Zen and the art of spider maintenance

I joined the local YMCAs (one membership gets you into like 10 local ones) pretty much the minute I moved to the Emerald City. I've become somewhat of a gym rat and needed someplace to go to when I got bored of hanging around our apartment. Plus it gives me something to do in between my cooking and writing Thank You notes.

I've been doing Yoga off and on for the last 10 years. Really I'm more off than on, which is sad because yoga and proper stretching probably would have prevented the hip injury, but I've always had a problem turning off my brain in yoga (well in life in general). I'm also ultra competitive which is not all yoga-like, so sometimes I'd try to out-do the other people in class. Or I'd just admire my hair instead of my form.

In the weeks leading up to the wedding I wasn't sleeping so great from the stress (not so much the wedding part but the lack of job part) and I discovered that on the days I did yoga I actually slept through the night. So I started to go to three, or four, or five classes a week between my two closest YMCAs. I also discovered exactly how week my abs are and how good it feels to stretch out my hips. I hadn't run since July on the account of my sprained ankle from my Boston Bachelorette night, but my ankle was strong enough to do most of the poses. My hip gradually began to feel better and I now have enough ankle strength to run again (I did a 30 minute run on my wedding day and another 30 minutes (about 2.8) on Tuesday.

So I guess you could say yoga has helped. I've even made a few friends in class. Including this guy:



I met him yesterday in my 11am Intermediate Yoga Class. I was in triangle pose 3/4th of the way through class when he crawled between my legs, touched my right foot and headed toward the girl next to me. I quickly stood up tapped her on the shoulder and grabbed the nearest yoga block and smashed him. Then I resumed my pose. It was quite unnerving, especially because spiders scare me.

Look at the size of him! He must be poisonous. I probably just narrowly escaped my own death. He would have taken out a chunk of my bare ankle and would never have waken up from corpse pose. I don't even want to know where he came from. I think my yoga teacher was a little mad that I killed him, but really what was I supposed to do?

Speaking of spiders, Mr. Snowgoose got me a hybrid bike (cross between a racing and mountain bike that is light enough to carry upstairs) as a wedding present. It's black and we were considering calling it Spider, but not anymore. We broke him in Tuesday after buying him from a shop near Green Lake after our run. We took him to his dad's neighborhood so that Mr. Snowgoose could get his bike and I could practice riding up and down hills and using gears since it's been over a year since I rode a bike for real and we're going on a mini-moon this weekend to San Juan and biking all over creation, so I needed to get comfortable.

I must be turning into a real Nortwesterner: yoga and biking. I'm practically a hippie. I just need to start a vegetable garden in a community plot and stop washing my hair.

And as of Sunday, August 31st I am officially Mrs. Snowgoose (well Mrs. Sunshine-Snowgoose).