Day 179 = Yoga + Happy Days

Tonight after work, I did yoga for the first day of September. In yoga class, I tried to find my center or at least keep my balance. The thing about Bikram yoga is the routine is the same every time. But I don't know how long I'll keep going. Once my trial membership runs out, it will get expensive to keep up this habit.

So in finding my center, I thought about some of the good ol' days. Back when I lived in my first apartment in Kemah, Texas, right after my divorce. It's weird to think about the places I've lived before and called home and the memories each place contains, and yet I'm so far away from those places now, both physically and emotionally.

I remember one night I had my friends over, and we decided we'd write a book about men. We called ourselves the Book Babes and there were four of us - me, Theresa, Denise and Lari. For a time, we were inseparable. And there was always wine involved. I do remember drinking wine at my little apartment. It was before Theresa and I decided to take breaks from our jobs and life as we knew it, store everything we owned in a 10x10 foot storage space and backpack around Europe for three months.

No matter what bad days I have (or good days), I can always look back on happy times when I thought I had nothing. But I had so much, and I can appreciate that now. I realize I might actually be happiest when I have nothing left to lose.

It was less than two months after 9/11, and I was just starting over after my divorce. I lived in an apartment near a marina and a golf course, and it was along this golf course and along the dock of this marina that I took up running. I would challenge myself to just run to the end of the street without stopping. Or just run to the stop sign without stopping. Or just to the end of the dock and back without stopping. Eventually I could run for several minutes at a time.

I was a technical editor for a NASA sub-contractor. My first day at the company had been Sept. 10, 2001, and soon after I started, I was selected to work with a team of NASA engineers that was developing software to help "ousiders" build a payload for the space shuttle. I got to hang out in the fixed-base shuttle simulator one day for research purposes, and when I disembarked from the shuttle, there was a tour and I thought, "This is the only time anyone will think I am a real astronaut!" I wonder if kids on that tour still say to their parents, "Remember that time we saw that astronaut, Mom?" And then one morning I came into work and some of the guys there asked me if I wanted to go to the motion-base shuttle simulator, and I said well hell yes. So I got to sit in the cockpit and pretend to fly the shuttle. They turned on a simulator program, and I actually landed it. On the grass along the runway of course, but I didn't wreck it like the intern did.

Then I'd go home to my one-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen in which I can't remember cooking anything. Well, except for when my mom came to visit me right after I moved in. I didn't really have any furniture except a bed and a chair and a huge desk because I didn't want to move anything out of the house I shared with my ex-husband. I didn't even have a stock pot. I was sick and she wanted to make me homemade chicken and dumplings because that's what moms do. So we had to run out at 8 o'clock that night to find one. I eventually upgraded to a Calphalon nonstick to match the rest of my share of the pots and pans, but I still have that cheap stainless steel stock pot that she bought for me.