Sweat, Baby, Sweat

So I've signed up to Bikram yoga last week Monday & subsequently transformed into a yoga hermit. Sorry for that. Yoga has more or less taken over my life, well, the few bits that were filled with work & socialising. I can only go to class at 8.15pm on weekdays, which means I come home from work, bimble around for an hour or so & leave the house again at 7.20pm. I then come back around 10.15pm & collapse into bed. It's slightly better on weekends coz there is no work, but I'm still pretty much in a daze after class.

I've been to class 5 times last week & I'm probably going to go to class 5 times again this week (if I make the session this afternoon & tomorrow evening). My body alternates between being stiff & achy to actually feeling quite nice & supple on a daily basis. I've had some really good yoga sessions & some quite bad ones, where every move is a struggle & I'm absolutely shattered afterwards. The only thing that seems to be rather constant, unfortunately, is that I don't sleep very well after yoga, no matter if I've done it in the afternoon or in the evening. This is pretty annoying, as you're supposed to sleep better afterwards. I do seem to have lost a kilo since last week without actually being on a diet, which kinda makes up for the sleep problems.

Apart from torturing my body & mind, I've had Frani come over dinner & a major catch-up, I've met up with Cherelle for gaming & chatter, been to a wine-tasting session with work and to the movies with Babs.

Due to my evenings being busy all the time, I haven't watched a lot of TV (good) and struggle a bit with cooking healthy foods (bad). I've lost interest in food a bit, I'm totally uninspired when it comes to cooking (all I want is something to eat, which means I stuff my face with bad things occasionally). Maybe I should just start the detox now instead of in May, at least then I'd have a fixed schedule of meals & drinks & don't have to think about it at all.

They say you start to see results of bikram yoga practice after about 13 classes, which means I'm almost there & should hopefully see improvements in body & mind soon...

Namaste!

It's been a week since I got back from my India adventure & I'm happy to say that I still feel fairly relaxed. It was a good trip, not an amazing trip, a great introduction to India but by no means the full India experience. Kinda "India from behind the air-conditioned glass", which was fine & what I had expected. But I probably need to go back there & immerse myself a bit more - I'm actually thinking of going to Goa next year...

So yeah, I've been back for a week now. Touched down in Heathrow last Saturday afternoon, came back to the same cold flat & miserable flatmates that I'd left behind (no, I didn't expect them to magically change while I was away) but with a new energy & will to get going & change things. I did some laundry, tried to fix the Sky dish that some bastard had vandalized again (just one more thing that makes me not like this place) & went to bed rather early at 7pm.

Actually managed to sleep for a good 14 hours that night, which as awesome. Woke up sometime after 9am, set off some more laundry & headed to the shops. Found out that Sainsbury's in Chiswick only opens at 11am on Sundays (how am I to know, I'm never there that early) & it was only quarter to when I got there, so I took this as an excuse to hit Starbucks for a Chai Latte. Well, if you ever want to get put off of having children, got to the Chiswick Starbucks on a Sunday morning... it was teeming with pregnant ladies & small children. Still managed to find a quiet spot to drink my tea & then did a humongous amount of shopping.

I also decorated my room a bit more on that day with 2 pictures of Hindu gods I'd brought back from India (Ganesh & Lakshmi) & put some mirrors on my wardrobe (which keep falling down, but never mind).

Going back to work wasn't as bad as I'd feared, although I was greeted with "I'm so glad you're back!" & an inbox of 700 messages. I'm trying to employ a less hectic working style, basically organizing my To Do list some more & systematically working through it. Unfortunately my manager is really good at "finding" stuff in his To Do list for me that he'd totally forgotten about & which has now become quite urgent. Oh, and there obviously always are the requests from our Finance guys, which seem to work 24/7 & are prone to send time-critical queries either at 8am in the morning or late on a Friday afternoon. Nevertheless, I DO like my job :)

I didn't make it to the pancake day extravaganza at Charlie's house due to my dentist appointment overrunning by an hour (not my fault, they were running late). Check-up went fine, but there's 2 fillings that are starting to look a bit dodgy & need replacement at some point this year. I'm quite happy to have found a dentist that seems to be good & knows what he's doing (& also does late appointments on weekdays).

Wednesday was the Day Of The Bearded One, aka Beardyman. I'd had the tickets for this gig for ages, it was originally supposed to happen last year November but got postponed, which meant that John was now unable to attend as he's fucked off to the USA for a 2 week roadtrip (I'm imagining some kind of geek Fear & Loathing style adventure). I managed to get Dan as a replacement, which in the end was really fun. We might've got a bit drunk, there was a lot of shimmying & a few hugs. All in all, a very good evening. Oh, and Beardyman was bloody amazing, needless to say that, really, he always is.

Yesterday evening Frani stopped by for a major catching up session, I cooked us some tasty Indian food, we talked for hours & almost didn't get around to looking at my holiday snaps! She might know someone who's looking for a flatmate, whom I hopefully will meet next week. Her flatshare is also on it's way to relocating, but they're already 3 people & might not want an extra person. Boo.

Oh, and now that I'm back from India we've started to rev up the planning for the other big holiday I'm taking this year. The ticket is bought, the RV is booked, there are vague plans in place what to do with the rest of the 2 1/2 weeks I've got off... BURNING MAN, here we come!!!! Frani will be joining our little party as well, which is awesome. Unlike last time, I've got a really good feeling for this trip. Bring it on!

Today will be mostly spent waiting for the Sky engineer to rock up ("sometime between 2 and 5"), then possibly a trip to the health food shop (need vegan cheeze) & maybe to the sports shop to buy one or two shorts for yoga. I'm planning on doing a 30 day Bikram Yoga challenge, at the moment this is still failing because I don't have appropriate clothes (need tight shorts or something, it's 40 degrees in that room). I'd thought of starting tomorrow, but I'm now heading over to Seven Sisters to keep Fliss company, which might delay the whole thing a little. But I'll definitely start this month, can't go to the 6pm class anyway because the 30 day pass doesn't apply to that, which means I should have enough time to sign-up & go to the 8pm class sometime next week. But first I would need something to wear, right?

I'm seriously hoping that this year will be the year that I'm happy with myself & my life. I hereby promise to do everything I can to make this happen!