Sometimes things break. It happens all the time and it generally makes life more difficult. So, picture this: a grocery store is filled with groceries (well, most grocery stores are, unless it's the Union Square Trader Joe's after a busy Monday when the customers have swarmed and done us the kind favor of scouring the shelves of all available products.) Each of those items happens to be shipped in a cardboard box. The result is a whole lotta empty cardboard boxes. Something has to be done with all of those boxes. That's why we have a baler. We toss the used cardboard into the bailer which then uses hydraulic pressure to compress the cardboard into manageable bales. When I arrived at work on Friday, the main baler was broken; the part needed to fix it was not scheduled to arrive until Monday. (By the way, it's Thursday and it has still yet to be fixed.) Great; we have to survive a busy summer weekend with only the back-up baler which is much smaller and much further away from all of the cardboard. One of my exclusive duties, on Saturday, was to cart all of the bulky cardboard about a half of a block — down a pedestrian-packed 14th Street — to the home of the back-up baler. Well, sure enough the back-up baler buckled under the pressure of handling the load of its much more brawny, much more experienced cousin. Back-up baler breaks; now we use the even smaller, even less capable wine store baler. Now there are two broken balers and the little engine that could...also known as the wine store baler. Where's the repair guy with that part???

OK. So, we're dealing with the cardboard drama. Cardboard, cardboard everywhere and nowhere for it to go. I arrived at work this morning at 5am to find that Big Joe was broken. Who is Big Joe, you ask? Big Joe is not a man at all; it's a machine...a machine built to lift up to 6,000 pounds of groceries. It's just a coincidence that we use a tool called Big Joe at a grocery store called Trader Joe's. No relation. So, rather than having the seventeen pallets of milk, yogurt, and watermelons gently placed on the sidewalk in front of the store at 5 in the morning, we had to hoist it all by hand. This is quite a pleasant experience while it's still fairly dark outside and most of my friends aren't even considering waking up for another four hours. Just as we're about to be finished with the 5am truck, the 6am tuck arrives. That's right we receive one truck at 5am which delivers dairy and produce followed immediately by a truck filled with bread and meat. This process occurs every single day followed by a truck at noon and another at 6pm. It's insane how much food we sell on any given day.

My body is another thing that recently broke down. My super-human immune system which has kept me strong for the past two years has finally collapsed under the pressure of keeping up a schedule which allows me no personal time. (Sort of like the back-up baler being unable to handle the overwhelming load of cardboard.) On the Fourth of July, I tried to disregard a sore throat while at a stunning dinner party at some stranger's apartment. My friend, Gwen was cat-sitting at a fabulously lavish and utterly unique duplex in Tribeca. The next day, the ailment quickly evolved into complete sinus congestion. Friday brought a sinus headache and by Saturday I was unable to leave the presence of a tissue box because there was so much fluid flowing from my nose. I had a solid week and a half of residual phlegm and today was the first day that my health seemed to be completely restored. Over the course of the past two weeks, I skipped three yoga classed. This is strange for me because I generally take a class every day and on July 6th, completed a 104-day streak of consecutive classes. And although I believe that the yoga helped wipe away my illness, there were times that I just needed to get some sleep as well.
Other than that, life has been good. Since I last had time to blog, I've been to a wedding in Detroit and another wedding in Jenkintown. I saw The Facts of Live: The Lost Episode (hilarious) with Benn and Spring Awakening, with which I'm now completely obsessed. I missed my scheduled ushering responsibilities for 110 in the Shade due to a severely delayed Greyhound bus from Philly but Doodle and Natalie willing filled my shoes. My good friend Brian, was in town from San Francisco (...or Chicago...or wherever he's living this week) and the ever-lovely Breanna was in town from LA, both of whom I adored having the opportunity to spend some time with. This weekend, I have a friend in town from Baltimore. Last night, I shared a birthday with DarlaDiva at an Ani Defranco concert and tomorrow, I see Patti LuPone in Gypsy with Doodle.
I'm no longer teaching in Hoboken and I had the opportunity to try three new Bikram Yoga studios in Detroit: Farmington Hills, Ann Arbor, and Plymouth. All of this, and now I have to get to bed so that I can teach early tomorrow morning. I'm currently pondering how good life is and how lucky I am to have had my dreams come true. Next on the list are health insurance (which should be coming my way in about two weeks) and massage school.