weekend.

Tastes like heaven.

Last night before going to the wedding, Jill offered me a couple of the perfumes she keeps in her purse. Both were kinda too floral for me, so I declined. And then wished I had some hanging around in my purse for those moments when I realize that, hey, this is a time when it would be nice to alter my scent from the default of ‘woman, vaguely raspberryish from my choice of hair products’.

So I hit up ZOMG Smells for a couple tiny bottles of their Spacebat. I’d met them at Geek Girl Con a couple years ago and gotten a few of their perfumes, and Spacebat is the one that I just keep on using, so I figured I needed a few tiny bottles.

And then I looked for a few other scents, to fill out the order and give my self variety. I quickly noticed that the ones I went for first had names like ‘Kuiper Belt Objects Unite In Vengeance’ or ‘Coronal Mass Ejection’. Add this onto the couple tiny vials I have of their ‘Oort’ and something becomes clear: I want to smell like space.

Okay, time to take a shower.

Ugh. The tub is filthy. It’s been needing a cleaning since before this month of cons. It is now downright dangerous because a conditioner spill that happened during one of these cons rendered the whole thing slippery.

I’ll clean it after I take this shower.

pause

No. I’m going to clean it now. I’ve been saying “I’ll clean it after this shower” the past several times I’ve showered, and it’s still filthy.

Well now that I’ve got this sponge full of bleach powder I may as well clean the bathroom sink, too.

And why not clean up some of these hair dye stains on the counter while I’m at it?

And now at last I think I can shower. 

Attending a friend’s wedding.

Dressing nicely to attend a friend’s wedding.

Knowing that I should dress nicely, but not so nicely as to become the center of all attention – it’d be rude to upstage the couple getting married.

As noted previously, I’m switching my net from Comcast to Centurylink. Today, I stuck the old modem into the box along with the giant new modem/router they sent me, and took a bus up to the Comcast office in Bitter Lake, then visited Best Buy to attempt to buy a Centurylink router that didn’t do wireless.
On the way, things got interesting – about halfway along my trip on the second bus I had to take to get up to Comcast, someone tried to do a right turn from the lane to the bus’ left, and would have gotten run over if the bus driver hadn’t slammed on the brakes. Passengers went tumbling, and the car clipped the bike rack on the front of the bus, knocking off one of the wheel clips and probably fucking up the wheel of the bike sitting on the rack. Nobody was hurt beyond some bruises, as far as I could tell – the bus was empty enough that everyone had a seat.

The bus driver and the driver of the car were clearly gonna be there for a while, so I got out and walked the remaining four or five blocks. Along a busy road with no sidewalks, because this is the fucking suburbs and nobody ever walks there. Blah. I was kinda tempted to just walk right down a lane in protest. I did not; I reached the Comcast offices without further incident, and gave them back their modems, then walked about a half hour to the Best Buy in Northgate.

They only had one router, which also did wireless, so I sighed and got it.
Upon getting home, I got it plugged in and running, then made the mistake of trying to let it be the master wireless router, and have my two Airports extend the network. This did not work very well at all; I don’t recommend you try this. I wasted at least an hour and a half trying to make this work before turning the wireless off at the modem, and using the Airport that was formerly sitting in the living room repeating the other Airport’s net as the master router. Now everything seems to be mostly working.

I guess now I’ll either slack off for a while, or work on the RF take-home commission I did a good sketch for on the bus…

Okay! I think I’m ready to go run some errands now. I’m dressed casually, right?

God I miss being able to just pull on jeans and a Tshirt sometimes.