So the other day I woke up in an igloo

Today I saw the most aMAZing thing. A SNOW CHOMPER! And yeah, I think that should be the technical term. I was going to run inside and grab my camera to take a picture but then I had to not look like an idiot be a responsible employee and finish up with my morning opening duties. It really was the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

If you’ve already known about this and didn’t tell me then you’re kind of a jerk. Or maybe you just didn’t realize that morons still don’t have a clue about snow removal. And since I don’t want to be a jerk and I feel the need to teach a man to fish…or at least how to remove snow:

Buy a front loading feeder thingy
Buy a really big dump truck
In your front loading feeder that we will call your FLF … drive down Main Street against early morning traffic
Chomp up all the snow
Dump the snow into the dump truck that is following you BACKWARDS down Main Street.

See, I dug up a picture on the internets!

Isn’t that the coolest thing ever? I would liken this discovery right up there to the time when I discovered how wasabi was made. Thanks Google. You’re a pal.

Someone said that they probably go dump the snow in the lake. I personally think it would be funny to go bury someone’s house in the snow. Like, completely bury their house so they will think it snowed a whole bunch. But I’m guessing your dump truck might be kind of noisy, especially with multiple trips. So maybe this would only work on your friends that are heavy sleepers? Or if you ruffied them first.
Ooh a great fundraiser for your kid’s school! And then your friends have to pay you money to dig them a tunnel so they can at least get out to the street to check their mail. I think I like where this is going!

In other news, I am a very delicate creature. A very type A, do not move my cheese kind of peep. I think I will be thrilled beyond belief to go back to my normal schedule next Monday. Running in the early mornings…I miss it.

I’ve purchased a training plan for the Pear Blossom 5k…just for funsies…to see if having an actual plan will help with my motivation. My current plan has just been to run 5 days a week and see how fast I can run. Sometimes, that gets a little boring. So I’m really excited to have a plan that is going to force me to do intervals and hill work. Maybe I’m not really a Type A…maybe I’m just a sheep that needs to be told what to do?

Annnnny way, a client brought me a flyer for a local 5k that is in March, I’m actually going to start the training plan in the very near future (note to self, check plan and see when you start genius!) and use it for that race instead.

I got the training plan from Runner’s World. The client that brought me the flyer told me that she has used a training plan from Runner’s World before and she really did see an improvement in her running. So my question is, how much would you pay to have a tunnel dug for you so you could get out of your surprise igloo?! Seriously, haha, no seriously…have you ever purchased a training plan? And your thoughts, pray tell?

Free snow cone

People should warn you that when you lovingly bring a pet into your home, that you should be prepared to only wear that color for the rest of your life. Or your pet's life, if you plan on outliving them. Which is highly likely unless you have recently adopted a sea turtle or a walrus...I mean a parrot.

On to less random stuff...

Last Friday, I came home from work to find goodies! You might remember that I won a giveaway?? It CAME! I might have clapped my hands in glee. Funny thing is that last Friday, I remembered I had won and I thought that it would be cool if it showed up today. I should have thought that winning the lottery would have been cool. There was something in the air I tell ya!

So I opened up the box and squealed just a little. Zipfizz sent me a water bottle and it was filled with single serving tubes - one with each flavor, and a limited edition Creamsicle flavor. I can't lie, I'm most excited to try the grape and the pink lemonade. The other flavors sound all mheh to me.

I thought I took my own pictures but I failed at that. So I stole these from their website.
I'm also a major fan of Nuun so I'm very curious to compare the two to each other. I usually use a sport drink supplement during a long run that is over an hour and since I don't have any of those planned in the near future, I thought I might give these a go with some upcoming workouts that I have planned in the evening. 4-6 hours of energy...maybe don't drink it after 2-3pm? Hmm....

This is what they sent me. Isn't it cute?!

I never promised that this would be a very thorough review now did I? So far, I've consumed the grape and the pink lemonade flavor. Both are delish but I'm leaning towards the PL flave as most fave. I think I have noticed an increase in energy. I mean, it's currently 8:30 at night when I'm writing this and I haven't konked out on my keyboard or resorted to my bed in a heap of tears. And that folks, usually happens around 7pm every night. I'm very curious what these babies will do next week when I go back to my regular schedule at work and my early morning workouts. That should be the true test!

PS We got lots of snow here...finally. And I didn't take one picture. Sooo sad...about the no picture part. Maybe it won't all rain away tomorrow? I'll have to ask my hubs. He is my weatherman.

Oh and speaking of snowcones...I'm not at all fancy so you'll just have to follow the link. Promise that you'll listen to this...Brian Regan...free snow cone.

Have you ever made snow ice cream?

For the love of fuzzy socks!

You know those people that you make fun of, and be honest cuz you probably DO make fun of them...the ones that make their resolutions and/or goals and then fall off the wagon in a day or a week? Yeah, well don't make fun of me!

I had a slight shift to my work schedule and that kind of threw me into a mild state of chaos. Not too terrible but enough to tilt my little world into an almost precarious state. Sounds WAY more dramatic and interesting that it really was. HA!

With that being said, I slipped up on some workouts and some of my goals for this month. Most of last week, I was really scrambling to just get 7 hours of sleep a night. Eight would be ideal and nine hours? I would kick everyone's butt and be the awesomeist! Anything less than 7 and it doesn't take long for me to break down in tears.

At the very top of my to do list is: Learn how to keep stress in perspective. Sounds easy enough? HAHA!!! Maybe for normal people. For me? That will cost you 9 hours of sleep a night.

I was rewarded with an awesome, long weekend that I had mostly to myself. Friday, we had a fun girls night in and watched Planet of the Apes...or wait, the Rise of it? Whatevs...it was entertaining and now my 12 year old wants a chimp for her "half birthday." (No we don't celebrate half birthdays around here. She wishes!)

Saturday morning brought an early two hour volleyball practice for the small one followed by a 6 hour round trip for me to take my girls to their dad's house. I rewarded myself with a trip to Trader Joe's. Lo and behold!!!...(that's my drumroll) there was a frozen yogurt place in almost the same parking lot. Ok, and you can't NOT go to TJ MAXX's which is right across the street from TJ's. A lot of TJ's there. It must be meant to be.

Please say hello to my new scarf! It's crazy and bright and I LOVE it! Plus that is the hair-do that I gave myself to go with my new scarf. I call it the "It took a lot of effort to make it look like no effort when into this" do.

The dimension in my photo is great, no? Not as great as the wallpaper in my bathroom though. Woot!



My Trader Joe's Haul!

The bag of popcorn and green beans on the right are the two purchases that were opened while driving home from Eugene. I told myself that I wouldn't eat the entire bag of everything on the way home. They were ooohkay...in a weird way...like you couldn't stop eating them because they were so good or because you couldn't really tell if you liked them at all. And they were almost a little too sweet...no sugar added, just sweet on their own. The Olive Oil Popcorn? To almost die for. It was just your normal popcorn but I really enjoyed the plain, hint of olive oil taste. I told myself not to choke and die while eating popcorn and driving. That would have been bad.

The farina is enriched...is that the bad kind of enriched? The hummus dressing is delectable while the hummus was just eh. I meant to get the roasted pepper one. The Wheatabix is for my UK born hubs and was his only request when I asked if I could drive the extra miles to TJs. I got him two boxes since I kind of love the guy. The Skinny Fries...um bleck.. for the birds! I literally threw them out the back door for the birds. They don't want them and now I have skinny fries scattered on the lawn in back. Oh and the olive tapenade.....

I could eat the entire contents in one sitting. I didn't...but I could...all 18 servings at only 15 calories a pop. Yeah, but Hellooooo sodium! I didn't eat it all though...which reminds me...I'm going to go heat up the oven and make more little pita chips with my mini pita pockets and do some damage to the tapenade. I did do more damage but I still have quite a bit left. Which leads me to believe that I lied when I said I could eat the whole jar...the contents...not the jar, in one sitting.

Lastly, I'll leave you with these little muffins. Minus the crappy manicure from before.

They are called donut muffins, but I have changed their name to, "Don't ever make these muffins while you're home alone" the long version of their name, you would just add on "...and especially if no ones knows you are making them and won't know what they are missing."

Don't ever make these muffins while you're home alone. I stole the recipe from that site which I found on Pinterest. Thanks Pinterest for being a *itch. Now I have to workout more this week.

I threw the rest of them out. Horrible waster that I am! But I knew if the remainder where down in the kitchen, they would be calling my name this morning. Not that there were too many remaining, but gee donut muffin have you no mercy? They are the muffin version of that chip that no one can eat just one of. More like, no one can eat just seven. And if you tell my husband or kids about this, I might start premeditating something I like to call a smackdown on YOU.

This brings my weekend almost to a conclusion. I also got caught up on Desperate Housewives, The Bachelor (I find comfort in watching women that are crazier and bigger lunatics than me), watched the US Olympic Marathon Trials...crazy fast runners!, and I watched three movies.

"One Day" was pretty good. "Warrior" was pretty amazing but not as good as "The Fighter". What made it even more amazing was that I painted and glittered pinecones while watching it.

And then the stupid movie made me cry. Maybe it was the glitter that got into my eye? Definitely watch Warrior, maybe rent One Day, and if you have a few brain cells left to kill, watch "I Don't Know How She Does It." And then don't hate me if you do. Very annoying movie. But cute in spots. Mostly annoying.

The only reason I left the house yesterday was to rent the movies and find some more fuzzy socks. Don't fuzzy socks just make you the happiest?

My happy place

So this was an interesting week! I really like having my 31 day exercise streak in place, even though I’ve already broken it. BUT, I jumped right back in! I'm convinced that had I not had this little challenge written down for me, a good portion of the workouts this week would not have happened.

Lowlight:
Wednesday is a day I would love to completely obliterate from my memory banks. But since I’m blogging about it, then I guess that won’t be the case. To make a long boring story much shorter and only slightly less boring, I’ll just say that Tuesday I started wrestling with a migraine, it kicked my butt on Wednesday so much that I went to work for an hour and got sent home. I’m thinking my boss didn’t like the potential of me throwing up on clients? So that’s why I didn’t exercise on Wednesday. Even though I briefly contemplated doing some yoga. I'm really not that stupid. So on Thursday, I kicked the migraine in the balls. Yup I said it. It felt so awesome to not be in all that pain. Whew!

Highlight:
Thursday night, I convinced my 12 year old daughter to workout with me. We did the circuit workout that I talked about the other day. It quickly turned into the, “Let’s see if we can get each other laughing so hard we pee our pant’s” workout. I almost succeeded!! In making HER pee HER pants. Not the other way around. It started with jumping jacks. She had her back to me cuz she was on to my shennanigens. We were doing jumping jacks and I was doing mine while spinning in circles.

Look at me Kam!
No mom.
Look at me!
NO!
Plleeeeeaaseeeee look at me!

She finally couldn't resist my antics and turned to look just as I spun myself right on to the bed and as I was landing, my arm landed and bounced right back up into my face. We laughed, we cried, we might have tinkled. What struck me the most was just how much fun it was to get in a great workout and have such a fun, bonding moment. Certainly not anything I ever experienced with my own mother. She better know how awesome I am!

With the first week of January almost in the books, here’s where I’m at with my monthly goals so far:
1 Session of yogo – completed
I took my vitamin 6 out of 7 days (Not the migraine day as that for sure would have made me hurl.)
I got in three sessions of strength training/circuit workouts
I ran 12.4 miles total
Annndd….I think I might be down two pounds. Two times on the scale this morning and the number stayed the same. The first time I thought it was joshin’ me. Silly scale. So that's why I say "think". If the number is in the same vicinity tomorrow, I'll take it!

Oh you want to see some random pictures? I believe I can accommodate your wishes!

Sock bun curls
My 14.9 year old tried telling me about curling your hair with a sock. I thought she had done lost her mind. UNTIL, I ran across a tutorial on Pinterest. It made sense! What can I say, I’m a visual learner. I got myself some socks and ta-da!!! Now to get brave enough to wear my sock bun to the gym in the morning.

My first go around and yeah...crappy picture.

Yogurt – I love the stuff but getting past the cottage cheesy look to it without spilling all the yogurt water/juice out the side….it’s kind of like raw meat. Try not to make direct eye contact. That is, if yogurt and raw meat had eyes.

You can kind of see my Wonder Woman mug that I got for Christmas from a coworker friend. Yeah...he got it right!


Happy Camper! – In my quest to make my weekends flow a little more productively than-Drink a pot of coffee and waste too much time reading blogs and facebook-I got up first thing…second thing since I got up at 4:30am only to realize it was Saturday. So after I got up the second time, I went directly to the gym. Popped into Freddie’s and picked up some healthy breakfast fixins and voila! Egg white scramble with spinach, mushrooms, and capers. Morning workout done, healthy breakfast, black coffee and my new issue of Runner’s World. Color my morning complete!

That green coffee mug is my "happy mug" and I get rather perturbed if it gets put into the dishwasher. I wash it by hand so I can use it everyday. I throw a hissy fit if someone else uses it too. It's only my happy mug and they need to get their own.


PS What is a Malicious Toolkit Website 9? My Norton's keeps bragging that it is blocking it.

Oxygen Magazine - January 2012 Issue - Review Part 1

My workout this morning was fueled only because I made it a goal to exercise for 31 minutes, 31 days in a row. My other two workouts, and yeah, I think I only worked out twice on my vacation, well, they were fueled with Reeses PB cups. I said WITH, not by. Meaning, I didn’t work out because I ate them, I worked out WHILE eating them. Kind of a mute point? Wait...moot point? Mhmm.

So today, I tried out the “Living Room Fat Blaster” workout in Oxygen’s January 2012. To get more out of my subscription, I thought I might actually review each issue right here, on my BLOG! What normally happens is that my issue arrives, I go through it quickly looking at all the pictures, a few articles jump out at me and I think, “Ooh! I must try that.” And then life happens and another issue arrives. Vicious cycle I tell ya!

Aren't my slippers cute? They are Reefs and hubby bought them for me just because...because my feet are so vein-y and he wants them covered up.


Oh so the workout…I liked. I made a small tweak though and worked out in my bedroom instead of my living room. Call me crazy! Really, the only equipment required was two resistance bands and a bench. I have a step that I used for the step ups since the bench at the foot of my bed…well I’d hit my head on the ceiling if I used it for the step ups. The actual workout was a circuit that you go through twice with minimal rest in between each exercise alternating between a burst of cardio and a strength move. Because you move so quickly through the exercises, you really have no chance to get bored.

Turn yur head sideways cuz Amee is too lazy to edit her pics before she posts them. ha!

I’m going to stick with this workout three times a week as the first two weeks are to ease you into it, and then you add on another circuit with a couple of different variations for weeks 3 & 4.

Some of the recipes I’d like to try are:

No-Butter Chicken
Tuna Tacos (which I bought the stuff to make those)
PB Strawberry Chia Jam Sandwich (Buts I needs the seeds first…where to get local peeps? Freddies? Or Sherms…which would be better?

On the cover…Tosca in a pink one piece? She can rock a two piece and I wish that they had used a different shot. But what do I know? All I know is that the cover isn’t too appealing to me. I love pink, but the suit is a snoozer.

Loved the article about green tea and I’m excited to get back to my huge stash of it at work.

Lastly, I always ALWAYS flip to the “Are you next” section first. And the first thing I do is look at how tall the featured readers are. The tallest one is 5’6”, boo. I like to compare the heights and weights and always find it amazing, even though I know the science behind it, to see women that weigh more but look better and smaller than a woman with less muscle. Very fun! It’s inspiring, even though my results will be individual and unique, but inspiring still to find a woman close to my height that is in great shape and to cut her head off and place my head with her body. One day, I will be in that section of the magazine!
If you don’t have the January issue yet, you should probably go get it and subscribe because we are going to have fun with this. Unless you’re a dude. You probably wouldn’t dig this magazine.

Do you have this issue?
What recipes are you going to try?
Which workout?
More importantly, what did you think of the cover and the suiiitsnooooorrre???

Happy New Year - I know, original right?

Funny!

I did lots of super productive things today. Namely, I watched 2.25 episodes of Dexter that had racked up on my DVR. The .25 came from an episode that I fell asleep during an evening of chilling out with the hubs. I think it’s important to mention here that he was watching the episodes with me…so there were more than two lazy bums in the house today. We also have the finale to watch later this evening. I know, wild and crazy kids. I think it’s also important to mention that during our regular “scheduled” lives, aka, the kids are in school and I’m not on vacation and I’m also getting up at 4:25am to go run, that it takes me over three evenings to watch just one half hour episode of a syndicated Big Bang Theory. This is even sadder because when you DVR a half hour show and skip all of the commercials, you only end up with about 12 minutes of real show. Breaking it down into three segments you have:

Evening #1 Begin the episode for the first time. Fall asleep during the first commercial break while your husband is fast forwarding.
Evening #2 Spend precious time fast forwarding to the spot you last remember before you started drooling on your pillow on evening #1 and fall asleep during the second commercial break, exhausted from just trying to find your spot again. And lastly,
Evening #3 fast forward almost to the end and watch the last 2 minutes you missed on Evening #2.

The moral of the story is, watching tv rots your brain but watching Dexter makes you an expert in Miami homicide.

PS I’m now officially caught up on Dexter and will have disturbed sleep patterns for roughly the next two weeks due to the gory images and disturbing thematic material. AKA my mom knew what she was doing when she didn't let me watch scary movies until I was 34.

So to sum up my very first day of the new year? Let’s just hope that my activity level for the day isn’t going to set the tone for the remaining 365. It’s a leap year! I still have 365 days left to kick butt!

Speaking of kicking butt…my goals for January!! (I guess I should add that my one resolution for the year is to make monthly goals. Although, I do have a few goals for the year so far. I’ll add more to it as I go. Maybe. Since I’m chill like that.

Yearly, it looks like this:
Run my third marathon.
Run maybe my fourth, or perhaps my first half marathon!
Develop an overall positive and thankful attitude.
Oh and to lose 25 or so pounds.
Oh AND to blog regularly. Blogging helps hold me accountable. By regularly, let's go with at least one post per week.

So specifically, for January. This new month of 2012...Yay! My goals are to:

Finish Unlimited by Jillian Michaels. I'm really great at starting a book and not finishing it. This one wasn't started too long ago though so I'm not in that, "Ughh...finish the book!" mode quite yet.

Go to a yoga class at the gym. This one scares me!

Take my multivitamin, daily.

Oh and lastly, move it for 31 minutes...31 days in a row. Whether it's running, strength training, yoga, or what have you. I'm going to create myself some consistency.

Lose 8 pounds

Run 65 Miles

Include one session of yoga each week

Focus on breakfasts and cleaning it up. (I currently have a bowl of oatmeal each morning with walnuts, cinnamon, and stevia. Clean, yep, but I was thinking of adding some protein…more than just what’s in the walnuts.)

Hey, guess what? The benefits of me blogging more regularly? My posts won’t be so long winded and jumbled. Bwaahhaaahaa!! Who am I kidding?!

Road Trip!

Ten hour car trip? Teach yourself how to knit, I always say!

Going through Gig Harbor, WA, to get to our final destination of Port Angeles.

Random bridge picture for the year!

I'm sure there has to be a fro-yo place around here somewhere but SOMEONE will barely bring the car to a stop to let me out to pee. I've gotten pretty good at rolling the landings, taking most of the force in my left shoulder. Kidding, I am.

Don't feel too bad for me. Soon I will have access to all the free Dairy Queen a girl could want.

Hi mom! We're home!!

What is your favorite blizzard? And I don't want to hear that you don't like them or any of that crap. Mine is pb cup (shocking!) Made with chocolate ice cream.

PS First blizzard down the hatch.