Read Head

It was an interesting if not entirely productive morning.  My computer had an incredibly annoying virus which I dealt with, but which took forever.  I was freezing – in spite of the heat being on and my turtleneck – so I curled up on the couch with a comforter and a book.  So cozy!  I fell asleep for a bit and was woken up by UPS –

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Yay!  And then I finished my book!  I have always loved to read, I devour books, but it’s been forever since I’ve been able to just curl up with one for hours.  I read Madness, Marya Hornbacher’s (second) memoir.  It was good; very sad, but interesting.  I read her first memoir, Wasted, when I was in middle school and it seriously changed the way I thought about literature.  Hornbacher is such a beautiful writer, her style is all off the place and full of vivid descriptions, it’s perfect for me.

The rest of the afternoon, unfortunately, was completely killed by a migraine 😦  I’ve grown out of them for the most part, and now they are pretty responsive to Ecedrin Migraine, but they still eat up a few hours.  When Adam got home around 5 I realized that part of the problem was having not eaten since breakfast so we split a Granny Smith apple.

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I spread my portion witha 100calorie pack of Justin’s Organic Honey Peanut Butter.  I love pb on tart apples.

Our main fun for the evening was a trip to the grocery store so we made a weekly meal plan and off we went.  I love doing errands with my husband so much!!!  The grocery store is one of my favorite places, especially because they gave me several free samples today 🙂

Dinner was eaten in a strange series of courses, all of which were quite good.  I was at the stove, so I ate most of them there, which was actually sort of cathartic.  Btw, I was at the stove because I was making Adam a Wholly Wholesome Pumpkin Pie.

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The husband is a crazy-face; he is obsessed with pumpkin (“punkin” he says) pie but won’t let me make it from scratch because apparently that would be gross?!

First dinner course, 2 celery stalks with 1t light chunky blue cheese dressing.

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My huge package this afternoon came from Dr. McDougall’s.  I had never heard of their soups before, but when they sent me a description and asked me if I wanted some samples I happy obliged.  I tried veggie today.

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The company was quite sweet, and sent me this pretty place setting from Crate & Barrel.  So fall-ish!

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I liked the nutritional stats on the soup, and almost never eat one portion when it comes to soup, so I ate the whole box.

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It was quite good.

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Third course, and the other reason I was at the stove, was bbq cabbage.

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I didn’t measure anything but I’ll give you the basic steps/ingredients.  Heat Smart Balance Light in a pan over medium-high heat.  Add 1/2 head chopped napa cabbage.  Cook for 2-3minutes before adding 1/2 – 1 cup of water and covering.  After sufficient steaming time, douse with worchestire sauce, hot sauce, honey, ketchup, and apple cider vinegar.  Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, covered, for 7-10 more minutes.  Delish, it ended up being like I imagine Kim Chi would taste.

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Finally, I ate 1.5 servings of Synder’s Buffalo Wing pretzels while Adam and I watched the new episode of Bones.

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The perfect date evening!

It’s too bad I spent most of my day asleep, because now I have more to do this weekend, but I do feel well-rested.  We have a lot planned for tomorrow, all of which I’m pretty excited for.  Happy weekending everyone!

Who is your favorite author? As I mentioned, I have a reading obsession, but Hornbacher is definitely one of my favorites.  I am also a big fan of C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Gregory Maguire, and Kurt Vonegut.

Hitchin’ a Ride

Volunteering went well and now I’m making a quick stop home before I head to school.  I have to wait for Adam to come home with the car so I figured I’d do a quick lunch post.

Small cup vegetarian chili –

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Dang this was an interesting post!!! 😉  See you this evening.

How do you get around?  If you have a car, is it yours alone or do you share?  Here in Buffalo I am 80% car 20% walking and I share a car with my husband.  In NYC it was 70% walking 30% subway, I miss that!

Pretend You Saw This Last Night

*****NOTE***** This was written last night and would have been posted if WordPress didn’t suck so bad.

What a difference a day makes; I am in such a better frame of mind! Nothing stereotypically exciting happened today, but my nerdy self was in heaven 🙂

My doctor’s appointment went great; she thinks my next appointment might be my last! I can’t even image having an uninterrupted training schedule, so exciting. I went straight from the doctor’s to school, meaning I was at school from 2-8. I snacked on my Sahale Ksar Blend while I studied notecards.

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The bag had two servings, but was a perfect larger snack.

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A couple of hours later I ate my Cashew Protein Plus Boomi Bar while doing practice problems. It was delish.

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My test was 6:30 – 7:50. I actually think I did pretty well. There is one problem I know I messed up, but overall I knew what I was doing. I will not, however, be cramming for test #2, it would have been much less stressful to just study properly in advance.

Adam was with friends studying future doctor stuff so I met up with them. I had a great time watching them practice taking vitals, and I also managed to somehow do more chemistry; I read a whole chapter! Plus our friend Benji made fabulous roasted eggplant soup for dinner.

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I had a small bowl with a slice of bread. We got home around 11:30 and the productivity continued; the planned out our meals for the next week! I am definitely proud of how much I accomplished today. Tomorrow will be busy as well, there are a lot of to-do’s on the agenda. I’ve got to go rest up, see you tomorrow!

Why are you proud of yourself today?

I Didn’t See Its Shadow

A successful evening, all around!  Lab went well and I got back my quiz from last week – 100%, woot!  That makes me feel much more confident about next week’s test.  Plus I made plans with a friend from class to study this weekend, so I know I won’t slack off.  And on the way in we made a new friend, my very first groundhog sighting!

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During lab recitation I snacked on this Perfect Pumpkin Boomi Bar.

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This was nice and crunchy, and perfect for the first day of pumpkin month!

When I got home I had a gourmet dinner in mere minutes –

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Moo Shu Stoup leftovers from August.  No one ever wants soup more than twice in a row and it freezes well so it is the perfect thing for long-term leftovers.  Plus it is easy peasy:

  1. Measure portions into ziplock baggies
  2. Lay flat on a baking sheet and put into the freezer overnight
  3. In the morning, remove the sheet and you have perfect frozen soup stacks

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All we had to do tonight was make new veggie dumplings, and Adam did that so for me it was easy 🙂

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I’m still super hungry, but I’m trying to have a drink and see if it passes.  We are watching Cold Mountain, so it’s possible I’ll get a snack in a bit.  ‘Night.

Do you make long-term leftovers?  What dishes work best?

*****Updated – We stayed up waaay to late watching Cold Mountain (which was super sad and sort of disappointing) and I did have a snack.

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When I made cookies the other day I reserved 2 pieces of dough and tonight I crushed them into some Purely Decadent Coconut Milk Coconut Ice Cream.  Good idea!

Listed

This post is check off style, following my to-do list from the last post.

#2 – Feed my sourdough starter. 

#3 – Eat some damn fruit.  All this was blended into a tasty smoothie.

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Er, uncheck

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My blender exploded.  That was fun.  So I drank the rest of my sample from Ooba, and ate a Farmer’s Market plum while I cooked.

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#4 – Make dinner.

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We used a Racheal Ray recipe, Mu Shu Stoup, from Just in Time.  I can’t post the recipe, but it had chicken, cabbage, and pot stickers, and was delicious.

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#1 – Fill in my new planner.  I was so frickin excited to start a new planner!  It is kind of sad how obsessively I plan; I used to plan out my outfits for vacations on paper and my friends would tease me mercilessly 🙂

#5 – Find time to curl up with my new reading material.  No check, boo.  But I did eat a yummy dessert while we watched “My So-Called Life.”

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I warmed it in the microwave, so it was nice and gooey.

And now if I hurry, hurry, hurry in the shower, maybe I can skim a magazine!  Night.

Do you keep a planner?

Reflections and Refraction

I am back, officially!  I promised some reflecting in the last post, as to why I was being such a naughty blogger –

I am freaking out a bit.  About going back to school, about moving, about not having any idea what I want to do with the rest of my life.  About only taking one class next semester, about that class being too hard for me.  About quiting teaching.  About going back to teaching.  The list goes on, and there are a lot of contradictions.

It does not help that I am beyond exhausted, I don’t sleep well anyways and our new neighborhood is astonishingly noisy.  In the interest of full disclosure, I will also mention that I am becoming very depressed about my foot.  I’ve mentioned that I had plantars worts on my left foot (I am apparently with out an immune system!) and now instead of 3 I have 5.  And I don’t have a doctor’s appointment for another month.  And my foot hurts like heck and I’m afraid it will effect my marathon training.

From these reflections, I realized that I’ve been doing some self-sabotaging.  I’ve been eating crappy food, not working out, not studying.  I had planned on signing up for a week yoga pass (I have to do it now because once school starts my class is all at night) when I realized that I was dreading going.  That is not the feeling I want to have, towards yoga of all things.  I decided I will not do more than 5-10minutes of strength training a day until class starts, and let myself focus on volunteering and chemistry review.  I’ve had a lot of big changes in the last month, I need to allow myself to deal.

Today, I ate an Orange Cranberry Gnu Bar sample on my walk to volunteering.

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Probably the best flavor I’ve tried so far.

For lunch I used my volunteer voucher to get a cup of vegetarian chili, which I topped with cheddar cheese and jalopenos.

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I love veggie chili so much, I have a list of chili recipes I am excited to make this winter.  This was beyond tasty for cafeteria food, but left my mouth pretty spicy so I ate half a sample bag of Sahale Snacks Soledad Almonds Nut Blend.

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This was a much more pleasant flavor to spend the afternoon with 🙂

After volunteering I walked back to a coffee shop in my area and set up shop for studying.  As mentioned, I am taking one class this semester (Gen. Chem. I with a lab).  To prepare I’ve been working on Chemistry for Dummies.  I studied from 2:15 – 5:45 and while I worked I had an iced coffee – 1sugar, splash of cream – and the rest of my nuts.

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The bag had 2servings, 260calories in total, and was just the right amount of munching to keep me focused.

Tonight I have some more to-do’s to check off (including putting away the laundry I did more than 24hours ago!) and I have a 10pm bedtime goal.  See ya for dinner!

What have you been freaking out about lately?

Cold and Not So Hot

My volunteering meeting went well – I completed orientation and once my TB test gets cleared on Friday I will be ready to start.  I am trying to get in as many hours as possible before school starts so I will be going pretty much full-time for the next three weeks – Monday through Thursday from 8am to 4pm.

After volunteering I came home and met up with the husband for more local exploration.  We drove out to Erie and walked around the waterfront a little bit.

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We spotted a cute ice-cream stand and I bought a lemon ice.

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I ate about half before handing it off to Adam.

We did more house-fixing when we got home and then headed out for our first Buffalo run!  I ate a Stoneyfield YoKids Banilla yogurt to refuel first.

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We did 2miles around the neighborhood in 20minutes.  I am painfully out of shape, I can’t wait until 2miles don’t kick my butt any more!  I kept my heart rate monitor on through 10minutes of floor work (stretching, 100 abs reps, and 50 arms reps with my 5lb weights) and all total I burnt 344 calories.

When we were done we cooked our first Buffalo dinner!  We made cold avocado soup and sandwiches.

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We used our George Foreman to make the grilled cheese sandwiches, I used 2 slices of reduced fat colby-jack on mine.

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And the soup was a Rachael Ray magazine recipe which I will include for those of you who enjoy cold soup, but it didn’t really float our boats.

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No-Cook Avocado Bisque, serves 4

  • 2 large avocados (we ended up accidentally buying “Slimcados” which have 35% less fat and calories but tasted the same)
  • 2C buttermilk
  • 4 scallions, green and white parts sliced separately
  • grated peel and juice of one lime
  • 16 ice cubes
  • salt
  • 1lb tomatoes, coursely chopped (we used three plum tomatoes)
  1. Put 1 avocado, buttermilk, scallion whites, lime peel and 3/4 of lime juice in the blender.  Blend on low speed and then blend in ice cubes one by one until smooth.
  2. Meanwhile coarsely chop the remaining avocado and then combine with tomatoes, scallion greens, and the rest of the lime juice.
  3. Divide soup among 4 bowls and top with with guac.

We were excited to have leftovers for lunch but after tasting it we are less excited!  I ate about half of my bowl (but my grilled cheese was great!).

Now I’ve got to go because we are watching old episodes of “My So Called Life” that we Netflixed, night!

Do you like cold soup?  I had some kind of cold fruit soup a few years ago that I loved but now I’m not sure if I enjoy it.