All Around the Garden

Woohoo it's Friday! No definite plans so far, but working on the garden and a birthday dinner for D are both on the agenda.

I also wanted to give a public congratulations to my brother who just found out he passed his Florida Engineer exam yesterday. This is a big, long, scary exam, and passing it means 1) He never has to take it again and 2) He gets bumped up a pay-grade. So congratulations, J, you are well on your way to endless drudgery... I mean the wonderful world of work.

Fitness
I've had some good runs this week, and- knock on wood- all my aches and pains have felt better. I took a bit of advice from Jess yesterday and slowed down today to make my easy run truly easy. Is there any runner out there who doesn't run too fast on easy days? It's so tempting.

Food
I have a great idea for something to make for D's birthday Wednesday, but until then it will remain a secret. Muahahaha.

Fun
Let's see if I can find some good pictures... How about some pictures from the garden area? There are people with all sorts of gardening styles. We have


Procrastinators


People who are concerned about Mongol invaders


People who obviously know what's going on


People who are unclear on the concept

and....





Our garden!!!!

Hopefully the plans are much bigger now. Or at least not bug infested and/or carted off by raccoons. I guess we'll find out tomorrow. Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.

Vacation!

Hi everyone,

I finally have a minute to share some details of my vacation to Florida.

We flew in to Orlando a week ago Sunday and spent Monday afternoon with my grandparents.

Tuesday my parents treated D and I to a trip to Sea World. Here's a picture of Shamu telling you to believe in yourself.



Highlights included riding the Manta roller coaster, feeding a Manta ray (they suck the food out of your hand!), seeing the manatees (ie. salad monsters), and watching a little girl get attacked by a zombie crane (there's a reason they tell you not to feed the birds).

The next day we took a drive up to see "real Florida". This included pancakes for lunch at DeLeon Springs. Evidently it's not the water that is the fountain of youth- it's the syrup.



After a few days with my parents, we drove up to Gainesville for my brother-in-law's wedding. We had a great time seeing seeing family and being part of this big event. I took lots of pictures, but I'm not sure how the people in them would feel about them being all up on the internet, so I give you: cake.



Hopefully the bride and groom are having a wonderful time on their honeymoon. Actually, given what time it is where they are, they should probably be asleep.

As far as working out goes, I was proud of myself for getting out and running or walking every day. It was much warmer and more humid than I'm used to. I started out with good intentions of doing pushups, but it didn't really happen. I'm back on the bandwagon now.

I'm catching up on housework/work/blogs etc but hopefully I'll be back to regular posting again!

Back!

Hi everyone,

I was gone last week to Florida visiting family and watching my brother-in-law get married. I'm back and will have plenty to share with you, but I need a little time to catch up. Stay tuned for pictures, etc...

Crazy Food Combo

Fitness

I had another enjoyable run this morning: 4 miles out and back on the Lakeshore path. It was only about 48 degrees at 6am. I don't know what I'm going to do in FL next week when it's 85! This afternoon I'm headed to the gym to lift weights. I'd love to run again tomorrow morning, but I know I need to take a rest day. Three days in a row is enough for right now. I'm finally getting over my piriformis problems. I don't want to invite another injury along for the ride.

Food

Behold, my creation:



It's creatively titled "Stuff that needs to be eaten before we leave on Sunday." The ingredients are salad greens, broccoli slaw, a veggie burger, salsa, and scrambled egg whites with cheese melted on top. Eat your heart out foodies. I'm even going to tag this baby because my weird food combos happen more often than you'd think.

Fun

Not a ton going on. I'm looking forward to meeting with my conversation partner tonight and catching up with her. I'm trying to think of things for us to do together so she can experience more of American culture. Maybe I should take her out for ice cream, haha. Mmmmm... ice cream.

Sore Butt Tuesday

I feel kind of funny calling these things daily updates because realistically they are never going to be daily. Anyway, this is what's been going on.

Fitness:
Whew, my behind is sore today from lifting weights. I did a couple of different moves yesterday- lunges in particular- that left me pretty tight and tired.

Luckily that didn't negatively affect my run this morning. I did 4 miles with 3x800m intervals at 7:54 min/mile, 7:28 min/mile, and 8:35 min/mile. While this is an easy pace for many of you out there, I was quite happy with my speed. I decided to look back in my training long, and about this time last summer I was running 800m at slower than 8min/mile pace on the track. The ones today were done on my regular running route.

It gave me a nice boost because sometimes I feel like I neeeever improve. The truth is I have gotten faster in the last two years, but I haven't made a lot of progress because I haven't been consistent. I go through periods when I do a lot of speed work and periods when I do none, and that doesn't get you results- at least not very quickly. So hopefully this discovery will motivate me to keep up with the interval and tempo work even when I'm not really feeling it.

Food:
Not much exciting here. I have a great (scary) picture for you of my lunch from Friday. It involves salad... and scrambled egg... mixed together. It was truly something out of a Lovecraft novel.

Fun:
Nothing super exciting right now. I really bombed Bible Trivia last night, so I think I'm going to try to find a Bible Fact of the Day site so I can brush up on "Old Farts of the Old Testament."

YAY! For No More Heat

So they fiiiiiinally turned the heat off in our apartment building, so now instead of being insanely hot at night, it's kind of chilly. Oh well. I'd definitely rather put on a pair of socks than sweat all night.

Fitness

I did an easy 4 miles yesterday and a 6 mile "long run" this morning. Yesterday afternoon was also lower body strength training day, and D met me at the gym to work on my squat technique. I'm trying to work on my hip and ankle flexibility and get down to a true parallel squat. Anyway, I'd been having trouble keeping my torso upright, and I wanted to get some feedback. D's suggestions were to move the bar farther down my back and to get my stance a little wider, both of which helped a lot. I'm still using a very light weight (only 65 lbs) but I think my form is getting there, and I'll start being able to add more weight soon.

Food



We had gyros for dinner in the rooftop garden at Parthenon Gyros off of State St yesterday. Calling it a rooftop garden was a little bit of a stretch because I think the only plants out there were fake, but it was a nice evening to eat outside.

Fun
RW people- I think I have almost all of you added to my blog roll and my sage feed. YAY! I love spying on people, and this is even more intrusive than Facebook. Haha, just kidding... you think.

This is going to be a fairly boring weekend. We'll just be doing a lot of errands and normal stuff. Weeding the garden. D needs a hair cut. But that's okay because we're leaving for FL in a week for my brother-in-law's wedding, which is going to be a lot of fun.

I do have a question for all of you out there- especially now that there might be quite a few RW people reading. Do you ever feel weird/bad about choosing to do sedentary activities? Maybe not the college students because you are up and walking around a lot, but now that I have a sedentary job, I feel kind of bad/guilty if I'm not doing something active all the time after work and on the weekends. I do run, ride my bike back and forth to work, and climb stairs with co-workers at lunch time so I don't sit alllll day, but sometimes I want to sit and work on my cross stitch or read after work or on a weekend afternoon, and I feel guilty for not being outside biking or walking or whatever. Anyone else get this way? I know it's irrational, but it's alway nice to be irrational with others.

Grocery Shopping Adventure

So these things aren't exactly daily, but whatever ;).

Fitness
Got in an upper body workout yesterday and a 4mi run with 2mi tempo this morning plus a little yoga here and there. Tomorrow will be lower body after work. I'm going to be really glad when the gym is open in the morning again. I love to have my workout done first thing.

I think I may have some insight into what's bugging my hip, too. I think it's doing the stairs. Monday I felt a twinge right in my trouble spot when I was on my second round of stairs. I did a double round today, but I think I should stick with just one set from now on to see if that improves the problem.

Food
I'm not sure if I've posted about it before, but I have a conversation partner who I meet with each week so she can practice English ask questions about American culture. She also tells me a lot about China and Chinese culture, which I think is really cool. Yesterday she was asking about the English word for some foods so we took a trip to the grocery store. It was neat walking up and down the aisles and talking about all the different foods and seeing a grocery store from a completely different perspective. Actually, it was kind of strange for me because we usually shop at Trader Joe's so I'm not used to that much variety. There's some pretty crazy stuff in grocery stores these days.

Fun
It's been neat to see all these RW forumite blogs. I'm going to do my best to add all of you to my Blogroll and Sage feed reader. Feel free to add me and make comments!