balance and gym

I had another session with Emilie this evening. We'd changed it from 6:00 to 6:30 so she could take the Zumba class, and then she decided not to do that, so was ready earlier. So the only exercise I did before working with her was 12.5 minutes on the cardio bike.

The session included a lot of stretching, rolling out the IT band, and such, along with a chunk of knee massage. At the beginning, she told me I was a lot better balanced (and closer to vertical) than I had been on Monday. The knee massage may have helped with the remainder of that, and made sense because I woke up with my left knee hurting this morning. It's been mostly okay today, with ibuprofen and a bit of care.

I'm still not sure how I wound up out of alignment. Nor entirely sure how I fixed it, though I've been paying more attention to how I was standing, including going back to stuff from the beginning of my work with Emilie, namely standing more on the outer edges of my feet, and making sure they're parallel.

Other than that, we worked on shoulder movement, and did some ab work. My right shoulder was tensing up on a number of things: that's probably some mix of general tension (and that shoulder's tendency to jump in on things that should be done by other muscles, especially abs) and whatever's had it feeling sore the last couple of days. (I abandoned one of the usual rotator cuff exercises, the one where I pull the elastic straight toward me, last night because it hurt. Not in the rotator cuff, but high in the upper arm. Oddly, the other exercises in that collection were okay.)

More problematic Republicans

Wiscon is hardly the only group that doesn’t check people’s previously published opinions carefully: the NY Republican party is trying to get its own candidate for Congress off the ballot, now that someone has found his past racist writings. (This is for northern suburbs of New York City, the district currently represented by Nita Lowey.) The candidate is now refusing to comment on his own article on the grounds that he hasn't read it recently.

I doubt the party leadership are going to be able to do this, legally: it’s too late for them to name a replacement even if they convinced him to withdraw, and “he isn’t a real Republican, philosophically” is probably not a valid legal argument. And nominating him for a judgeship, even if it’s not too late, would look worse than 'no, vote for X as a write-in' or "we've realized the Democratic incumbent isn’t that bad." The best they can do is probably to stop giving him money, withhold any get-out-the-vote help, and maybe pick a write-in candidate on the theory that while a write-in probably won't get elected, the lack of one certainly won't.

[No, this doesn’t have anything directly to do with Elizabeth Moon or Wiscon; it’s just interesting timing.]