Ulog: Aerials and Plum Juice

On Monday we had a family holiday dinner, and my best friend (who will hopefully be @porphyrin here soon) said that she was going to take an aerial hammock fitness class in a studio in her neighborhood. I've been looking for something more to do with Stella, and also, heck yes, so I asked to join her for the intro class tonight.

As a kid and a young man, I was a climber, and I always, always loved to hang upside-down. Hanging upside-down and reading were among my favorite things, and doing them together was just amazing. So I did that at every opportunity, from trees, playground equipment, pullup bars, what have you.

But as I got older and larger, this stopped being an option for me. So when it became clear that this studio had hammocks whose weight support limits were way more than any human weighs, I pretty much had to jump at the option.

And it was predictably great. Because it's an aerials and fitness mix, it was more cardio than I've been used to for a while - I am really a low-speed cardio kind of guy. If I have a pillow for my head I can do a plank forever, but asking me to do one and kick five times every three seconds is a bit much for me.

But the stretching part was fantastic. I want to get myself one of these just for the stretches. I wouldn't be comfortable doing aerials at home by myself, but the hammock-assisted stretching fit the ways that my body really needs to move more or less perfectly. One leg in the hammock and bend to stretch the hip flexor and the hamstring. Pull it back to stretch the hip flexor the other way. Enough support to stand like a stork for as long as I need pressure off my left leg. Hammock behind the elbows and lean forward to pull back the shoulders and loosen the SCMs. Basically all of my trouble areas handles simply and easily.

The aerials themselves were fine, I guess. My body is not used to being supported by a single band of fabric, so few of them were at all comfortable to spend much time in, and we weren't given a lot of time anyway. It was more about learning to get upside-down and then getting back out, rather than getting to spend some time there. Hopefully that will improve with practice.

No photos of this part, sorry. An upside-down fat guy isn't likely to be any more appealing then the other way around. I'm going to keep doing this, though, so maybe the extra cardio will help with that.

The extra gelato probably won't help with that, and that's where the second part of this post comes in.

^{I forgot to take photos of the plum pyramid until after I had taken the top off.}

Stella had said she wanted to give me some plum juice; I hadn't realized she wanted to give me a gallon and a half of plum juice. I like drinking plum juice but only occasionally and in small quantities, and 24 cups of plum juice is a lot. So I drank a little and then broke the rest down into two-cup containers that I keep around for that purpose and put it into the chest freezer for future gelato use.

^{The others are fig and apricot, which I buy in puree form because they have super-short seasons here}

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with 22 batches of plum or plum-hibiscus gelato, but this way we'll be able to eat it all winter. Two batches make about a quart, so that's a lot of tasty dairy dessert. If anybody wants to come over and eat gelato, let me know, we'll figure out a time.

Anyway, that's my evening. More interesting than they normally are. Now I'm going to go watch all of Open Mic this week and work on some other projects.