Classes don’t start for another two weeks, but today intersession athletic classes started, so I was back in Columbia’s Iyengar yoga class. At 8 AM, which means that I got up at 6. Oof. There were no holdovers from last semester’s 9 AM class, and a few people who hadn’t really had yoga classes before at all, so we started more or less the same way we did last semester. Which is good, actually: Columbia (the teacher, not the official policy of the university–same name) advised us that we should all take the beginning-level class three or four times, and that we’d notice a real difference each time. I did–I’m still horrifically inflexible, but I understand some of the basic principles of how to do the poses a lot better now.

(I am sort of curious about how yoga & yoga instruction as we know it evolved. There is an actual Mr. Iyengar, about whom I know very little–apparently the student who made him famous was Yehudi Menuhin! Cue “Who’s Yehoodi?” in my head.)

Dinner last night was a stir-fry involving asparagus and oven-baked marinated tofu, from the Crescent Dragonwagon book–very tasty, but I’m not going to reproduce it here because it set off the smoke alarm three times, once with good reason (dropping 4 dried peppers into smoking-hot peanut oil & stirring them around over high heat for a minute = cough cough cough cough). C.D. is fond of cooking spray, which I’d never really used until last week. Odd stuff.