Hello, again!

A friend of mine told me recently that it was time to update my blog, so here I am.

I've been busy the last couple of weeks and have hardly been on the computer.

While Sarah and Robert have been taking some time finishing schoolwork for their last classes, I kept Ethan. My mom usually keeps him, but right now she's working for the Census, so she's been busy with that. There was one day that we went to Bahama Bucks for sno-cones, and I was able to take a couple of pictures:

The next day Sarah brought him here and we decided to go down to the pool and go swimming. He had never done it in a big pool before and he's a very cautious child, but he did an excellent job. Of course he was timid about it, but I was able to coax him to let me carry him all over the swimming pool and he loved it. That night I went to Wal-Mart and got some pool toys for him which he ended up really liking. He over for the next few days and he's trusting me more and more to do things.

Here he is at our pool's tanning deck, where the water is only 6 inches:

The second one was a different day before we got in the pool, but it was cute anyway. :)

This past weekend was pretty busy. We went to the graduations for Bryan and Alissa on Saturday, (Bryan is Travis' brother, and Alissa is Bryan's girlfriend) and it was a long day. Their university had two ceremonies for the graduates, and of course they weren't in the same ceremony, so we sat through both. On Sunday I went to my sister's graduation which wasn't near as bad, except it was REALLY hot. Though it made for very busy weekend full of time on the road, I'm proud of them all. :)

What else is going on? Oh, right. My birthday is tomorrow and you are allowed to send lots of money and gifts my way. Don't forget, mkay?

New stuff! :D

Yesterday my mom and I went to TJ Maxx, and I saw these really great lamps that I wanted for our bedroom, but since Travis wasn't there, I wasn't just going to fork over $60 for lamps that he possibly doesn't like, you know?

So today I take him by there, and he liked them and agreed that they would be a good addition to our bedroom. Maybe the need to show them off to people that come over will inspire me to get our bedroom in order.

Now presenting, my new lamp(s)! There are two, but I only took one picture, duh.

Also, pardon the other lamp in the background. I've yet to find a new home for it.

The shade is white, though I could definitely handle getting a colored shade later on. They had 3 of these lamps, 1 of which had a grey shade in the same style, which I really would have preferred, but since they only had one like that, I just got the white ones.

Anyway, yay new lamps! :)

I'm a neglecter.

So I have been terrible and neglected my blog for a while. But I've been kind of busy, I guess.

Last week, Travis and I went with his brother (Bryan) and Bryan's girlfriend Alissa to a Chick-Fil-A opening about an hour from here in hopes of being in the first 100 and getting free Chick-Fil-A for a year.

We were not in the first 100, but were there in time to qualify for the raffle...which we didn't win, but whatever. We had a good time and lots of laughs. It may have been a day wasted, but it's not like I missed work for it or anything. It was something to do.

Over the weekend, I went to the beach and it was so pleasant. I really enjoy a sunny day just laying in the sun with a friend, watching the water.

I also watched this movie with some friends this weekend called Arlington Road. It was a fairly low-budget movie made in 1999 with Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins. It ultimately was a fictional story about terrorism in America by Americans, and it was actually really good. It was filmed in surrounding areas to where I live, and the homes that they used for the neighborhood was filmed literally around the corner from my friend's house, though she didn't live there at the time. It was strange because we walked by the houses and then watched the movie, so it was like, "Hey! I was just there!"

I watched Precious today. I don't know what I was expecting, but I don't think it's what I was expecting, though I have to give credit to the acting in the movie. I do think I liked it, though it was a little rough to watch.

I guess that today is a movie theme, because I am going to have to spend some time soon watching American Beauty. I was thinking about that movie yesterday and realized I haven't watched it in a while. It's one of my very favorites, and I've probably seen it a gazillion times.

I often wonder if anyone else is like me and can watch movies over and over like I can. But if it's a movie I really like, I enjoy the story. It's like reading an old book over and over. It's just something that you do.

Anyway, I'm boring and that's all I have for now.

I'm sitting here waiting for the dryer to finish its cycle and am flipping through photos on Facebook to pass the time. You know how Facebook works. You end up adding most of the people that you went to school with, regardless of your current relationship with them. If you were friendly to each other in school, then you're Facebook friends.

This, as you know, allows me to be nosy and look at peple's pictures and try to figure out what their life is like to an extent. That's what brings me to this post.

There are a number of people on my friends list that post pictures of their life constantly, which is fine. It doesn't bother me one way or the other because I don't have to look at them. Through these pictures, I can see the inside of their home, how they dress, places they go, who they spend time with, etc, and usually makes me happy for them or sad for them.

Today I was looking through a few albums of a girl that I know, and I always remember her as being a nice, fun, happy person, but from what I can remember, she grew up in a world of financial difficulty, and due to the neighborhood that she lived in, was probably exposed to a lot of things that a kid shouldn't have been exposed to. In the photos I saw of her, it seems like her life is no different now. She seems live in the same type of neighborhood, if not the same one that she grew up in. She seems happy, which is good, but I can't help but wonder if she ever really tried to change her life for the better.

I wonder this about people all the time. I didn't have an easy childhood. We didn't have a nice house. We didn't have a nice (or even decent), car. My mom worked really hard to support her children and we just always had troubles along the way. When I started kindergarten, I knew then that I wanted to be a teacher. I didn't know yet that it was a profession that required college, since most 5 year-old kids don't know what college is, but I remember learning later that I would have to go to college and that college cost money.

I didn't really care though. The older I got, the more I was convinced that I wanted to have a different life than what my mom had. She worked hard and did the best she could. I tell her this still and I'm grateful for that, but that doesn't mean that I want to follow in her exact footsteps. So I made it happen. And my siblings have made it happen. My older sister is graduating in May with her Bachelor's and I couldn't be more proud, especially since she got some kind of award for her hard work. She's paid her way through school while having a child. Just because her life didn't go exactly according to her plan, didn't stop her from continuing in achieving goals she set for herself.

So maybe it's because of the way that my mind works that it makes me sad for the people who never try. It's one thing to try and fail, but keep trying. It's different to try and fail never try again, or to just never try to change their life in the first place.

Oh, abbreviations.

Just now I was reading status updates and whatnot on my Facebook when I keep hearing "UTI" from the television.

I was wondering why on earth they were discussing UTIs on television and saying it over and over.

Then I realized that they were talking about the Universal Technical Institute:


not Urinary Tract Infections.

That's about as bad as my college prefacing the students' email addresses with 'std' for student, but of course everyone was like, "WHY DO THEY HAVE SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE IN MY EMAIL?!"

That's all. It made me chuckle.

A recap of my really uneventful life.

Well, today was day 3 of my new workout plan, and I am beginning to hurt all over. I tell myself that this pain is going to be my success, so I push through it, but I haven't hurt like this in a really long time.

Yesterday I focused on my arms and realized that I have no arm strength to do anything. If my life depended on me doing say...a pull up or push up correctly, let's just say that you'd be making a trip to the funeral home before too long.

After I got home yesterday, Melinda and Jill came over in the afternoon to watch Planes, Trains and Automoblies for the first time. I felt that it was necessary for me to expose them to this genius piece of 1980s nostalgia, and they both really liked it. Like normal, we'd pause mid-movie to start chatting and things, because I think it's impossible to have the three of us together and get true silence.

We were talking about workouts and gym memberships, and I found out that both of them have one, which got me thinking...why does nobody ever talk about going to the gym? Had I known that people I know actually go to the gym and it's not just something that you see in movies, I possibly would've been motivated a lot sooner to get up and do it. It makes me wonder who else is working out in secret. ;)

For dinner, I made mahi-mahi with lemon pepper, oregano, basil, garlic powder and onion powder that was cooked in the skillet with a round of EVOO. (Hello, Rachael Ray.) It was DELICIOUS. I do the same recipe with tilapia, but I think I prefer it with the mahi-mahi because the mahi-mahi is a thicker cut than the tilapia and doesn't fall apart so easily, but is equally mild in flavor.

I had invited Kim over for dinner and she came in right as I had finished cooking so we ate and then watched LOST. I won't share any spoilers in case someone isn't yet caught up, but I will say I appreciate that they're slowly bringing questions that I've had since the first seasons back to the surface and answering them. The episode was soooo good and I got mad when this came up:

Cliffhangers kill me! I hate that there are only 4 more episodes left. I am really not looking forward to having nothing to look forward to from June-February each year. Not to mention, I would like to think that Jack, Sawyer, Kate, Hurley, Claire, Sayid, Locke, Sun, Jin and the rest are all REAL people. Not Matthew Fox, Josh Hollaway, Evangeline Lilly, Jorge Garcia, Emilie De Ravin, Naveen Andrews, Terry O'quinn, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim, etc.

Have I said that I'm an avid LOST watcher? In case you couldn't tell, I am.

As tired as I was yesterday evening I got a second wind RIGHT before I was about to pry myself off of the couch and head to bed. I hate when that happens. It happens far too often.

I got up this morning around 6:50, made scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast and then met Kim and the gym. We worked our abs today. I'm curious to see if we worked them hard enough. For me, the true test will be if I can feel it tomorrow or not. If I can't, then that's what I'm going to re-work tomorrow. When I was doing my cardio workout, I started getting a headache (of course) and ended up cutting it a little shorter than I would like to.

Yesterday, I put all of my workout and calorie intake for the day into an app on my iTouch, and it measures how many calories you're taking in and burning. It gives you a budget of calories for the day, and I had 548 left over. It made me want to eat a few Oreos, but it was too late to eat. That part is going to be a hard habit to break: not eating when I'm up late.

That's more than plenty of text for now. :)

Workout: Day One.

Well, 7am creeped up on me this morning much sooner than I would have liked for it to. I went to bed late because I was up making my workout playlist, (a workout must, duh!) and it took me a while to fall asleep.

But that probably (and hopefully) won't be happening tonight. Hopefully I'll be exhausted and want to go to bed at like, 9, so that I can get up and start it all over again.

Kim and I met there at 8am to meet with the trainer, Rachael. We did the BMI thing, and it was actually better than I figured it would be. I just knew she was going to look at it and say, "Wow. You're so fat, that even your bones have converted to fat. You are at a 100% BMI and all 100% of that is body fat. Way to go."

I won't say my weight, but I will say that I am 41.7% body fat and my BMI was around 35-38. I can't remember that part. Clearly, I'm waaaaaay to fat, since a person my age should be at 19%.

They didn't take my body measurements, but I'm thinking that I'm capable of this on my own. I have a tape measure. And I have a camera. My intention is to have all of that written down and then every month or so, I want to re-measure, take a new picture and compare the differences.

Maybe once I'm feeling confident and have made some progress I'll post all of that information here and then it'll be out there for the whole world to see, thus keeping me encouraged to not go back to that.

To start my workout, Rachael said to do a 10-minute cardio warm-up on something that wasn't a treadmill, so I chose a bike machine. I was proud of myself for keeping a really steady speed of about 83rpm.

After that, Rachael had us do strength training on our legs for 30 minutes. She said instead of working everything at once, work your legs one day, your arms and upper chest another, your abs another, etc, so that our bodies don't get overwhelmed.

In the past, between sets I'd just sit and drink water or something, but she really enforced the idea to keep your heart rate up so that your calorie burn is higher, which makes sense to me. So this was the first time in my life that I had really worked-out non stop for about an hour. You know what I suck at? Lunges. Oh my. I have no muscles in my thighs apparently, because lifting my fat self back up after going down wasn't easy. But I did it. :)

She had me do anywhere from 10-20 reps depending on what machine I was using and then I'd do anywhere from 5-20 reps of the alternate strength training, such as lunges, pumping myself up onto my tip-toes, etc.

After that part of the work out, I did about 10 minutes, on the bicycle again, about 5 minutes on the elliptical, (My legs were waaaaaay to tired for all of that excitement) and did the treadmill for about 10 more minutes going at a quick pace with an incline. For my cool down I did about 5 minutes on the treadmill when it was flat and much slower.

I could easily go back to sleep now, but I won't. Good day. Good workout.