Long Island

I'm enjoying my visit to my parents in Morrisville, PA. Today, we're with my sister and her family in West Islip. The children are playing Wii. Jessica has invited me to play, but I was too slow to say "yes." Now, she's moved on to offering to help her mother with preparing the brussel sprouts. Jessica is checking out my posting. Neither of us knows how to spell the sprouts' first name. Mark, Jr. wants to know if he's in the posting. He doesn't want to be included. Now Kristin is playing Wii ping pong. It looks as if she's having fun although the moves with the Wii stick don't look like the same moves one would make with an actual ping pong paddle. I'm curious about the Wii yoga.

Partner Yoga

I had a great time yesterday when Laura King invited me to Suze Curtis's Power Yoga studio in Addison for a 2 hour partner yoga session. The studio had a 5/8s inch foam floor, unlike anything I've ever seen. It was firm enough to support balancing moves, yet soft enough to feel comfortable sitting or lying down. When we started doing inversions, I was glad for the softer surface to cushion any falls--and surprise! We didn't have any falls. Laura is especially strong from her work with tree yoga. I managed to hang in there and keep going. I did okay with the 85 degree room temperature, although even I could have enjoyed a cooler room. Today, I'm headed to McKinney for an 1 1/2 restorative yoga session with Brandie at Yoga Balance. What fun!

Thanksgiving & Black Friday

I enjoyed another blessed holiday at home with my husband and our 3 cats. We cooked the traditional family recipes and had a relaxing day topped off with paper grading. Today we had a good time shopping in the Metroplex. I'll be at yoga teacher training school Saturday and Sunday. This yoga twist is new and exciting. I'll be meeting my class for the first time. They started last month, but I had a previous commitment to an honors conference and couldn't join the group at the start. I hope that I can catch up and become a part of the group. I feel kind of nervous being a student in a new class. It's a good nervous feeling though.

Midsemester Joy

I am enjoying this semester as we head into its eighth week. Most of the freshmen students I'm teaching wrote good papers defining leadership and illustrating it with examples. I'm even more excited about their third essays that will look at a fake and a real Web news story to compare and contrast them as a way of sorting out the difficulty of getting the truth in the information age. Someone once told me to only assign papers that I wanted to read. I'm looking forward to reading the summaries of the news stories students will find and seeing how they were able to sort through them. The students seemed happy that we were rounding the corner and heading toward the second half of the semester. I hope that they'll all hang in there and do their best until the end. I know I enjoy reading good papers. Not only are the quicker to grade than the bad essays, but they are a pleasure to think about and reflect on later.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I watched Memoirs of a Geisha last night after having finished the novel last month. I found myself intrigued by the harsh conventions surrounding beauty for purchase as distinctive from prostitution. I suppose we have similar restrictions on behavior and appearance in the US today. Our images of beauty are often artificially enhanced by computer touch ups that alter reality to make it just a little more attractive than what nature provides. I often read that this kind of beauty enhancement as harmful to women when it makes them dissatisfied with their normal, healthy bodies. At the same time, I read that men and women are becoming monumentally overweight in the US. Do both sexes despair of reaching some kind of idealized perfection and simply give up pursuing any kind of physical excellence? Does overeating provide a kind of emotional release from the stress of not meeting the ideals? Or is lazy pleasure-seeking something so uncomplicated that it doesn't need an explanation. I wonder if we are too hard on ourselves or too easygoing in our acceptance of flaws. Both the movie and novel were thoughtful and easy to relate to our current way of life.

Student Success

Today I'm attending a 4-hour retreat on promoting students' success at GCC. I am also finishing up a recommendation for a student graduating from UNT this August who wanted a recommendation for graduate business school. When I went back to spring 2006 when he was in my English 1302 class, I was surprised to find that of the 18 students that started in the class, only 11 finished it with a passing grade. Those numbers really ought to be better, but I remember that the students just weren't showing up for that 8 a.m. class, let alone turning in any of the work. It was as if they just wanted to be enrolled for financial aid purposes, not for the sake of actually getting a college degree. Maybe with the tougher economic climate, people will set higher goals so they can get more because they gave more effort to the plan they had. I hope so. In any event, I'm looking forward to working with our team to see what ideas we can come up with to support the students who really are working to help themselves.

Sunday Mornings

Sunday mornings were always my favorites growing up. We used to go to the First Presbyterian Church in Morrisville for the 9 a.m. service. Afterwards, we would go to the bakery and get some kind of insanely delicious fresh pastry and go home and enjoy it. For lunch, we would go to my grandparents' house to see my aunts, uncles, and cousins while we enjoyed my grandmother's homemade spaghetti sauce. If a person had to work on Sunday, then my grandmother made a special fuss over that person and let them eat first and pampered them a little more than the rest of us. Sometimes, I had to work. I was a lifeguard at the Morrisville Community Swimming Pool--not hard work, but it did last most of the day and into the evening. I think we opened at 1 p.m. on Sundays. Morrisville has fallen on hard times and no longer has a pool, or even much in the way of schools anymore. The town can't really afford to support itself. Even the Presbyterian church has begun laying off staff to beat this tough economy. Still, Sundays are great days for starting the week, for starting fresh with church, good food, and family.

yoga class

This Saturday is my favorite yoga time. I head up to the Denison Nautilus and relax for the next hour and a half with a regular group who enjoys a good stretch and a full breath. I've been thinking about whether or not I want to train for the 200 hour Yoga Alliance certification. I really would like to improve my home practice. I read books and journals for ideas and to understand the theory behind the movements. People have recommended that I download some of the MP3 videos and learn that way. I really benefited from going through physical therapy with an individual trainer who watched me, corrected my movements, and challenged me. I'm debating whether to do YogaFit or to drive into Dallas. Part of what I have to do is checkout the drive to Dallas and how I work with the instructor there. It's nice to have good choices.

Born to Blog

I hardly think that I was born to blog, but when my husband urged me to check it out, I thought, why not? After all, I do enjoy writing things down and reading them later. I can't imagine that I want to invest much time in blogging, but today was a slow starting morning. I was reading a variety of articles, one on how fitness buffs are overdoing the core exercises. My conclusion, is that most people tend to overdo good things. That's what keeps the good life as an elusive journey, one that requires continuous travel.