Chris and I do road trips really well together. We are a team. He’s the pilot and I’m the navigator. In fact, mapping out the trip is one of my favorite things to do (I think I get my internal compass from my Dad). Meanwhile, poor Chris can’t even find his way into his own backyard. But that’s OK, because he’s the driver. That’s his job and he is very good at it.

By the time you read this entry, Chris and I will be on our way to Lake Charles, LA. We haven’t done a road trip this long since we went to Mississippi for Pepaw’s funeral. We will be in the car all day on Thursday, but I can’t wait! I love looking at crazy kooky road signs and cheesy tourist traps and Stuckey’s. Plus, I’m really excited to see our friends in Lake Charles. The last time we saw them, She was due-any-minute-pregnant and they were living in Clovis NM. Now they have a daughter who is more than a year old!

I love road trips. They are even sweeter when the road leads to wonderful old friends. Happy Love Thursday!

I rarely have a weekend where I feel like I’ve accomplished anything productive. This weekend was the exception. Chris and I got all of our grocery shopping done on Saturday. I started and finished more then half of the laundry, dusted and vacuumed the bedroom, and took a two hour nap. We cleaned up, dusted and vacuumed the living room on Sunday and I washed sheets, towels and the comforter. We even managed to get some scooter rides in.

The biggest challenge I faced was planning our meals around a broken oven. Thursday night, while baking our pizza, there was a crackling sound and then all the lights flickered off in the kitchen. Pop! The oven shut off. Luckily, the pizza was done, but the oven is out of commission. I have no idea when and if Mrs. Swan will fix or replace it. And I didn’t realize how important the oven has been to us this last month. So…I’m learning some new tricks.

First off, the crock-pot is the new oven. Did you know that you could bake potatoes in those things? Just wash them, wrap up wet in aluminum foil and set up on low for about 6 hours. Perfect baked potato. Also, I had almost forgotten that it’s chili season and it’s the time of year for black bean, sweet potato chili. It’s all ready to go and tomorrow morning all I’ll have to so is plunk it into the crock-pot. Walla! Dinner is served.

I am also really excited about a raw “soup” I’m trying out this week. I made the base today. I put some onion, garlic, broccoli, avocado, almond milk, cumin, chili powder, and Bragg’s liquid amino (have no idea what this is, but bought it at the health food store) in the food processor and blended until smooth. All I’ll have to do is add hot water to it tomorrow. The base was yummy enough that Chris even said that he wanted some. Hope this works out. It was a recipe I picked up last weekend at the workshop.

Who needs an oven?!? At this rate, I can start using the oven to store sweaters in or shoes.

ME: “OK. You are going to want to turn right onto Penn.”

ME: “Now when you get to Penn, you are going to turn right. It should be the next light.”

ME: “You are turning right on Penn. It’s coming up in a block.”

CHRIS: “Why do you keep saying it like that?”

ME: “I don’t know. Maybe because you are STILL IN THE LEFT LANE.”

CHRIS: “OH…..I thought you meant my other right.”

I wrote up half of a thankful Friday entry and then deleted the whole thing. On purpose. I was reading through it and it all came back to me as blah, blah, blah. It was all the usual things I’m thankful for on Fridays, like the fact that it is Friday. Of course, we are all thankful for Fridays. Duh.

You know what I’m really thankful for? Last night my left hip was hurting, to the point that it was waking me up in the night. I would roll over and stretch and then go back to sleep for a bit, only to wake up in pain again. OK. So I over did things this week physically. But finally, sometime around the hundredth turn over, my hip popped this horribly loud cuthunking pop and the pain went away. I am so thankful that my hip popped. I am thankful for the three hours of uninterrupted sleep before my alarm went off at 5:45AM. I am even thankful that I skipped my meditation practice this morning to “sleep in”.

I know that some time today, I’ll get a chance to make up the meditation practice and set things back to normal. I know that this weekend I will be able to give my body the rest that it really, really needs. I always tell my students at the end of class to have gratitude towards themselves for the kindness they have done to their bodies by being on their mats today. Lately, I’ve been too busy and caught up to take the time to actually do this for me. So, today, I am thankful for the body that I have and my health in this moment.

The girls I walk with and I noticed this squash plant growing out of the gutter a few weeks ago. Now it has little flowers. I’m curious to see what it will be. Will there be yellow squash or orange pumpkins?

Seeing that squash plant growing there made me laugh. It’s such a living cliche really. But it’s also a smack on the forehead. Good things can come from lowly beginnings. Good things can grow from nothing.

Short and sweet Love Thursday. Hope yours is wonderful.

On the last day of Doug Swenson’s workshop, he discussed The Eight Limbs of Yoga. The eight limbs are not that complicated. Basically they can be broken into three parts: ethical (yamas and niyamas), physical (asana, pranayama, and mental (pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi). Now I could go into depth here and define all of the above, but what I really want to talk about is the second niyama.

The second niyama is contentment or santosa. It means being at peace with where you are right now. Doug elaborated on this to say that it doesn’t mean that you can’t aspire for better or to be some where else, but you can also be content with where you are in this moment. I feel like this year has been a practice of santosa for me. I got to thinking that maybe I’ve been a little toO hung up on being content with where I am right now and I’ve forgotten to work on the aspiring for better things.

I’ve been grumbly about the rain and drizzle that has settled over us for the past week. Grumbly about all the things I can’t do because of it. This morning, driving to work under gloomy rain heavy clouds, my heart sunk at the thought of walking the inside track today. The more I looked out the window, the more I thought about just sucking it up and walking outside. I mean, we are planning on moving to place that sees an average rainfall of 36.3″ a year. So, I donned my rain jacket and headed out. The battery on the iPod went dead by the time I made it to the capitol. For more then half of the walk it was just me, the rain/drizzle, and the sounds around me.

So this morning I feel like I truly practiced santosa, being content to walk in the rain while thinking that this is what it would be like living in Portland. The peace of hearing the swish of my arms as I walked, the splashing of puddles as cars drove down the streets, feeling the tops of my thighs get damp and cold as my pants collected the water dripping down my jacket. Being happy and content with all of it.

So many things went on this weekend that I still haven’t absorbed and processed it all. First of all, I attended a weekend long yoga workshop with Doug Swenson, which was fun.

I blogged more about the workshop here, but I had a chance to hang out with Doug and my teacher Karen in between sessions on Saturday. Doug is just this really funny guy that says some really profound things in between some really nonsensical things. It’s totally up to you to interpret. What I really liked about Doug’s approach to yoga was the emphasis on making it your practice no matter what branch of yoga you choose to study and his carefree approach to the practice. It was refreshing to be around a yoga guru that didn’t take things so seriously.

In between yoga workshops there were documentaries at the Sustainability on Film festival going on at the art museum. We saw No Impact Man on Saturday evening and Earth Days on Sunday. What I liked about No Impact Man was how this man dragged his some what unwilling wife into the project. She just wasn’t into it, but by the end she was all excited and talking about what they were keeping (bicycles, farmers’ market, no TV). See her transformation was refreshing. I don’t have much to say about Earth Day. It was a good documentary, but it left me angry at the generation before us. Why the Hell didn’t they do more!? Sort of like crying of spilled milk, I know.

This was a weekend for learning new things and meeting new people. Smooshed into all of this was time with some old friends and meeting an internet friend face to face. Lots of laughs and lots good conversations. It was just a full weekend, but the soothing “I just ate a bowl of comforting stew” type of full.

I have many things I’m thankful for this week, even though it’s been a busy one. The weekend seems to be promising into an equally busy one. But, I’m thankful for this too.

One thing I’m thankful for is new adventures. Chris and I were able to check out the new vegan restaurant, 105Degrees this week. It was unbelievably good. Do you realize that it’s been a year since I’ve opened a menu and could pick anything, anything from it? I didn’t have to even ask what kind of stock such and such was cooked in or pick from the sides. This alone brought tears to my eyes. Another new adventure takes place this weekend with a yoga workshop by Doug Swenson. One of the sessions is all about nutrition and juicing. This is a guy who stayed a week with my teacher once and only ate watermelon through the entire visit. Should be very interesting.

Yesterday’s rain and the new chill in the air also reminded me of how thankful I am to be able to be some place warm and dry. I couldn’t get Aprilhelen out of my brain yesterday. I just kept picturing her curled up into the back of her dog house with the rain leaking through. Which then got me thinking about other’s who would be lucky to even have the dog house to shelter in. I don’t live in my ideal situation, but at least it’s warm and dry and there’s a real roof over head. Tomorrow is the last day of the contest. I’m hoping she wins, but I’m also thankful it will be over for her.

Be thankful for the blessings in your life and have a wonderful weekend!

I’m probably the worse person to take shoe shopping. As a teenager, I was my mother’s worse nightmare in a shoe store. I hated shoes and still would prefer to walk around barefoot. The shoe always looks better on the shelf then my foot. My mom would take me to a shoe store like Belts or some other warehouse type place and grit her teeth the entire time. I hated shoes, so I didn’t take them seriously. I could spend more time hunting down the most ridiculously ugly pair of shoes. I believe it’s a gift.

I’ve come to terms with shoes and comfort and have a more balanced relationship with shoes these days. But when I saw these red shoes at a garage sale last week, that teen Cindy peeped out and made a bee line for them. For $5, I grabbed them up, barely trying them on. I thought they would be great costume material for when I start the 365 day project again next year. What I didn’t count on when I really truly put the shoes on was just how much I would totally fall for these shoes. They are the shoe with endless possibilities. I saw dozens of outfit possibilities in these shoes. Plus, and this is a very big plus, I could be a red shoed ninja! I was planning on being Amelia Earhart for Halloween this year, but suddenly I became Amelia Earhart as the Red Shoed Ninja. The whole story fit perfectly. Amelia Earhart didn’t disappear. She studied with a world renowned ninja in a secret society of red shoed ninjas.

Love Thursday isn’t just about red shoes. It’s about finding that something that makes you feel like you could conquer the world. I believe I was meant to have those shoes right now in this moment. I would never have purchased them full price, which just happens to be $100 (I looked them up). Score! Happy Love Thursday!

OK, I have a couple of items of charity business to discuss. First off, my friend Aprilhelen is in the My Life as a Dog Challenge and is currently chained to a dog house in Bricktown. The challenge is to raise awareness and funds for the The Central Oklahoma Humane Society. Not only is this a great cause, but she could also win a compressed natural gas vehicle. It’s seriously going to come down to a popularity contest, so I need you to go and vote for her every day at this link. Aprilhelen’s dog name is Aum.

Secondly, I’m doing the AIDS Walk of Oklahoma City this year. Many of you may know that this is something I used to do regularly a number of years ago, but unfortunately stopped because of something or another and then got out of practice. Any way. The AIDS walk is another great cause and one that I’ve always been a supporter of. The CDC reported that more then 56,000 Americans become infected with HIV every year. This totally blows my mind considering we know how this disease is transmitted (that’s as far as I’m going on this topic. This entry is about charity, not politics). Please email me if you would like to send some change and moola my way for the AIDS walk. Any thing, even dryer lint, is appreciated.

Lastly, Zelda and I are brewing up something that may become a monthly event. We are hoping that it becomes a monthly event where we can raise some money for a different charity each month. We have willing participants; we have a PA system. We just need a venue. I’m working on it, but hopeful by October or November we’ll get this show on the road. Stay tuned. And don’t forget to vote for Aum (Aprilhelen) every day!