Days 10, 11 and 12: The picture I wanted to post before

That's pitcher Jered Weaver, one of my favorite players on my favorite team, practicing crow pose before a game on April 21, 2009.

Day 11 was good. Would you believe I took class from Bikram himself? It's true: he taught in my living room! The CD is cool like that. For a long time I really didn't like the CD. It aggravated me in ways that are hard to pin down now.

But now, I giggle at most of the Bikram-isms and really find a kind of comfort in the rest of his dialogue. The man is funny. His accent and pidgin English are also kind of funny (except "much more higher." That is not funny. It just hurts my ears.) He segues into singing at times, from silly ("Don't look so sad/Don't look so lonely/Long way from home/To kill yourself...") to more somber tunes (he intones something during a savasana in the floor series, and he could be singing Britney Spears for all I know, but it just seems less jokey).

I went rock climbing later in the day, finally some "easy" stuff (the routes my BF finds are not usually easy enough for me, and it's never truly easy). I climbed the strongest and fastest I have in a long time, and with less hesitation/freak-out about moves. Yes, it was an easyish route, but I wasn't scared. Pretty sure that's the yoga effect, my friends. :)

Since I'd missed Friday night again (it's not even like I'm going out and partying, I just cook longer and relax longer and start drinking wine earlier...), I had to do a double Sunday and make up for at least one of my two missed classes.

Previous experiences with doubles had not been good: I had done one class early and one class later, and the later class was usually really hard. So of course I was realllllly intimidated by the idea of doing back-to-back classes, followed by my usual hours of cleaning. I'd carefully planned out that in the half-hour between classes, I would chug a coconut water, shower quickly, change clothes, and help as needed at the desk. Well, the desk was chaos from the start, and I didn't have a chance to shower or change. (Importantly, I got the coconut water!)

I ran into the room for the second class just as the teacher was about to start pranayama, and I had a good, strong class. It was small, and nearly half of the students were brand-newbies. I think I decided that since I had to be an example, I *couldn't* have a weak or unfocused class. And I didn't. (And the new kids did so great! I was so proud of them.)

The first class was really aggravating on a personal-space level, and the work-study cleaning after class was really frustrating, and I could go on and on and on here about the specifics, but I'm mostly going to just try to let it go.

One funny thing, though:
I thoroughly cleaned the mirrors during the long gap between the second morning class and the (usually very small) afternoon class. They looked awesome. They were perfectly clean. The later-class's teacher and I had been discussing various cleaning issues/dramas. Usually after class, the mirrors just need to be spot-cleaned. I told D that I'd done everything possible to make her post-class duties easy, and she'd just have to spot-clean the mirrors before leaving. ... ... ... ...

And then The Flinger walked in. As soon as he was safely in the studio, we just smacked our palms to our foreheads. The best-laid plans...