End of the year, new goal

I've been thinking a lot of Yoga the last few months, since I had this new Yoga teacher for the Thursday night Yoga. I like her classes.

Every time after the class, I feel so relieved and refreshed. I became more aware of me, and my presence. It brought me joy.

My instructor is also a Yoga teacher's instructor, so she told us about the certification program she was teaching, which ran from beginning of August through the end of the year . I took a flyer with me. She also hosts retreats to Mexico next year. Everything seem so beautiful and refreshing. I wanted to join too. I took a flyer with me and put them on my bulletin board.

I have been thinking about getting certified. But I held myself back, because I didn't want to jump into something that I didn't have time or energy to do, when my full time job was already keeping me busy.

My motivation of getting certified was not because I thought I was a better teacher than others, or that I wanted to change a career to do something easier. I wanted to get certified so that I could teach Chinese Yoga. See, my mom and other relatives in her age had been in pain a lot in their old ages. They weren't exercising regularly, so they couldn't keep a strong body to fight the pain. So I had been searching for some Yoga classes for Chinese, but I haven't had any luck. So I thought I had to be the person to do it.

My plan is this. I would have to start practicing Yoga on my own, build my own sequences with the help of books and online materials. Then I will read more about Yoga and the philosophy. I could then start introducing my mom to Yoga. So today, I built 2 sequences. One Easy Yoga for elders, another one was Yoga for back pain, for me.

I bought a pair of Yoga sticky gloves from Target, and I used it today to practice the Easy Yoga, they were awesome. I will do my back pain sequence tomorrow morning. I will try to make it a routine. So I don't have to commit to getting certified, which is $2500 and over a few months of part-time study; or going on a retreat, which is $1500 for 7 days.

See how long this hobby will last for me.

Christmas Shopping 2010

Christmas is always stressful for me, I guess this is nothing out of the ordinary for Americans.

Over the years, Jack has this open secret about shopping, which for some unfathomable reason, I never adapted myself to. He shopped online and I didn't. OK ... there were many reasons why I didn't like to shop online: I enjoyed the perks of shopping at malls, namely, seeing and touching what I would buy, socializing with friends, people watching; I had bad experiences shopping online; I believed shipping and handling were way too overpriced and weren't worth it.

Jack on the other hand, hated going to shopping malls, because standing and walking around hurt his back. Jack shopped online. Fedex and UPS were his friends. He was probably the first few who shop online many years back when the internet was still some kind of unknown to the general public. He even created an online shop for the pizzeria at the Student Union, so that it was more convenient for him to order food during his office hours, and maybe get himself some free pizza.

The last few years, my traditional ways of shopping didn't work out quite well. Since I became so super busy all year round, I didn't have time to squeeze in for finding thoughtful gifts for my love ones. So I ended up stressing myself even more every year toward the Christmas Season.

This year, I found myself in similar situation. Last Sunday, Jack and I were talking about Christmas gifts while we were driving home. He already done some shopping, and was pleased. I told him I haven't started yet, and I said, "maybe I could get you some plugs and cables for the home media player project you are putting together." I smiled when I thought it was such a brilliant idea.

I tried to wing it every year. After all, I didn't grow up with Christmas and gift giving, so it was hard to get me excited about spending a paycheck over a holiday.

Jack said, "if you got me plugs and cables for Christmas, I will divorce you."

OK, I could hear the joking tone in his voice, but it was severe enough for me to take it more seriously.

"Ha ha ha, that's good to know. So underwear and socks are out of the question, then?" I continued my joke, and tried to get myself out of the corner.

The pressure was on. I spent the next 4 hours scrambling to find the catalogs from National Geographic Store, Wind & Weather and Brookstone, etc, which would normally end up in the recycle pile, looking for fun toys for my new husband. I also bit the bullet to make the orders online. 4 hours and a few hundred $$$ later, most of my shopping was done. It wasn't that bad after all. The good thing, I used Jack's Amazon prime account to get free 2nd day shipping. For non Amazon orders, I managed to find free shipping deals and additional discounts.

This morning, the door bell rang at around 10, while both of us were working hard at the computer. We both stayed super quiet pretending we weren't home, thinking it was my church "friends" - I didn't read the Bible, the part explaining why God allowed wickedness (which Jack mistaken to be "Why God allowed wikileaks" and jumped to his feet), my church "friends" were going to discuss it "next time". After shower, we headed out to walk the dogs. I found a Fedex box at the door addressed to me. Ah, the Christmas present. While we were opening the box - I had to, cause it was labelled "open immediately" - a second Fedex delivery came to me.

As we open our Christmas presents - to save the efforts to wrap them - I started to feel the joy of online shopping!

How I've gone to the dark side.