My classes will be subbed from Tues July 31-Thurs Aug 9th

 *Yin Yoga UPDATE- yin students will be called and refunded for the two classes missed after all. take care friends!
Hi friends!
I suddenly have to split town for a family emergency and all my classes will be running with subs. 

All but Yin Yoga. Yin Yoga Thurs Aug 2 &  9 is CANCELLED.
I can A) make it up to ya
or B) You can get the class refunded.
Can't always plan for the family sadnesss.

I'll be missing my little yoga family which is YOU!
See you again soon.
And P.S. There is no Yoga on BC Day, Monday Aug 6 anyways.
Have a great long weekend.
Any other questions please feel free to email me at yoginilori@gmail.com anytime
OR I'm always around on both my Facebook Pages regardless of what city I am in so you can always find me there! (links on the right hand column of this page).

**Be sure to continue to register for the classes/sessions of your choice! Looking forward to catching up right where we left off, the week after next! ** 



A HUGE thank you to everyone who has been so supportive throughout this very difficult time. You all know who you are and you all mean the world. 

Freeride World Tour Invite!

I made it! I am so excited about this coming winter. This event is full of the greatest competitive big mountain athletes out there. I am honored to be part of this event. It will be a great opportunity to see the world and snowboard in some of the coolest places imaginable. This video says it all!

Getting to learn from the skiers is also exciting. This will be the first time in a while, I have been in a contest with the ski athletes. I look forward to learning from them as well as the veteran snowboard athletes. 
Crazy! This is what Dreams are made of! At least my Dreams!
FWT 2013 - PREQUALIFIED WOMEN
FWT REGION EUROPE & OCEANIA - SKI
Last Name
First Name
Country
2012 Qualification
1
Hargin
Christine
SWE
Top 5 FrWT
2
Walkner
Eva
AUT
Top 5 FrWT
3
Kuzma
Janina
NZL
Top 5 FrWT
4
Gundersen
Pia Nic
NOR
Top 3 FrWQ
5
Wallner
Nadine
AUT
Top 3 FrWQ
6
Slinning
Anne May
NOR
Top 3 FrWQ
7
Segal
Natalie
AUS
Top 1 FsWQ
8
Hargin
Janette
SWE
EU Wild Card
FWT REGION AMERICAS - SKI
Last Name
First Name
Country
2012 Qualification
1
Wright
Crystal
USA
Top 3 FsWT
2
Collinson
Angel
USA
Top 3 FsWT, Top 5 FrWT
3
Maxfield
Ashley
USA
Top 3 FsWT
4
Paaso
Jackie
USA
Top 5 FrWT
FWT REGION EUROPE & OCEANIA - SNOWBOARD
Last Name
First Name
Country
2012 Qualification
1
Rozies
Margot
FRA
Top 3 FrWT
2
Mouthon
Elodie
FRA
Top 2 FrWQ
3
Mouthon
Anouck
FRA
Top 2 FrWQ
FWT REGION AMERICAS - SNOWBOARD
Last Name
First Name
Country
2012 Qualification
1
Yates
Shannan
USA
Top 3 TNFM, Top 3 FrWT
2
Lucas
Casey
USA
Top 3 TNFM
3
Dewey
Laura
USA
Top 3 TNFM
4
De Bari
Maria
USA
Top 3 FrWT

Camping Trip to Lost Lakes

What a blast! Josh and I headed to Lost Lakes, a couple weeks ago, for a quick over night trip. After work I rushed home, to have the truck packed and everything ready to go. Pretty nice! Thanks Josh.

The 4x4 road out there gave us instant adrenaline. The wide Chevy seemed a little cramped on this narrow eroded out drive. Josh handled it, while I made weird nervous noises in the passenger seat, along with shrills of excitement.
We did make it to the top. 

Brought our ski gear hoping that the patch of snow, many locals in this area love to shred in the summer, was still available. Unfortunately we found that it was entirely melted out.
 So we made our way to the lake. Set up camp and set off on another adventure, night bike ride to the upper lake. Feeling our way around cause visibility was close to none. Laughing was a constant and an epic sunset to boot!

The next day we checked out a spot that is accessible for shredding in the winter. It looked so insane with no snow. We hiked around and took a swim before heading out.

 I hope you enjoy some of the pics!

All in all it was an amazing night trip. More summer fun to come!





Website illustration

Illustration for the website http://l2-vanimar.de

Commissions


Some more character design commissions

Life is filled with suffering, but...

Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby. To suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. They are within us and all around us, everywhere, any time.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

We really are all dependent on each other

This video is only a couple of minutes long and really is a must see. sigh.. such beauty and magnificence captured on film. Love the bats!

080 BCN Backstage for ROCKET















all the pictures @ http://www.rocketmagazine.net/2012/07/16/080_bcn_fashion-backstage-menswear-for-rocket-magazine-by-lucas-loren/

video @ http://www.rocketmagazine.net/2012/07/27/video-080_bcn_fashion-by-lucas-loren-for-rocket-magazine/

Tracy Recordings




Fundraising Milestone

Thanks to the Mardi Gras Foundation and their $10,000 donation we have secured funds to purchase the playground equipment!

here comes the sun



miss us?
we've been busy summer-ing.
+++ 
this day was spent listening to this and this.
doing chores for treats.
taking long afternoon toddler naps.
and then parking our lawn chairs down by the river as the sun went down.


 


it was such a good one.
+

Giving Up Excuses

I reached for the edge, a full pad crimp. The pumpy, overhanging basalt of the Fugitive Extension weighed down my crooked left arm.  The anchors taunted me.   I failed in slow motion.  20 seconds later and 20 feet below, I hung dejected at the end of the rope.  I wanted to scream at Jailhouse, the steep sport crag in the Sierra foothills. The move was impossible.  I immediately made excuses for myself.  I settled on one quickly. I was handicapped.

Jailhouse
Seven years ago, I fell from the top of Intersection Rock in Joshua Tree.  I was onsight free soloing the North Overhang (5.9) when I made a grievous error.  I passed the crux of the climbed.  I stared at the summit, a few meters away.  I felt secure knowing I’d sent the crux, 100 feet of space swimming below me. Then I repositioned my feet, moving them underneath my body, a slight miscalculation. I started to barndoor, my balance suddenly gone. I fell.After 70 feet I hit a ledge.  I was ecstatic.  I had stuck it.  I was still alive.  Then I fell off the ledge and went another 30 feet to the ground.  
A few minutes before I fell in Joshua Tree


Other climbers, out for a mid December weekend at the National Park, saw my fall and helped facilitate a rescue. I had a stroke shortly after I hit.  My brain swelled inside my cracked skull, threatening to kill me.  A helicopter flew me to the ICU in Palm Springs. I barely made it to the hospital.    Spinal and ankle fusion, pin and rods in my elbow, a vana cavity filter to stop a blood clot from entering my heart, brain damage from hitting my head, a broken clavicle, nerve damage.  I spent 3 weeks in the ICU and 81 days in the hospital that year.  I laid prone in a hospital bed for over 2 months before I fought to sit up.  There’s nothing inspirational about learning how to walk again.  It’s a painful process.  To facilitate my recovery, I fixated on climbing.  I took the steps to get back to the crag.
In the hospital trying to figure it out
After the ICU, I went to a spine and physical rehabilitation center in Los Gatos, California, near where I was attending school at UC Santa Cruz.  I learned to stand, then to stumble, and finally to walk.  I focused on recovering, and returning to climbing.  Every step brought me closer to the crag.  I wanted to climb more than ever.

“Maybe you should take up something safer, like cycling,” Paul Dossick, a South Bay area orthopedist, told me in his office. Dossick tore through the scar tissue that had healed from my last surgery. “Or take up bowling.”

The geriatrics waiting outside for their knee and hip replacements heard my yell through the small office.  I nearly fainted from the pain.  
More painful than Dossick’s wrenching through the tender scars of my elbow was his bowling suggestion.  It was a recurring theme in my recovery.  Doctors and physical therapists told me that climbing led to injury.  I pretended not to notice.  I just wanted to climb again, it was crucial to my recovery.

Dossick removed two screws and a plate from my elbow during a second surgery on my elbow.  The orthopedist increased the range of motion in my arm.  He could do nothing about the metal in my ankle or the rods in my back. The bottom of my tricep would never return and I lost an inch of my reach. I went to physical therapy and worked the muscle out.   I push harder with my triceps when I mantle,  I stand harder on my feet, I open my hip to crack climb on my fused ankle, I smear my knee to make up for the rods in my back,  I learned to compensate for my various injuries.


“Super Pete” Chasse reached for the edge on the Fugitive extension. He grabbed the crimp, wavered a little hitting the undercling, and then clipped the anchors. Solid. The 40 year old sport climber lowered 30 meters down the overhanging 5.13b sport climb.  He hobbled to the base of the route on the right side of Jailhouse.  He unscrewed his urethane foam foot, replacing his custom fabricated climbing shoe with the foot he used to walk in.
Pete on Father's Day. John Vallejo Photo

Pete worked as a steel fabricator for a pier building company in Lake Tahoe and he often moved large dirt-sifting equipment. A week after sending a 5.14b at Jailhouse, Pete was lowering an enormous piece of machinery.  One of the hooks attached to the chains holding the equipment fell off. 6000 pounds of metal fell onto Pete and pinned his leg. The doctors gave Pete two choices: a dozen surgeries and maybe partial function of his leg or cut off the limb.  Pete didn’t give the options much thought, he let go of the dead limb. Pete bought two prosthetic feet to attach to his new “leg.”  The first foot he walked in.  The second he ground down into a little shoe, he made a stiff edge on it, pointed the toe a little, glued sticky rubber onto it, and created a climbing shoe.  Pete’s returned to the rocks four months after his accident.   

“I never see the use in making excuses,” Pete told me over the phone as he drove back from Bishop this spring.  Over the weekend he climbed High Plains Drifter, a high V7 at the Buttermilks that he had broken his heel on earlier that season.  “There are certain things you can’t do but there’s other things you can do to make up it for it.”  Because of the prosthetic, Pete is unable to kneebar but he can stand on his prosthetic forever; his artificial foot never gets pumped on slabby terrain.  For Pete the loss of his leg didn’t handicap his climbing, it just changed it.
Pete and his wife Lidija in the Red.

“Grab the sidepull and reach straight for that crimp.” Pete told me at the crag.  He had just hiked the route and I desperately wanted to do it too. I started to show Pete my arm, to give an excuse of why I couldn’t reach straight with a crooked arm.  I wanted to tell him about my handicap.  I looked at his prosthetic leg, and remembered how he didn’t use any of the dozen of kneebar rests that I used on the route. I could only nod in response.

This spring at Jailhouse, I pantomimed the beta to Jake Whittaker, a tall bespectacled Yosemite friend, as we sat at the pillar start of the Fugitive Extension. 

Jake, a master slab climber, once forgot his blown out shoes on his way to the Camp 4 boulders.  He climbed anyway, trying the notoriously difficult V5 slab Blue Suede Shoes.  Jake crimped his way up the problem barefoot, ignoring the extra difficulty. 
Jake Whittaker
I jumped in the air showing the dyno after the crux. I wobbled slightly showing the delicate traverse move.  I flapped my arms wildly pretending to fall going to the anchor.  I pointed to my elbow, indicating my six-year-old injury.
Jake smiled. “So, if you’d sent that 5.9, you could have sent this 13b?”
                                                                         
For a year, I thought the move was impossible.  I tried and I fell. I had a good excuse for not being able to do the route but Pete had a better excuse.  There are thousands of hard climbers who, like Pete, fight through adversity.  American aphorist Mason Cooley, wrote “Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.”   As Jake suggested, if I had sent the North Overhang of Intersection Rock, it wouldn’t change whether or not I could climb my current sport project.  I decided to crimp harder on the side pull to compensate for my crooked elbow.  I fell.  But I was closer. 

Climbing on the Fugitive

This spring, my raw hands grated across the basalt for the third time of the day. As I approached the crux of the Fugitive Extension, I didn’t fixate on my broken elbow and I didn’t think about the moves ahead.    I breathed.  I stepped into the move, reached for the crimp, and latched it.  I fought a few more feet and clipped the anchors.