Day 213

I enjoyed a wonderful 'day off' yesterday. The weather couldn't have been more beautiful, with sunny and balmy (well, 4C, anyways) temperatures. I headed down to the St. Lawrence Market early so I could buy my baked spinach-tofu samosas before they sold out. I also bought a homemade rice krispie square and a cinnamon sweet roll.

(And interesting aside: When I got home, I looked up nutritional data on sweet rolls and discovered that they are extremely caloric. So I divided my sweet roll into small servings and froze most of them to eat in the coming weeks as a special treat. Did you know that just one Cinnabon Classic has 730 calories and 24 grams of fat? I used to eat those regularly during Yoga Teacher Training...argh!).

After teaching my morning class, I ran another quick errand: signing up for a cooking class ('Heart Health Cooking', taught by a colleague of mine). Then I took the dog for a long walk in the Big Park. There seems to be about a foot of snowpack in that park - it's going to take forever for it all to melt. I spent the rest of the day reading and listening to some new music downloaded from iTunes (I achieved a personal goal and the music was my reward to myself).

I was having such a great day, I didn't want to go to sleep!

Today was cold (-8C windchill - seriously, when is it going to start warming up?!), so I spent much of it indoors. I made a batch of my Fabulous Butter Cookies and used my brand new set of icing implements to put the icing on the cookies. I just wanted to created a fancier 'look' to them. After fumbling around and ruining a couple of cookies during the inevitable learning curve (of course, I had to eat the ruined cookies because I couldn't let them go to waste! *wink*), I'm filled with admiration for those people who decorate cakes for a living. It's truly an art - and not as easy as it looks!



I did my practice in the evening. It was laundry-yoga-fusion-practice (and I'll be sleeping on clean sheets tonight, yay!)

I was feeling a little bit tired, but as soon as I got on the mat, I felt energetic and strong. I had a really, really good practice - probably my best in about a week. Handstands were good, backbends were great! It felt so good to move and stretch my body. I was feeling a little bit stiff and stagnant after that long walk and no yoga yesterday. My forward bends were particularly deep.

Musical Sirsasana was 'Laughing Out Loud' by the Wallflowers. My arms felt really tired after headstand today and my half-bend felt a bit strained. Perhaps I need to do some work with Dolphin pose to build strength for this posture.

I'm looking forward to the coming week - I have a feeling that it will be a *good* week.