Jumping into a Stretch with Sprouted Potatoes

Today, I took a day off to spend with family since my little bro will be headed down to LA to begin his career in financial law.

Since I take the train a few times a week, there are a few days a week where my car goes un-driven for many consecutive hours. I had a rude awakening this morning as I hopped into my car for the first time since Monday night and got no response at all from the battery. This was awfully annoying as I had just gotten my battery replaced only a few months ago due to this same issue (the charge disappearing after only 2-3 days), and has led me to believe that either I got a defective battery, or that there's an electrical disconnect somewhere in the system that causes an extremely slow leak of power. Either way, Chris came to my rescue by coming back from work and helping me jump start, which was actually my first time doing it on my own, and gave me a very small sense of satisfaction that I was able to do it without blowing up my car, Chris' car, or our respective persons.

I did yoga for the first extended time today. Both my parents have been practicing it for years and swear by it, and have been encouraging my brother and I to attend a class. After 1.5 hrs of stretching, contorting, and doing some things that seemingly aren't physiologically possible, I actually felt pretty good. And surprisingly, it's also a pretty good workout. I am definitely going to be sore tomorrow.

Since I have a chronically sore back due to basketball, I'm hoping that perhaps a more regular routine of yoga can help strengthen the core muscles to help mitigate that. Also, it appears that I've inherited from my father's side a predisposition to be unbalanced in the shoulders - my grandfather's and my father's right shoulders are both prone to droop lower than the left, and apparently that's the case for me as well. So hopefully I can bring my body back into better alignment too.

We had lunch at Santana Row at Pizza Antica, a decent European-style pizza joint. Portobello mushrooms? Underrated. They make a lot of things taste better.

Every month, the 2nd Harvest Food Bank of San Jose does a food distribution at a Latino church in SJ, and my parents and several of their friends typically volunteer. So that ended up being part of our family day - unloading boxes, packing bags of produce, and handing out the assigned amount to those who had registered for food. There's something greatly satisfying about working with your hands in order to help people out.

Back when I was on short-term missions in NYC, there was one week where we stayed at a homeless shelter and helped with food distribution. There, we became accustomed to breaking off the moldy parts of food (like bread and produce, in particular) in order to give away what was still edible. Today, I found it interesting that most of the volunteers had a lot of trouble giving away donated potatoes that had sprouts coming out of them. Can't they just be cut/peeled off?

'Twas a nonstandard day off for me, but I should do this more often.