My newest dance teacher can dance fluidly in any pair of boots at insanely cold temperatures on treacherous amounts of snow and ice in front of City Hall smack in the middle of the legendary Buffalo winter.



Can yours?!

We learnt a 30s routine in around a hour this past Monday and had too much fun doing it. Half my office and extended office contacts made up around 85% of the class. To what end, you ask?

We hope to be able to star in Missy Elliot's latest video and replace the Japanese blokes in around a year.



Watch out. The 345-BMR-Bloc* is learning some serious Hip-Hop!

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NB: That's our kewl office nick if you didn't guess already.

I just realized that I have been tagging all my yoga posts as "dance". That was because I started doing regular guided yoga to get better at salsa. My categorizing OCD kicked in recently and I wanted to re-label everything as "yoga" or maybe "fitness". But it's too late.

The yoga classes have somehow evolved into sessions of extreme performance art and creative mental dance. Yesterday, for instance, we tried to become one with the sinuous forms of this exotic looking flower called the bird of paradise...


Too bad, none of us ended up quite like this bloke:


Even secretly-super-yogi-power-(e:Paul). HEHEHE


But I maintain that I could have totally done it if I were at that crazyawesome beach in the background. You shouldn't believe anyone if they tell you that it depends on the extreme flexibility of hip joints and core balance. It's so obvious that you need to be at the beach.

Oooh, there is more. Erin also demonstrated to everyone how to stand on our heads.


This time everyone in the class ended up like this.


Except me. I was stuck in Figure 31 for an eternity...


before this rather unfortunate image made its way into my head: "And yet you incessantly stand on your head - Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

I wimpily decided it probably wasn't, at that particular time and gave up.

But hey, all was not lost. I was able to do the exclusive "Erin-asana" - an inspired soulful yogasana conceptualized and breathed into life by the one and only Erin at Hand to Heart. It's so exclusive, I can't even find a google image!

After class, Paul and I got a bottle of vodka (if you are thinking that it was probably to drown our mediocre birds of paradise hell, you would be wrong), had some delicious sautééd mango in sauce, crispy noodles, sushi and rice delicacies at Blue Fin (arguably the best Asian fusion restaurant on Elmwood Avenue), bitched about tech stuff, got some smashing groceries, including an out-of-this-planet olive bread, talked conspiracy theories and discussed housing markets, in that order. If you had not been at some crowded beer club, you could have enjoyed the Yogi's choicest...

Too late. It's time to honour your practice now. Or come to another adventure with us next week! :-)

The incredibly sad news about (e:joshua) reminded me of the last time I had a substantial conversation with him, in person. I think it was a couple years back at (e:Drew) and (e:Janelle)'s labour day breakfast (or was it July 4?) I remember it was a classic American holiday and (e:Drew) was making delightful pancakes. Obama had just been elected or maybe he was about to be elected... I am not very sure.

In between a mash-up cross conversation about current research and medical management of early-onset hypertension and where to get the freshest coffee beans in Buffalo, I was asking (e:Joshua) what he thought were the redeeming qualities of being a Republican and he said, "Fiscal Responsibility". He also gave me quite a run down of all the different ways that the US would not do well under the Democrat-led spendthrift government. He made a special case about how the debt of social security payoffs and public health programmes such as medicare and medicaid would cripple the economy in the near future. He stressed on how important it was for governments to focus on being debt-free as a long-term strategy instead of trying to bail out of trouble short-term and abandon ship after their elected terms were over.

I am not quite sure that I understood all the nitty-gritties of his argument. I remember thinking that he was being rather severe on the Democrats but I do agree that fiscal responsibility has been and will always be a crucial cornerstone to not only the success of governments but also individuals who make up the population that is being governed. I continue to believe that being responsible with our money shapes several aspects of our lives and makes our toughest of choices easier. Looking back, I think that was the core idea that (e:Joshua) was trying to explain to me over breakfast.

(e:Joshua), that was an interesting conversation and it has remained with me since. I didn't always agree with your ardent support of Republican policies across the board and your relentless criticism of a large number of ideas slightly left of centre, but I think we did agree that day over cilantro and mint chutney with crispy rice and raw onions. Hope you are having a swell time, wherever you are now! I always thought you looked awesome smiling (and resembled Major Healey from I dream of Jeannie). :-)

Does anyone else have their recently updated chrome pop-up a javascript dialogue to set time out (s), whenever it starts up for the first time? I thought it was a linux-related problem (amidst all my zillion other linux problems) but now this pop-up javascript dialogue has started appearing on my windows terminals as well... Wonder what it is...

GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r(): failed due to unknown user id (0)

I get to bat my eyelashes at this gibberish every time my laptop boots. And every glib soul on the World-Wide-Web seems to be just as mystified as me about what it can possibly mean.

Oh, the joys of linux.

Seriously, this is what I feel like when do anything on Linux. Not only do I have no idea about how to deal with most problems, I also feel as if I am always trapped in a hung window somewhere in OS hell. There is always something waiting just around the twisted little linuxy jagged corner to vex me.

Today I almost learnt how to compile a tarball. The keyword here is *almost*. And yes. A tarball. To add injury to insult, I was constantly reminded with obsessive checks by the terminal on Linux that I needed a sane environment to build these "tarballs".
Only, a zillion errors and a gazillion "lib-that-or-lib-this" missing messages later, I gave up.

And I am not going to have the time to go to yoga today. Enough grounds to conclude that I obviously don't have a sane environment anymore. I might as well have K-dollar-sign-HA! tattooed in comic sans on my forehead.

Walking back home yesterday, I was beyond appalled to see an oversized red truck with a massive plow driving illegally all over the sidewalk and grass outside the Church of Ascension, on the corner of North Street and Linwood Avenue. The driver didn't just stop at the snow. He took a good chunk of the grass, dirt and pavement along with the snow and then, flouting all sense of common decency, tossed all that snow and dirt all over Linwood Avenue, over the driveway of (e:pmt)'s house on 24 Linwood and heaped the rest on the sidewalk in front of the LinNor Apartment building across the street.


Is this kind of plowing authorized by the Church of Ascension? I find it despicable that a church, whose main goals are to serve the community cares so little about its neighbours that it goes out of its way by hiring or authorizing obnoxious illegal plows to make life more miserable for them.

I was also extremely shocked to see this church-hired plow truck driver almost run over (e:Matthew) who told me later that he had stepped out to express his concern over this plow outrage. When (e:Matthew) asked if the church-hired plow truck had a city license to drive and plow all over the sidewalk and generally be a menace to the neighbourhood, the driver did not respond well and drove off in a huff, heaping even more snow over the lawn of 24 Linwood. (e:Matthew) was left to clean up the tons of snow he had just shoveled before the plow truck destroyed all his efforts.


Agreed that it is a church and churches do serve a religious purpose, but this definitely does not give them a blanket approval to do whatever they wish, break the laws and overstep common courtesies to their neighbours. At the very least, I hope city hall takes a stern view of this very objectionable, disruptive and quite possibly, illegal snow plowing authorized or encouraged by the Church of Ascension, issues a warning for future violations and fines the church authorities.

Who's next!!?? (e:enknot)? :-)

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PS: I wish these droids actually had smiles... I was chuckling all through class, the poses were so extreme and I was discovering all kinds of hilarious asymmetry in my body. I think everyone else was smiling and laughing at some point as well...

Tallest yogi EVAH!



PS: Too bad they don't have piercings or earrings! Cramping my style here...

Okay, seems I have caught the mattandroidify virus as well! Modeling DroidyPaul on (e:paul,52884)...