Daily eats 1/25

Anyone interested in what I ate today? I have to admit it sounded like a much more interesting blog post when I was half asleep and came up with it last night or this morning. I apologize for the iPhone photos. I’m not quite devoted enough to find my actual camera and learn how to use it.

Well after going to bed at midnight last night, I woke up absolutely starving at 6 this morning. So I had a serving of Trader Joe’s peanut butter filled pretzels. Yum yum yum.

Back to bed for a few more hours, then breakfast of old fashioned oats. I make a big batch with just water and a bit of salt about once a week and just reheat daily. It’s the having to clean the pot that I object to. In any case, I reheat my oats with unsweetened almond milk, about a tsp of brown sugar, raisins and a spoonful of peanut butter. I have this fabulous recipe for ginger apple jam that I need to make, I just haven’t managed to find two hours at home to leave the stove on.

J and I attempted to run a few hours later and only made it about a mile or so. We’ve both been physically exhausted the past few days, his leg has been bothering him, and my calves are still ridiculously sore from a workout class I went to on Friday. Jumping jacks AND high knees AND mountain climbers AND squat jumps. Really? Ouch. But a mile run and a mile walk with the dogs and I call it good. No need to push it.

I was hungry again before we even left to run so I started lunch cooking while I showered.

Homemade tomato sauce with chickpeas and the miniscule handful of spinach I had left in the fridge, served in a sweet potato. I go through phases with sweet potatoes. I’ll eat them for two weeks straight and ignore them for three months. The best sweet potato pairing? Try them with bacon. I’m telling you. Really.

Anyway, the recipe was taken from this post on The Kitchn. Their picture is prettier.

Relistened to Friday’s lecture, ran some errands, got home from the grocery store and was hungry again. It’s just been one of those days where my hunger suddenly catches up with me. But a heaping serving of Trader Joe’s Omega Trek Mix was my snack of choice. Chased by a sneaky Cadbury Egg. Those things always seem to jump in my basket as I check out from the store. What can I do?

Snacks, like the peanut butter pretzels, trail mix, and tortilla chips I tend to portion out based on the serving on the package because they’re so easy to overeat and so calorie dense.

I dragged J to Odell’s in the hopes that they had gotten more keychains in, they’ve been out since before Christmas! But no luck. I had to settle for a beer. Darn.

I’ve been trying to start cooking for/with J once a week. I can’t decide which. So far it’s been recipes I’m very familiar with so I just kind of do it all, and part of the idea is that I need to get more comfortable cooking in front of other people. And for other people. But he wants to learn more recipes too, so we’ll have to see where this takes us. Tonight’s entree was Jenna’s Turkey Taco Casserole that I love so much.

I almost forgot to take a picture, and the one I did take is horrible so please just go check out her pretty photos with the recipe. It’s kind of like a Mexican lasagna and really quite easy.

And now to quell my sweet tooth I’m having a cup of bedtime tea with honey. The tea is a habit, the honey is a treat.

Other exercise this week:

Sunday: 2.5 mile run in 26 minutes.

Monday: Rest, the rec was closed most of the day and wasn’t offering classes due to the holiday.

Tuesday: 1 mile run. My mid-week run is usually short but quick. I’m trying to get faster!

Wednesday: Yoga Sculpt class. Loved it, bought an unlimited mind-body pass the next day (I’d already been planning on it though). (Yoga and spin classes are free for the first 10 days of the semester, after that you have to pay.)

Thursday: Rest

Friday: Interval Burn class. Kind of like a Jillian Michael’s workout with alternating cardio and strength bursts. Didn’t love it, honestly.

Saturday: I intended to go to a 10:00 yoga class, but slept until 9:30 and couldn’t bring myself to push it to get there on time.

Sunday: 1ish mile run and 1 mile walk.

Since the weather has been relatively mild this week I’ve also been biking the mile back and forth to class, sometimes a few times a day.

So that’s that. I’ll try to post another next weekend if anyone is interested.

On introverts. Again.

“Extroverts and introverts are apples and oranges. Extroverts sparkle, introverts glow. Extroverts are fireworks, introverts a fire in the hearth. Extroverts attract people who like razzle-dazzle, introverts attract people who want to bask in your warmth.”

I love that.

I’m reading this article on The Introvert’s Corner. The first thought that runs through my head is “how on earth did I ever get voted runner-up biggest flirt in high school?” I thought it was a joke then and I still don’t quite get it. Me? A flirt? That means I actually talk to people. That doesn’t happen often.

But you know what it might be? That whole thing about introverts coming out of their shell if you get to know them. I’d been in school with most of my class since kindergarten. They’d had a good 12 years to get to know me before senior superlatives were voted on. I was relatively comfortable around them. Or some of them, at least.

I just felt the need to share, and it felt a little long for a Facebook status.

What works for me

This is a post for my cousin. And if she gets her wish, it will even become a running series… or maybe I’ll even go back to writing a food blog.

The final project for one of my classes this semester was to review a popular diet book and present it to the class. I’m a fan of Mark Bittman’s column for The New York Times, so I chose his recent VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health… For Good.

But first, a little history: I believe I was skinniest back in my vegetarian days, when I had just completed my first half marathon and was playing with the idea of training for a sprint triathlon.

Wow, what babies we were.

For the year before I moved out to Colorado I worked with a personal trainer and I was pretty happy with my body that first summer of 2013 too. Once here, I tried to continue working with heavier weights and move into an even stricter paleo-style diet. But between the social isolation of living in a brand new place with no one I knew and the sense of deprivation created by trying to cut out a whole food group, I’d find myself stopping by the bakery on my late night drive home from work to buy that lovely combination of chocolate chip cookies and buttercream icing. And I gained about 10 pounds in just a few months.

(Other people thrive on a paleo-style diet, my roommate is one of them. We all have to play around a little and find what works for us.)

But since then I’ve quite the bakery dessert habit, stopped restricting myself to heavy weight lifting just a few days a week and the goal of a routine closer to weights twice a week, running twice a week, and yoga once a week. But that grad school thing can get in the way. I think I only managed that one week last semester. Oh well. My weight was still heading in the right direction before winter break hit and the rec center stopped offering classes. And then there’s the sleep deprivation from being jerked around between early morning and late night shifts at work and the leftover cookies in the back office. The drive for sugar as a temporary source of energy isn’t doing me any favors either.

To bring this post back around, VB6 reminded me that eating something closer to a vegetarian diet is what works best for me. I’m not someone who will make a main course and various sides to go with it. My vegetables have to be incorporated into the main dish or they won’t even leave the grocery store with me. I’m not strictly following the concept of eating vegan meals before dinnertime. I’ll have half and half in my coffee or eggs in my cornbread, but I’ll try to make two out of three meals a day vegetarian at least.

And by vegetarian I don’t mean slapping a machine-processed veggie patty on a bun, I mean soaking a pound of dry beans, sauteing some onion and garlic before adding the beans to the pot with water, cooking them, and towards the end tossing in some red pepper flakes and three pounds of kale. Or sauteing onion, garlic, sweet potato, black beans, red peppers, and various seasonings before adding a cornbread topping (my lunches this week). I’m trying to come back to living by Michael Pollan’s words “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

If you have loved ones suffering from heart disease, this mindset also ensures that you are following the Mediterranean Diet (recommended by the American Heart Association) or the DASH diet for those with hypertension. How very convenient.

Unfortunately, all of my recipes come from blogs that I follow so I can’t post them here, but I’ll try to make more of an effort to share links to my favorites as they are consumed.

A correction

Thank you all for your concern, I seriously thought about taking that post down, and even did for a few minutes. But let me clarify instead.

I wasn’t upset about being alone and not having anyone to hang out with. An evening alone in the apartment without my roommate and her boyfriend around is something I absolutely savor.

Instead, while looking for an incident in one of my old journals (really, the ONE time I didn’t write everything down… so frustrating) I ended up looking through those from my early twenties and I just couldn’t believe the insecurity and negative self-image I found on those pages. I know I wasn’t happy then, but I managed to block out just how bad it was.

On New Year’s Eve there was an incident of domestic violence at the hotel. The girl was taken to the hospital, the guy fled, we have to get the blood out of the carpet. Last night, J. and I realized that when she came back to pick up her luggage the next day she was with the guy who did it.

“That’s a shame,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you want out of that situation??”

“Because they get so far into your head you think it’s your fault. You know what pushes their buttons and you should have avoided it. You feel like you brought it on yourself,” I explained.

Because it’s true. That’s how you feel. It’s certainly how I felt on rare occasions. And the fact that I was weak enough to even let it happen is what I was mourning. And now I have even greater appreciation for how much I’ve grown, how much stronger I am, how far I’ve come.

(Because I know it will come up, there is no actual hitting in my past, more of an angry wrestling. Arm twisted behind back and forced to the ground. It was rare that I even walked away with bruises, though my bathroom door and my car were not always so lucky. I am not at all comparing my situation with the poor guest this week, but it has certainly made me think.)

Christmas break

(random note, anyone miss my old food pictures? no? well here’s one anyway. My grocery haul after getting back from Christmas in Atlanta)

My dogs continue to be an endless source of amusement, of course

There have also been several moments of “Piper, go pee! It’s way below freezing out here!” “But mom, the snow makes my tongue feel funny *nom nom nom*”

My mom got me back into knitting, by not making me the hat my brother didn’t want.
 

And Christmas vacation brought a new appreciation for Atlanta. It only took a year and a half. The skyscrapers, running through Piedmont Park or Tech’s campus, walking the BeltLine and seeing neighborhoods grow and develop new personalities, visiting all of the places where I formed my best memories.
Driving down 10th St or Monroe, through Virginia Highlands or Inman Park, wandering Lenox Square, wandering the zoo and finding new faces (panda twins!).

  

I’m not moving back any time soon, at the very least I have grad school to finish, but I have more reason to look forward to trips home. 

And really, I absolutely adore my friends here. 

https://flic.kr/p/q72Mgk

Back again

I have so much that I want to say, and no one around to talk to at the moment. And sadly not many of them are ready to be shared on a public forum like this. I love my friends here. Unfortunately they’re sick, or out of town, or otherwise unavailable tonight.

I love the way Sam started her most recent post: “Being in grad school is weird. It’s weird in a lot of ways that I keep meaning to write about, but keep not writing about, because grad school.”

Isn’t that just it, though? I’ll try to better, I swear.

Going through old journal is an absolute roller coaster ride. High school was such a funny time. Old AOL IM conversations printed out and pasted in. They were just SO important. And it’s somewhat amusing to me that I can still tell you who the guys behind the cryptic screen names are.

Undergrad and the period soon after is a different story. Not my happiest period, and I’d only write when I was upset. I know there were good days, but the absolute misery on those pages literally brought tears to my eyes.

Piper refuses to let me be sad though.

It seriously brings all new meaning to the song “Let It Go.” I knew it was a big hit, but damn. It hits a different way now.

So wants to come over and break me out of this funk?

A moment of regret

I seem to be going through a phase where this move to Colorado feels incredibly selfish. Maybe it’s just because I’m still twiddling my thumbs, waiting to start school. Perhaps because I still haven’t made many friends here yet. But people I love back home are going through difficult times and it feels selfish to have moved away to challenge myself and see what I can make of myself. I’d much rather be back in Georgia where I can give them my love and support. 

I’ve been challenged by one to ask deeper questions. He feels that people don’t truly care about him because no one tried to find out how his mind works. It makes me feel slightly guilty because I’m one of those who never did, but it’s an avoidance tactic for me. I don’t think about my own answers to such questions, so I don’t ask them of others because I don’t want them to return the question. So far we’ve covered deepest regrets, If you could change one thing what would it be (past and present), if money weren’t an issue what would you do with your life to be happy (also, describe your perfect day). I was aware that he is unhappy, but it definitely brought more of it to light and I’m glad that he does have some awareness of it. Any suggestions for next week?

Maybe it really is a lack of friends here. Considering how much planning I’ve put into my parents visit in May when they haven’t even bought plane tickets yet, I clearly need more excitement in my life. 

Not the happiest post ever, so here’s a picture of Piper enjoying the sun from a few weeks ago:

A New Blog

Okay first, I just have to get something off my chest: I’m tired of being cold. 

 

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, those few of you who have followed me for awhile have probably noticed a new title over there. It just randomly came to me Friday night between work and going out for drinks (yeah, the thought came to me totally sober!). A quick search on the Google indicated that it might be available, so lo and behold, I made it happen.

Maybe a bit of a reinvention will be enough to bring me back to this little space. Or maybe it’s a lack of a sense of connection. We can get to that in a minute. 

You see, I don’t exactly run anymore. I do intervals, but I don’t think that 4 one-minute-long bursts of sprinting really counts. I focus more on lifting weights these days. Same sense of accomplishment from training, it’s just moving another 5 lbs a week (give or take) instead of being able to run another mile.

Sure, every few months my friend Robbie can talk me into running a 5k. We even managed to bring home first and second in our age group back in December.

 

That sounds more impressive than it actually was. But I’m looking forward to another on St. Patrick’s Day weekend. I hear there’s a free Odell’s waiting for us at the end. Will run for beer, right?

But back to the new title: I can’t remember the exact train of thought right now, but I think I was laughing at myself over some random thought about either nutrition or my personal training course. I completely geek out over this stuff, I get so excited when I study it and learn more about how the human body works. 

And then there’s the fact that even back in high school there were times when I would choose to stay home with a book instead of going to hang out with friends. 

Plus I watch vampire shows. If that doesn’t make me a nerd, then we must have rather different definitions of the word.

 

So here I am, a self-named book worm and science nerd who is totally sucked into these stories about thousand (or hundred, depending which show we’re talking about) year old mythical creatures. Plus I’m a total rule-follower. It’s a little sad when your older coworker can make you feel like a total brown-noser. But there’s a lot to be said for hearing that your boss hopes you’ll be the one on duty when the brand standard auditor comes in, because they trust that you’ll get them a perfect score.

 

And about that lack of connection… it takes awhile to develop new best-friendships. And one of my best friends lost her mother a month ago yesterday. We finally had a good FaceTime talk yesterday, but distance makes it hard. I’ve told her over and over again that I wish to be there for her in whatever way possible. But I still have things rattling around in my brain (and in my heart) that I need to get out, and preferably in a conversation with someone who has been there the past few years and can give me some much needed perspective from my past. Alas, alack and woe is me. 

I just need to learn to put myself out there and worry less about awkward opening lines or imaginary boundaries. Unless it’s one of those times when you think the cute guy at the gym just gave you a big smile and later realize he was flashing it at the girl behind you. At that point it’s best to just roll your eyes and move along.

Colorado

I’ve learned a few things since moving to Colorado.

My skin type is not combination. It is, in fact, dry to normal. It just took me awhile to figure out why my bb cream was making my skin look all flaky.

After weather cold enough to freeze the pipes of the sprinkler system at work (even with antifreeze that should work to -18 degrees), 19 degrees and sunny feels downright comfortable. I’m expecting sunny 30 degree weather to only require a sweatshirt.

Even after 6 months to adjust to the altitude, I really should stop at 2 drinks if they include whisky.

Body oil, hot shower, lotion is the magic formula.

As ridiculous as you might find people who put their dogs in shoes, out of consideration for your apartment floors you become one of them.

New home

Well I made it! I’m here! I’m doing well! 

Passed some wind farms in Kansas, very cool to see these giants in person!

Keeping busy has been a huge help. Not leaving yourself time to dwell on things that might bother you is definitely the way to go. 

I’ve got my apartment, my temporary Colorado driver’s license, my Colorado license plates, and a plate mounting kit for my front bumper on order. I’ve changed all the addresses I can think of and registered to vote. Not sure what else there is to do but start paying Colorado taxes to make me an official resident (and that will start Monday)! And all in less than a week. 

I am also completely unpacked! I’m quite happy with how my room has turned out, though I still have a handful of stuff on my desk that need to find homes. 

I have a black and white painting of Paris that I might move from the mantel to above my bed, but it might be a little large for the space.

 

I also met another girl going into the nutrition program for lunch yesterday and she put in a rental application to be my roommate. Just an hour or so later I got a phone call with the job offer I was hoping for! Talk about two huge weights off my mind! 

I went to Old Town and bought myself a beer and a burger (with sundried tomatoes and basil goat cheese!) to celebrate. Can’t wait to actually meet people here so I don’t have to keep eating alone. It works out fine if I have a chatty bartender, but last night was not the case. So I watched the pretty scenery in the Tour de France coverage. 

Other than having no one to hang out with (the roommate is living in Denver until mid-August), I love my apartment and the town. A few too many stop lights for my taste, really (my car’s gas mileage doesn’t appreciate it either), but the town itself is great. I plan to go find some trails to walk with the dogs today. It’s so nice to be able to have all the windows open in July, too!