The past couple mornings the valley has been inundated with freezing fog, the moisture in the air solidifying as it comes into contact with the edges of leaves, delicate spider webs, and even the front of my jacket as I bike to school. Thick banks creep up the hills muffling the outside world and putting it on pause. My life feels like this, too, as I get wrapped up in a new environment, a new set of people, a new language of description. Massage school is not for the faint of heart. There's something to terrify everyone, be it intimate self-exploration or copious amounts of memorization. By 4:30 on Friday we all looked like we had been run over by a herd of stampeding bison.
My mind is running around in circles; even my body is adjusting to the new, rigorous schedule. Waking up in the morning before the sun, getting home around dark, remaining engaged all day long takes its toll. Luckily the teachers are the caring, understanding kind who know how difficult a transition this is for most of us. I at least have the benefit of attending school in the last five years; for others it's been a lot longer since they sat in a classroom. This week we covered introductions (many times over), expectations, how to drape and undrape someone on a table without exposing anything embarrassing (it's harder than you think), and began learning the language to find our way around the body: superior, inferior, lateral, medial, proximal, distal (and those are just reference terms - just wait until we actually start in on bones and muscles).
Thank goodness I've got a live-in study guide. Carl has been settling in to his job at the White City VA as a recreation therapy assistant. He's been to two high school basketball games, got paid for them, and soon gets to start organizing his own trips. It's quite convenient having a body around to poke and prod, flex and extend. And drape - have you ever tried to manhandle 200 pounds of dead weight? After that I'll be ready for anything.
You know things are getting exciting when the Martin Luther King Jr. cactus starts blooming (since it didn't deign to show its face around Christmas I'm renaming it after the pertinent holiday). It's the first time this particular plant has produced flowers, so you'll excuse my enthusiasm. School is gradually getting more intense, the weather took a turn for the damp and blustery, and we've had some exciting new additions to the house. 
Pictured above is Carl's carboy when it was in full fermentation mode, happily bubbling away in the pantry. All that yeasty foam slowly settled to the bottom over a period of fourteen days. Today was the fateful day of transferring all that lovely fermented liquid from one big bottle into several little ones. Carl has been on his own so far in this process, but this time I got to assist and abet in the operation. In my left hand I've got a contraption known as the Emily Capper (with a name like that, I had to get involved). In my right I'm holding a successfully filled and capped bottle of homebrew. Bubba was, as usual, unimpressed with the whole dog and pony show.
My job was to a) hold the siphon that transferred the beer from the glass carboy to a plastic 5 gallon bucket for further distribution and then b) take the filled bottles from Carl and use my spiffy red capper to seal them up. The whole operation took about an hour, not including all the sterilizing and cleaning. Bubba and I celebrated by lounging on the new sofa, the third momentous occasion of the weekend. With this new addition we were able to rearrange our awkward living room into something a little less stilted, and move the futon to the upstairs loft for a more complete feel. It's amazing how such little adjustments can make everything click into place. With homebrew and sofa our feng shui is complete.
