Juneathon day two: Swim-a-Song and sun salulations

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Monday is Mini-Ginge’s swimming day. I say his swimming, he just lies there splashing his arms while I do all of the hard work. Anyway, even though lifting him up and down is good for my bingo wings, I felt a bit guilty using this as my Juneathon exercise as it’s not what I planned to do.

What I plan to do is daily yoga. Oh yes.

I am rubbish at doing exercises at home. I lack the motivation and then when I do actually do them, I feel as if I’m rushing and not doing them properly. It’s daft, Dan and Angela both posted their first ever Juneathon blog on twitter, which set me off looking through my old posts from 2009. On the one hand I can see how far I’ve come since then, on the other hand one bit stood out a mile. Back in 2009 I had enjoyed an epiphany about my yoga, I had bought books about it (my favourite way of doing anything) and was going to embark on my posture practise at home.

Needless to say I have never done this. I have however, waited five years for another yoga epiphany. This time I have bought an app, not a book. Well several apps, but I only like one of them. The others are a bit too shouty, require a subscription, or have adverts that are a bit incongruous to the whole meditative yoga lark.

So tonight I have warmed up, done some stretches for my sacroiliac joint (Mini-Ginge has had a bit of a growth spurt and is challenging my back a bit), a sequence of swan to cat to dog to cat to swan to get things going and then to the app for some sun salutations. I am rubbish at sun salutations. It comes down to the fact that I’m terrible at any kind of organised dancing, you will never see me doing the Macarena and I even spell things wrong doing the YMCA (my C comes out backwards). With sun salutations, I struggle to hold the sequence in my head and always seem to be one step behind. I am determined to crack this by the end of June.

Today I learned that:

  • I still hate the transition from plank to the knees-chest-chin pose.
  • I’m still more hopeless at plank.
  • I’m leaping ahead. What I need to do is go through the individual postures and get the basics sorted.

If anyone has any tips for doing yoga at home, or knows of any good, non-shouty videos that might help me, all suggestions would be gratefully received.

Importing the Juneathon blog roll into Feedly

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Visit I can. I will who has put together the blog roll.

Right click on the the link to the OPML file and Save As or Save Link As

opml
Log in to your Feedly account (if you’re anything like me, this will take longer than any of the rest of the process).

*UPDATED* Feedly has made this bit easier, just click on Organize on the left of the screen

organize
This should take you to a page with the title Organize – next to the heading is a button that says Import OPML – click on this.

Click on Browse and find where you saved the OPML file back at the start, select the file and click Open. This will take you back to the import page – click the big blue Import button and wahey! The list should have imported into your Feedly account.

Juneathon day one – couch to 5k week 5 day 2

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Even though I started this year’s Janathon, it was only a couple of months after having Mini-Ginge, I was still banned from doing any high impact exercise and I felt I had a decent excuse for taking it easy. He is now nearly eight months old and I’m slowly but surely getting back to running. I feel that I should make a proper go of Juneathon. I thought that I’d considered all the issues that would make this year more challenging; the tiredness, the wonky pelvic floor, the difficulty getting out for early morning runs, the dodgy hip and back, the potentially still lax ligaments, the tiredness… What I didn’t account for was that even leaving the house would take so flipping long.

With hindsight, it might have been my own fault, but before I left I decided to peek in on Mini-Ginge just to make sure that he was settled in his cot. As I looked in the room, a head popped up and a pair eyes stared out at me in the gloom. His gaze met mine. I tried to back away, but it was too late. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

A few cuddles and a couple of verses of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star later and I thought it was safe to leave. I stood up. His face crumpled. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

At this point I handed over to Ginge but the WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHs continued, punctuated with a few of his hungry cries. This was a situation that I was hoping to avoid because once my sports bra is on, the door to the buffet is firmly locked. If wearing a nursing bra is like nipping to the cash machine when you need a tenner, wearing a sports bra is like getting your tenner from deep in the vaults of the Bank of England*.

I left the boy blowing raspberries in his cot and legged it.

Today’s legging it consisted of 8 minutes running, 5 minutes running, 8 minutes running. This was the first time that the return leg would see me running all the way home and it was both liberating and frustrating not looking at my watch to see how many minutes I had left. Instead I kept on picking out landmarks in the distance to split up the distance until I was home.

My next session sees me leap up from 8 minutes to 20 minutes of running. I have no idea who was doing the maths for this one, but clearly they forgot about all of the possible numbers between 8 and 20. I am a little terrified.

*I originally wrote Fort Knox, which does read better but then the pedant in me realised that you’d really struggle to get a tenner from there.

To Do: Knit tea cosy

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Yesterday I enjoyed a very indulgent afternoon of quality trashy television (I heart Nashville, do not judge me), a mug of tea, a slice of my mum’s coffee and walnut cake, and a ball of wool. Rather than embrace my inner moggy and spend my time chasing yarn around the front room, I was very productive and can now cross off “knit tea cosy” from my To Do list.

I should probably write a more useful To Do list.

Anyway, for ages I’ve wanted a cosy for my funny shaped teapot. It’s a For Life stump teapot (proper posh, it’s what they have in the Tate Modern cafe) and is brilliant because it has a removable infuser/strainer bit. This means that you can brew your tea for however long you like (3 minutes please) and then remove it, thus avoiding your second cup being an over-brewed brew. Whilst I always have a perfectly brewed second cup, it’s often a perfectly brewed second cup that is stone cold, hence the need for insulation.

My perfect but funny-shaped teapot
After a hunt on Ravelry, I found the perfect pattern. Based on a pattern for a type of fez (fezzes are cool, though I don’t know why you’d knit one), it just needed a bit of tweaking to re-scale it to the size of my teapot.

IMG_2946It had its first run out this morning and worked brilliantly. I am ever so proud!

Adventuring to the OM Yoga Show

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I’ve been doing yoga since 2009 and it’s one of the few hobbies/exercises that I’ve stuck with. I only do one class a week and I have only ever done classes with the same teacher (mainly because I think she’s ace but partly because I’m too much of a wuss to try another class), so I don’t consider myself to be a proper yoga practitioner. I am much more Boo Boo than Yogi.

However, I was lucky enough to win tickets to the Om Yoga Show (incorporating the Mind Body Soul Experience) courtesy of Helen at HelsBels.org.uk and last Sunday, my tiny yoga partner enjoyed one of my magical mystery tours around Manchester (he’s rubbish at navigating) so that we could visit the exhibition.

After parking in the extortionately priced but convenient car park, the show was very easy to find – it was just a question of following the steady stream of limber looking women wearing interesting leggings.

We kicked off with the Mind Body Soul half of the show, which I have to admit isn’t quite my cup of tea (or indeed my cup of purifying herbal infusion). At this point, I feel that I should issue a disclaimer: I will happily respect anyone’s belief in whatever mystic quackery they gain benefit from, however I also reserve the right to refer to such things as mystic quackery. This is probably why I found myself chatting to the man from the RSPB rather than discovering the benefits of hydrogen-rich water. Now I fear that I will never know how I have been coping with the water that comes with hydrogen and oxygen in the old-fashioned 2:1 ratio.

The yoga half of the show was (to me) far more interesting. I was very restrained when it came to shopping (like running, yoga is an activity that doesn’t require a lot of kit, but by heck there’s a lot of gorgeous kit to lust after) and only treated myself to a new mat and a spiky massage ball (which Mini-Ginge has taken a liking to, probably because it does look like it belongs in his toy box). There were plenty of demonstrations and open classes to gawp at (in an admiring way), I picked up a copy of Om Yoga and Lifestyle magazine for a quid and we bumped into both my yoga teacher (who was leading a demonstration later in the day) and Mini-Ginge’s yoga teacher (who was taking full advantage of the retail opportunities) which was also rather nice.

Would I go again? Yes, I think I would. Will I be brave enough to join in with the open classes? Maybe… Going to the show has made me think a little bit beyond my normal weekly yoga class and just setting off on the adventure to Manchester gave me a much needed boost, so all in all, it was a morning well spent.

(I went to the show because I won the tickets, there was no expectation or requirement from either Hels or the Om Yoga Show that I blog about it).