Night hangs on the city like a blanket on a cage

I slept until 1 PM today and then spent most of the day thinking about / getting ready for my mother's visit here next weekend. Actually, it's my mother and her husband on Friday, and then on Sunday we get heisenbug's father as well. I don't know what it is about mothers, but I'm currently rather worried that she'll get here and see how I live and suddenly think much worse of me. Which makes no sense, because I grew up in a household she was running that was way worse than this... but everyone has pet peeves, and who knows what little bit of motherly wisdom I've forgotten? Worse, what if it goes the other way and she finds our place intimidatingly nice? Grrrr, be quiet, brain.

With all these parental types descending, though, we've decided to hoppity-skip over a class boundary and have a cleaning woman in on Tuesday. Thus, I've tried to focus tonight on decluttering surfaces (yeah, that pile of papers on the couch) more than actually cleaning them. Last night we were at TBC's house for game night, and we got to watch him run his Scooba, and had an amusing debate over which is a lazier, more yuppified, plausibly embarrassing way of getting out of doing the mopping... hmm. Either way it's pretty clear that a career in software can get one out of mopping, if one is not a happy mopper. We're employing a local, independent person, so I'm pretty sure we're not being evil, just lazy.

Straddle-up handstands

( grouchy but peaceful about straddle-ups )

I've been meaning to post about last Friday's yoga class too. It was a 2-hour class on transitions. We did the following:

• Jumping out of high and low crane
• Drills toward jumping through hands with straight legs, using a towel under our feet
• Jumping into crane from down dog
• Jumping into tittibhasana from down dog (!)
• Some neat drills with coming up into handstand on an inhale, then down on an exhale, then spending another breath coming up into a lunge
• Jumping forward and back with straight legs
• Jumping through arms with one leg straight and one folded
• Jumping up into an almost-handstand with ankles crossed, then lowering down gracefully

...and I'm probably not even remembering everything. It was incredible to see people actually doing some of this stuff. It made me want to be about five times as strong as I am so I could do some of it too.