The Sunday Morning Muse, September 29, 2013

A lovely sunrise today with purples and white and orange and pink over a light blue background. The sun coming up over the valley. Cat looking up occasionally out the window, taking a break from cleaning her toes.

Speaking of toes, a cat with 6 toes on each paw showed up here and now thinks he lives here. I feel sorry for him because, though he has numerous toes, he has only one good ear.  The other one is seriously deformed. He's not a bad cat. Someone could take him in. Just not us. We are full.

Sipping decaf tea. Plain Lipton tea. I got talked into trying some kind of pumpkin flavored decaf coffee this week and spilled just about all of it down the drain. I don't get it. I like things to taste like they should. All this flavoring is not for me.

Finished reading Pain Free. Lots of stretching and exercises for back pain. The gist of it is posture related. You have to retrain your body to rely on your load bearing joints. The book gives you various positions to hold yourself in to do this. A lot of it makes sense. It goes on to say humans--for millions of years, bent and twisted and climbed trees and walked barefoot and such, and the body developed in a certain way. Now we
hunch over computers--and no longer forage for food, so here we are letting ourselves go. Underused muscles atrophy, posture wanes, and we are left with aches and pains and "compensation"--whereas smaller, specialized muscles are being taxed from repetitive use in awkward positions. All this leads to pain. There's a good deal of yoga in the book. I see that as reinforcing some of my beliefs all along about stretching and postures.

Met a nice Alpaca farmer yesterday. She has 50 of them and spends her time in her little shop behind a spinning wheel making yarn. Beautiful stuff.  She was selling it at the farmer's market.  She told me she even as a portable spinning wheel she takes around to use when she has time and is not at home. Now there's something I never knew was invented. Or still in use. But that's great.