Tai chi, curried shrimp and restoration.

 Here's Bob, the online tai chi instructor at work in yesterday's AARP online presentation. The exercise lasted about 45 minutes, a long time for me, but I kept up till the last few minutes when I finished it sitting down.

it was very similar to Eight Pieces of Silk, which I haven't done in a while, and I ran into my usual coordination issues, getting arms and legs going out of sync, but it was really good. I was totally relaxed in the afternoon and much less stiff than usual this morning.

Bob has decades of experience teaching in person, and the only hitch was the sound quality. When he introduced himself, close to the camera, it was fine. Then he stepped back as you see and started the movements and was inaudible. I think AARP is amateur night about miking. He was not body miked, I'm guessing. 

I messaged them and they said well that's why there's captioning, and anyway it worked fine in our practice run. I didn't pursue it but thought it was more than I could do, to read captions while watching and imitating what for me were difficult movements. I missed all the names of the moves.

It did revive my interest in Eight Pieces of Silk, and I may resume that practice, so that was good. And I'm glad they did it, even if not very well. They got about 150 viewers, pretty good.

They timed it for 12 noon, awkward time for lunch, so I postponed mine thinking better not to have a full meal right before. So eventually this was lunch. Curried shrimp over jasmine rice.

This is a natural artwork, the olive oil moving on the rice water and the reflected shapes. Cooking makes art!

Here's the rice, with the shrimp cooking in the foreground, with curry powder, my own Bill Veach mix, onions, garlic, homemade yogurt, salt and pepper

Then a handful of parsley chopped in, should have been cilantro but I didn't have any. And it was very good. Enough for another meal today, too.

And here's a bit of good news, some priceless artifacts looted from Ghana in colonial times personally restored by officials of the Fowler Museum, with some gracious apologies. 

Along with some lame excuses that they didn't know the full provenance back when the curators of the time acquired them. Which means they were either lying, or they didn't do their job back then. Anyway they now say they discovered these items were looted in conflict, and they are now back in the right hands

So, virtue signalling aside, this is good. They're beautiful artifacts, demonstrating the high culture of what Western powers dismissed as primitive people. Not so much. 

And this tickled me. Ukrainian humor. If they can laugh in their suffering, it seems we more fortunate people can at least cheer up. Which may involve avoiding the news for now.