Lazy eye... lazy tongue... lazy leg?

So Tai Chi was totally awesome as usual again last night! I may have scared the teacher a bit because he asked me after class if I was enjoying Tai Chi and I think my enthusiasm may have scared him slightly...

Anyway after making walking a little bit more complicated we finally learned some new steps because one of the beginner guys did something I can't pronounce that included aspects of Tai Chi and so he was getting bored and asked the teacher and i joined in. I can't remember past the first two steps but it was fun after doing the same 5 or so for a week...

The other interesting part was watching the teacher prioritising students. Prioritising is a bad word for it, but basically he would ignore the people who were there for the first time (I sidestepped this issue during my first lesson by asking questions ALL the time!) or the people who weren't trying too hard. So basically the people next to me were doing things upside down or backwards or missing steps entirely and he let it slide, and just told them to make sure they were expressing themselves and to try and 'feel the energy' and other abstract concepts.

The new guy who is totally better than me was picked on for not making his stance stable enough (I was picked on for that as well, but not as much) and I was corrected for the tiniest things like how I held my head or if my hands were too far apart or if my toes pointed in or not. This suited me well because I'm really loving the way that it's slow enough for me to really concentrate on getting each step right.

Anyway the whole point was, when we were walking I was stopped because whenever I balanced on y left leg and then stepped out with my right, he could hear my right foot landing. One a wooden floor! bearing in mind that the stance is something like this: (you start on the back foot and step out transferring your weight to the front foot once it's in position)Do you see why he might hear something when i put my foot down (and said foot is wearing running shoes with thick soles which doesn't help I don't think).

As it happens when I start on my right foot there's no problem, so basically my left leg isn't strong enough to control my entire body, complete with shifting centre of gravity until I'm ready to stand on my right leg. Weird.

So now I spend many hours doing this:

But just on my left leg :)

As long as I dont end up like this guy from Lady in the Water...

On the plus side I wore my new black and pink boots today and everyone has loved them! And according to one of the masters students I was speaking to this smorning, gravitating to pink things is a sign of change. And I think change is a good thing!

Here's a photo from my phone because I'm too lazy to find a real camera and I know that if I dont post a picture I may be lynched!

when the world gets too confusing, just live in the past!

It's Tai Chi night! I'm so excited! Really, I just did a little happy-dance in my chair. I never thought I'd get that excited over it, particularly when you only started doing Tai Chi in order to loosen up Pilatesised muscles...

Anyway, last night I was looking through a cupboard for an old camera box for Luke (long story and he can tell it) when I came across my old diary from when I was in high school. I used to be a total diary-geek and kept several, the first being pastel shades of purple, with scented pages and a lock that was amazingly easy to force open...

This one is slightly less awful looking, bright blue in a gellish cover that's a bit squishy and has flowers and pastic crystal thingies on it that sparkle. and I think I got it shortly before I stopped writing a diary so it's mostly empty. From the few entries in it I learned a few things about myself:

• my handwriting used to be HORRIBLE! How the heck my teachers ever managed to understand my work baffles me!
• I still feel like nothing much has changed, I'm the same person I was 10 years ago and so on, but reading through the old entries taught me that I definitely am not that much like my teenaged self! I think it's a good thing!
• I was not a very nice person.
• My spelling has improved dramatically! I used to be appaling and write things like 'sux' and 'RULEZ' and ;get with' and other things that make me cringe! I was also a big fan of writing in capital letters whenever I freaked out.
• I really loved multicoloured pens!

Anyway to illustrate just how far I've come (and to make you all giggle at the inanity of me at 16) I will provide you all with some excerpts:

I wrote a really bad essay fo Afrikaans, but Mev R-T loved it. It was al about trusting my friends when I was scared or some crap like that. Now it's going in the school magazine** which sux. The only one that was kitscher was someone who wrote about "Die lewe is soos 'n toffie"*** which was all about her puppy called Toffy who died and that life can be sweet like a toffee, but sometimes it's just really hard to chew."

"Since the last round of concerts I'm' really loving music. It sux bcuz I know I can't have it as a career bcuz I suck. I'm playing in 5th pos now. It HURTS!"

"He's such a loser! I mean he's not much older than me and he already has GREY HAIR and he's just a total LOSER. And he uses HEAD AND SHOULDERS**** and he LEFT IT IN THE SHOWER! and I totally tripped over it like 6 times, and he STARED at me like the whole way through lunch. And people knew he was coming to stay with us so I have to figure out what to tell them. Maybe I'll just say I didn't see much of him? I mean he was so BLATANT."

"Went to movies with G tonight and ran into KD. He invited me to a party tonight but I didn't go. It was just kinda late notice and I have like nothing to wear. I woulda liked to go tho, too bad KD's in boarding school and I totally never see him."

At the same time there are some entries about the holiday I spent volunteering at a preschool for kids with disabilities and how powerful and amazing the experience was. So maybe I wasn't a total loss!

It makes me sad that I've lost a lot of the innocence of the time, but also really glad that I've grown up a little bit!

**yearbook

***life is like a toffee

****anti-dandruff shampoo

Chicken or beef?

So after an AWESOME tai chi lesson yesterday that actually made me realise just how pathetic my ankles are (we did something called a "Tai-chi walk" which had a lot of swivelling and lunging and then swivelling the other way) and how I've picked up bad habits already, I woke up not feeling the whole Pilates thing this morning. On the plus side besides my original four different Tai chi steps, I can totally turn corners now!

So anyway, I managed to force myself out of my lovely warm blanket-cocoon and dragged myself off to the 8m pilates class. It's cold at 8 in the morning, so we get to wear our socks instead of being barefoot! Last week the instructor told us to wear more interesting socks - my lumo-giraffe socks weren't even close to the coolness of his retina-blasting yellow and red toe socks.

So today we lined up in our stripy or polka-dot socks and got started. I love the instructor. Seriously, if I could compress him down to an mp3 and have him on my ipod, the world's depression problem would vanish! Besides being a walking ken-doll with every muscle imaginable around a waistline that's about as wide as of one of my socks, he's also incredibly INCREDIBLY camp and he likes to have 'girl talks' with us.

It makes clenching your stomach muscles while throwing your arms and legs around incredibly difficult when you find him amusing. The others don't seem to have a problem, and I've been able to hide my giggling enough that he thinks I have no core muscles and therefore no sense of balance, when actually I'm just falling over from laughing too hard!

For instance he started off this morning by telling us about the gelling agents used in ice-cream and how they are also used in the manufacture of rubber. And there I was thinking they used algae in ice-cream and rubber came from trees. Either way before I could get confused he pointed to his stomach and said "So if you have a spare-tyre..." And I fell over.

Later someone was struggling and he went to her and said:
"do you feel like you want to kotch**?" she nodded, trying to maintain her position, and he continued:
"You see ladies, if you eat your nice bowl on jungle oats before pilates you're going to be bloated. Jungle oats is such a good breakfast, lots of slow release energy. Yip it tastes like snot, but it's so good for you. But then it sits there and you can't use the muscles because you're just squishing the snot around."
The lady who had been struggling started turning kind of green. I had given up and I was sitting on my mat refusing to make eye contact with anyone.

One of the 'teacher's pet' types chirped up with "but then what do we eat?"
"you eat that snotty jungle oats! No ladies, I don't want to know what you had for breakfast, sardines on toast... yes that's high in protein! Do we have to discuss the difference between carbs and protein again?" (he did, but I won't go into detail because there;s no way I can do any kind of justice to a muscled-up ex-gymnast in a shiny yellow singlet acting out farming).

Teachers pet started again with "but that means we must eat our breakfast at six in the morning?"
"Yes Tracey, you eat at six, or you don't eat and you have breakfast an hour after you exercise. Eat a banana, do you like green-yellow or yellow-yellow bananas?" we all mumbled something to show that we were listening while Tracey sat up straight and said "Yellow-yellow!"
"Oh dear Tracey! You're on the way for a fat attack!"

Anyway after an hour of complete entertainment Ken-doll broke the news that he's leaving to become 'cabin-crew' for an airline. So sad!

And now I have to start teaching on Wednesday mornings so I'll have to find a different pilates class to go to. Sad times!


*** kotch is a delightful term for vomit

All girlied out

Thanks so much those of you who've voted to name the cactus! Please keep voting, the poll is up until Friday!

So anyway after an awesome weekend of braaing, doing yoga on a wiii (videos might follow but I'm not sure how keen the people are to have their hula-hooping broadcast, and it's one of those 'you-had-to-be-there clips), being attacked by a lamp with a necklace doing an impression of a wind-chime at the same time, and spending an awesome evening playing Guitar Hero World tour (that's the one with the microphone and the drums and the two guitars and you play in a band!) after I was invited by telepathy and then yelled at for not RSVPing...

For the record, I really really really want to learn to pay the drums now! It was so much fun! And anyone near me got whacked by my flying drumsticks, so be warned... And of course when I mentioned the yoga to my boss on Saturday he and I ended up practising our yoga stances in the waiting room, between clients! It was bizarre!

Anyway it was also a bit of a weekend to be girly for me. I spent a long time having a chat with Chief-Goth, who's not very happy at the moment, and she's decided to do Pilates with me, so I'm hoping that'll happen. As much as I like gym as 'me' time, I want her to feel better more.

I also got these awesome earrings:


some awesome legwarmers (they're grey and black and I love them! and a pair of Converse-style canvas boots that are pink and black and lace up to just below the knee (hence the legwarmers, having boots on without tights or something makes me feel like I'm wearing shoes with no socks and that's disgusting!) and an amazing shirt that's made out of something called Lenzing-Modal or something, but basically it's made out of cellulose from beech trees! It's really comfortable and it'll be suitable for the goth metal music festival I'm going to in a few weeks!

The boots are amazing, except that I have to lace them up pretty tightly to get the laces the whole way to the top, so I went hunting for shoelaces and ended up buying these ribbons instead:

The laces are white at the moment and I love the look but the super-neon pink (it's brighter than it looks here) is amazing too, so I'm going to have to go home and try it out!

Anyway, after all that, and a relatively quiet Monday, Leia and I went shopping this morning. I've been promising to take her make-up shopping for months and we finally diarised it and went, although it was a bit 11th hour because her car isn't too reliable and I thought I might have to dash off somewhere else halfway through the morning, but as it happens, we made it, albeit about an hour late because I had managed to lose my car keys.


After only a brief stop at Rage and Aldo (who had the most awesome shoes but not in my size, the joy of it being on sale and therefore the last pair) I delivered her to Lizzy, the amazing person at Bobbi Brown. Lizzy recognised me! How scary? I introduced her (as she was kind of sputtering - Leia, not Lizzy) as my friend who needed help, and so Leia sat for about half an hour having her makeup done while Lizzy explained what everything was and how to use it. The only awkward part was when I was bouncing around (I ran off to check out MAC a few times, as well as looking around Red Earth which looked like there had been a tornado through the aisle) she gave us both a lecture on using black eyeliner and black mascara. For the record, my hair is super-dark brown and as much as I like brown eyeliner, it's too much effort maintaining two sets of everything, particularly when mascara goes funny after three months anyway! She also told me that as my eyebrows are basically black and my hair is brown I should TINT my eyebrows to match my hair to match my eyeliner. uh, how about NO?

Anyway after all that she sat me down and did my eye-makeup which was awesome! and of course resulted in me splurging on this:

And we also promised to go through on Saturday when they have a visiting international makeup artist visiting. I'm not sure what to expect, but she said we'd enjoy it and we'd have our makeup done again. I can never say no to free pamperage...

After all that, Leia looked vaguely shell-shocked but also decided that she wanted to check out a dress, so we ended up trying on outfits for a while. I liked a lot of stuff, but I have learned to go away and think for a day or two before committing to clothes, in an effort to avoid my cupboard filling up until the shelves collapse. She got herself a LBD and I was very proud!

I made it up to myself by going past my favourite accessories place and getting these:

I totally fell in love with the penguins! They also came with these:

Sorry for the fuzzy photo, they're tiny! And also perfect for teaching the snail dissection! And these:

so totally adorable!

Anyway after all that I'm totally girlied-out and I feel the need to play paintball or climb rocks or go quad-biking or something. Not that it wasn't awesome fun though!

And it's Tai-Chi tonight! I'm SO excited!

Name that cactus!

So the weekend is over and it's time to VOTE! Thanks again to everyone who suggested names for the cactus. If your suggestion isn't on the shortlist I'm really sorry, but please don't let that stop you from voting!

Without any further ado, the final list of potential names is:

• Leroy
• Norbert
• Gulliver
• Edmund
• Reuben McGarrige

I'm putting a poll up now and it'll be there until Friday, so please vote for your favourite!

Because I haven't given an account of my various injuries in the name of exercise in rather a long time

So after over a week of rambling about nothing in particular that is pertinent to my life (when I'm not clinging to rocks in the quest for small and very adorable reptiles, life is pretty gosh darn boring here) I guess it's time for an update.

 

First, I'd like to thank all of you amazing and wonderful people who have responded with names for the cactus! I will leave it open for ideas until 8am on Monday (Central Africa Time) which is about an hour ahead of GMT at the moment I think? We don't have daylight savings so the rest of the world kind of confuses me! Once all of the options are in we will have a lab argument (I mean discussion) to select our favourites and I will put up a poll at some stage on Monday, so watch this space!

 

Anyway I decided that now that I've been going to the gym for over a year (and regularly for eight months) I was getting kind of bored with the routine of it. I still enjoyed it, but I was kind of hitting a plateau and getting really dejected and I was afraid of ending up all demotivated and slumped over on my hair (we really need a couch in the lab. We have nowhere to slump dejectedly right now). So partly out of desperation and partly in the spirit of sorting my life out and facing fears and so on, I decided to be brave and try a class. This took guts - I like to do things on my own, new people scare me, and last time I tried a class at the gym it was the yoga session run y the horrible psycho woman and I could barely move for days after she decided that we didn't need any training or experience to try the difficult stuff.

 

So on Wednesday morning I went to a Pilates class. As an aside the name makes me giggle because on a field trip a few months ago we were playing 30 Seconds with the students. That's the game where you have to describe things to your team who has to guess what they are, in under thirty seconds. Anyway one girl waited until after the end of her turn and then yelled "What the HECK is Pohn-tee-is Pih-lah-tees?" Seems she confused the biblical Roman with an exercise regime. Could happen to anyone.

 

Anyway I had a blast! The instructor looked like a walking-talking Ken doll and he was so incredibly camp that I was tempted to ask his if he wanted to join me next time I go shoe shopping! He was really nice and let me in even though I was late, even if "You've missed the warm-up dahling!" and proceeded to make me laugh so hard I barely managed to get through some of the routine.  The best part was when we'd finished kicking "Like a merman! Kick like a merman!" he told us to check where we'd felt tension. When some of the women said that they had done it differently and suggested that they knew better, he threatened them with developing love handles. Almost without exception all the women around me (the lone confused-looking guy just kind of shuffled his feet) dropped and began doing the exercise again!

 

For the rest of the day i was worried that something was wrong with me - it seemed  that I had done a repeat of my previous experience and stumbled into the advanced class - noting hurt! I hadn't even broken a sweat. Admittedly it was absolutely freezing as it has been all week, but still, I bounced around all day and even did a demonstration in the lab (we'd had the floor cleaned recently so it was safe lying on it). The next morning I woke up and couldn't move my arm to turn my alarm off. The blinding blinding pain! And everyone laughed at me when all I could do was type (slowly) or move a computer mouse (carefully) and opening doors or lifting anything heavier than my coffee cup made me gasp/sqwawk in pain!

 

And so last night I decided that maybe Tai Chi class would be a good way of loosening up my muscles, so I went and did that, and it was amazing! The instructor was really nice and super-patient and it was slow enough that I was able to really focus on getting things right and it felt so awesome! At the beginning we (myself and two other beginners) were practically falling over our own feet and by the end it was feeling... right. And I felt graceful - which I haven't in a really long time! admittedly we learned four steps in nearly an hour and a final step at the end, but it was so awesome!

 

I can't wait for Tuesday's class!

Competition!

So back on the day of me dragging Leia around the paintball course in search of a geocache, we got a cactus for the lab. We already have a plant (Spaz), a bryophyte (Kermit) and a while ago we had a fish (Spot) with an aquatic snail called Gary (who randomly gave birth to Basil).

So now that the cactus is firmly established in our little family, we need to name it. and that's where you guys come in.

Please will you suggest some names? We just can't make a decision. If there isn't a clear winner then we will set up a poll to decide.

PLEASE help us on this! Arguing over names is seriously denting our productivity!

After much discussion we have decided that the person who picks the final name will win:

• a digital group hug from all of us


• a special post about your awesomeness (can be exchanged for a guest blog from one of us, you can choose who writes it)


• A specially made award badge for your blog


• 10 points!

Sounds like it's worth a try doesn't it?

Good luck and get naming! Multiple suggestons per person are allowed, but please put them as separate comments so we don't miss any!

More about me

Being Brazen did this quiz and so I figured I'd be lazy and copy her idea! It's the basic introvert/extrovert test and is pretty short so I didn't have to feel too guilty about doing it over my morning coffee...

Here's what it says:

You Are 10% Extrovert, 90% Introvert

You avoid people at all costs You aren't one for social interaction And you limit your interaction to a select few Thank God for self checkout!

Are You An Extrovert or An Introvert?

Not really surprising, I had a battery of tests done when Iw aas younger and hadn't picked a career yet (not that I have decided yet).

If you feel like doing it for yourself, the link is here. Let me know what you find out!