Welcoming 2016

On a last minute whim, we decided to go on a road trip down south to the Los Angeles and San Diego area. We started off with a stop at Ventura, visited the Bonaventura mission, beaches  and then went down to San Marcos..

Had a wonderful dinner with friends in Old Town, San Diego, a place we are visiting after almost 10 years! 

We started 2016 with a visit to the San Diego zoo! The smiling faces of the friends, kids and our first ever sighting of live pandas made our day!

Here's to 2016! May this year bring you the best of health and wealth! 

What is not to like?

Finally managed to watch Dilwale this afternoon. It was as high on my watch list as the Star Wars movie. There was really only one reason I wanted to watch this movie. It was a  Shah Ruck Khan movie.

One needs to have a certain mindset to watch an SRK movie.. don't expect much of a plot for starters. Expect very predictable twists and turns. Great visuals and a background score that goes with the visuals, SRK hamming his way through the movie with the few scenes where he is actually doing more comic timing than anything else. 

The hopeless romantic in me always comes home humming the background tune from the movie and this one is no different. 

SRK movies for me have become the equivalent of Nat King Cole songs for baby boomers or so I am guessing. Somewhere some neurons fire in your brain and make connections between the past and present and you get all emotional for reasons that you cannot quite put a finger on. 

Don't understand why people were working hard to set my expectations really low for this movie. Yes, SRK and Kajol do look a little ridiculous in some scenes trying to pass for folks a good 20 years less than their age, and in this day of special effects they could have spent some more effort to make those scenes look natural but it was just another SRK movie. 

The locations in Iceland for the song "Gerua", where Kajol is running on a black beach in a yellow nine yards saree (it has to be at least nine yards), were just breathtaking! See for yourself..

Need to add every place on the backdrop to our travel list. The gold threaded designer sari that Kajol was wearing will be the next big hit for Dilwali.

As for me, I am happy as Yoda, still humming.. 

Hathayoga Mathayoga…

2015 is almost done. Today I updated the excel spreadsheet again to review how this year went compared to previous years, as far as Yoga goes..

This year it was 209 so far. That is the best in the last three years! This year also saw 87 travel days. Very happy with this years push to do more Yoga personally and with the way my family pushed me to keep going. 

 

4 days a week should count as "regular" attendance..

and finally the weight tracking... something seems to be off.. I still track my weight after class every day but the weight is now stabilzing around 148 instead of 142. Either I have a new normal or the weighing machine that is ten plus years old has an issue and we need to buy a new one. The wife and kids are thrilled at the prospect of the new machine theory.  

Well, Jr. was supposed to take videos of me doing standing bow and toe stand.. which are two of my favorite poses, but she took pictures instead of videos.

Chin to dimple in shoulder contact works magic compared to cheek in dimple of shoulder, but when you take pictures, the truth always shows! 

The leg seems to be up a lot more now. Calling that as a response to "get your body parallel to the ground" is an insult to my 8th Grade geometry teacher! 

This one though, I like. Can lift off 3 to 4 inches off the heel now and have also managed to have the thighs parallel to the ground and the spine straight. Working on doing this on the right side to match the left.

The one thing that no graph will tell? Kicked out my leg (only left leg) to go from step 1 to step 2 in the "standing head to knee" pose a total of three times this year. Locked the knee for a full 60 seconds only ten or so times.

2016 resolution is to "Lock the knee" for a full 60 seconds and kick that leg out! 

Have become a true believer in the concept of "eventually"!

There are a lot of things that happen in the hot room that were really "not me" five years ago. Based on that, have realized that things happen if one keeps making incremental progress. So there is confidence on locking that knee... even if it doesn't happen in 2016, it will happen...

eventually!

ps. Jr. and the little one would actually like to see me do a standing split. Even that can happen.. eventually!