I know I should do it.  I know it’s good for my body but yoga and I are misfits from the word go.  We’re the proverbial square peg in the round hole.  A type A in a type B physical activity.

So this morning, feeling guilty about my waning flexibility (as a former gymnast, this is a source of great shame), I blew the dust off my Patricia Moreno Cardio Burn Yoga.  Yes, cardio yoga.  We must make compromises sometimes and the fitness industry wants my money more than it wants to wag a namaste finger at me.

Patricia told me to open my heart, breathe, melt, feel gratitude.  Okay.  I could certainly try.  Feel gratitude for feeling good.  Who makes this stuff up?  But fine, I stretched and leaned and strained in the poses, flowed from one to the next but somewhere along the way, I got sidetracked.  I scampered off into the woods to chase a squirrel.  I was in child’s pose, which is uber comfy, and just didn’t want to get out of it.  My mind moved out of its numbed state and began thinking about my novels…

“So I see she made you half Latin too,” Colin from All’s Fair said to Jon from the PURE.”

“Yeah, half Italian,” Jon said, shrugging.

“Half Spanish, here,” Colin said with a hint of pride.

“You have blue eyes.  How can that be the case?  What’s your other half?”

“My mother is Swedish.  I guess my father, Miguel, ugh what a name that is, must have had a recessive blue-eyed gene in there.”

“Well, we are fictional so she could give you purple eyes if she wanted,” Jon said, laughing.

“Puh-lease, that’s just for fantasy genre characters, isn’t it?  We’re romance genre leading men!”

“You’d be surprised.”  Jon moved in closer and whispered, “Did she…uh…do right by you…you know, down there?”  He checked his surroundings for eavesdroppers.

“No complaints.”

“Me neither.”

Open your heart and feel the gratitude oozing from you as you cartwheel your hands back to the floor and into down dog…

“She didn’t make you do yoga did she?” Jon asked

“Hell to the naw.  I think the only physical activity other than… you know… was running through the Portland Rose Garden, and that was only a brief sprint.  Other than that I was mostly sedentary.”

“I got to carry a gun,” Jon said beaming and pantomiming his action moves.

“Gah!  Lucky dog.  I’m a CPA…yawn…”

“I’m a CPA AND an FBI agent AND I get to speak the occasional Italian phrases AND I get to beat up the bad guy,” Jon said holstering his imaginary fictional weapon.  He raised a cocky eyebrow and challenged Colin to top that.

“I can cuss in Swedish and I make more money than you do.  Last I heard government jobs don’t pay all that well,” Colin said polishing his fingernails on his sleeve.

“So what.  I have a haunted car.”

“That she stole from another author’s imagination…”

“It was a tongue-in-cheek homage.  Plus she altered it from the original…it’s a Porsche.”

Do a mini-cobra and let your heart melt to the floor, neck back, chin in…let all the gratitude pour into your mind and body…

I checked the counter on my DVD player at this point.  I knew the workout was 50 minutes long.  15 minutes to go.  Arghh…

Twist into a mini-pretzel…

Gah, is that my thigh bulging out like that or just a wrinkle in my shorts?

I need to vacuum in here.

Wonder if Ripley got to eat most of his cat food before Bella chased him off.

Thank God it’s Friday.

Wonder what I’ll have for breakfast.

Open your mind and receive the gratitude and let it flow through your body…

My feet hurt.  Time to scale down the callouses.

I wonder how many Weight Watchers points are in pizza.

Annual review today.

I hope no one calls about that program I published on Sharepoint yesterday.

Wouldn’t it be cool to run into Alexander Skarsgard in Sweden this summer?

Namaste.

Oh thank goodness.