It’s a lovely morning in Crystal Lake, and I am sitting now in my favorite Starbucks. I am a bit sad, however, as normally at this time I would be taking the morning challenge yoga class at Akasha Yoga, my yoga home away from home when I am visiting Crystal Lake. My detached triceps, however, are going to put the class portion of my yoga practice on hold for a rather extended period of time. Yoga, however, is much larger than what we do in class, and since my motivation is to make my life into a yoga practice this injury provides me with an opportunity to further that aspect of my own personal practice. For example, as I sit here typing my spine is erect and with my feet up on the chair on the other side of the table I am working on my dandasana (staff pose); when I was standing in line yesterday to check my bag at the airport I was practicing my tadasana; when I am at the Fox Coffee House open mic’s I stand and practice my vrikshasana (tree pose). There are many opportunities to expand one’s practice outside of the class setting, and now I get to explore even more of them.

I flew in yesterday on Virgin America and had a very comfortable flight; I was a bit disappointed, though that acrobat extraordinaire and pilot David Floyd was not going to be in the cockpit for this flight; alas, he was flying to Boston instead. The gentleman in the seat next to me had the look of a rocker–he was toting a guitar case and had the hair–and it turned out that he was David Brighton, the lead singer in the David Bowie tribute band Space Oddity, who was flying in to do a solo gig tonight, and then on to Denver for a full band performance tomorrow.

As I was driving from O’Hare to Crystal Lake I received a text message from Edna Pestaño with a picture from my classmates from Evelyn Grauten‘s mat Pilates class at Yoga World Studio that really warmed my heart! Thanks Edna, Evelyn and the rest of the class for thinking of me!

Tonight it is a chili cookout replete with a bonfire at my sister Joyce’s house, and then tomorrow afternoon it will be off to Woodstock to celebrate the marriage of my nephew Eric to his lovely fiancée, Brianne. I will be flying back to Long Beach on Monday.

On another note in the “silver linings” vein, a couple of months ago I was reading a story in Sports Illustrated about one of the top quarterback prospects for this year’s draft, and the reporter noted that in his apartment this young man had a state of the art cold therapy system, and I was really jealous. I have found that icing helps many of the aches and pains that aging and an active life style have spawned, and my current system, which involves bags of frozen baby Lima bean, leaves a lot to be desired. When I received my pre-op instructions for my pending surgery I was delighted to see that my surgeon had prescribed a cold therapy system that will likely be covered by my insurance, and if not will be available for a deeply discounted price! A silver lining indeed!