Happy Seasonal Spheres Day!

Workout:
Saturday: Ran 3.4 miles in 28:48. No calf ache but my whole body was tired and it was really hard to get through the run

Apparently, someone was displeased with calling today "Easter" and now the P.C. thing is to call it "Seasonal Spheres Day". Yeah...whatever. If you don't believe that Jesus rose today, then just call today April 24th. I don't understand the issue here.

On Thursday, my friend Sarah and I went over to my Grandma's to dye Easter eggs with Cousin.

Sarah, me, and Cousin

Eye dying pros!

Our bounty. That blue egg says "Special". I poked a hole in it as I was writing the L. It really was a special egg.

Sarah and I discovered that we both do this weird hand movement thing on our hip bones when we're bored. A video would've explained this better. But just go with the fact that we're weird and awkward.

Dorks.

Grandma made us cupcakes with marshmallow bunnies on top!

On Friday night, Bestie was in town. We went out to dinner at 33rd Street Bistro in East Sac and had a yummy dinner of spicy chicken lettuce wraps and salad. I should've taken pictures but we were having too much fun gossiping and gabbing. Afterwards, we went to a dive bar to meet with a guy I met online (yes, I have entered the world of online dating). It was a pretty fun time overall.

Saturday, my grandma had Easter lunch/dinner at her house because no one could make it for Easter dinner on the actual day of Easter. We also celebrated my aunt's birthday and my baby cousin Wesley's birthday.

Birthday flower was a Siamese twin! You can see the two heads of the flower attached together.

My technologically advanced cousins playing on their iPad. I wanna be that cool!

A glass of Martinelli's sparkling cider with the perfect sentiment for the day.

Between dinner and dessert, my grandma whipped out her Bingo set. We played 5 games. Grandma won twice. It had to have been rigged!

My grandma doesn't mess around. We have a legit number spinner!

So close to winning, but I only won the very last game!

Baby cousin Wesley wearing his Tim Lincecum Giant's shirt. Get them started early!

Cousin Love!

I hope everyone has a great Easter day, spending time with your family and friends!

New Things

Hi lovelys :) As you can tell from the blast of purple hitting your eyes right now, I changed the design of my blog. My goal was to make it look a little classier and easier to read than before. I'm very big on the artistic appeal and aesthetics of things. Switching up the color scheme and background seemed a perfect idea. Many bloggers use a plain white background and add color through the text or their header, but I still wanted to keep color in the background. Hopefully the purple isn't an eyesore. If you experience seizures and/or lapses of consciousness from the purple background, please inform me :)

Secondly, I have my very first personal training session tomorrow, which I am super excited about! I won a free personal training session for having been a member of 24 Hour Fitness for 6 months. Heck yeah fitness! I'm looking forward to getting new arm exercises to add to my repertoire and maybe learn some new ways to strengthen my lame calves.

Thirdly, I'll be going for a 5 miler later today, followed by a walk/jog around a local park with some friends because one of them wants to start yyyyogging like us cool kids. I figured it'd be a nice cool down after my long run since I don't think we'll be running Kara Goucher fast (love that woman!).

Fourthly, Cousin and I made cookies last night. Cousin is allergic to gluten and dairy, so it really put a cramp in our cooking style. Luckily, there are other people out there with her same food issues who invented weird things like egg replacer and dairy-free/gluten-free cookie mix.

Cousin and I had tons of wonderful girl talk while making the cookies. She's in her freshman year of college so it was fun to talk about school and boys, mostly about boys and how dumb they can be :D

Cookie dough ready to be baked!

Cookies done!

The recipe turned out pretty well. The cookie dough never spread out in the oven and stayed exactly how we had plopped them down on the sheet. The cookies were pretty bready. Cousin said they tasted like chocolate chip bread, which, although I've never had that, I agree.

Yes, I normally look like that weird when surrounded by cookies. Cookie Monster wasn't my favorite Muppet for nothing!

Hope everyone has a fabulous Wednesday! And yes, I'm still floating on cloud 9 after yesterday :D

The Best Holiday of the Year!

Yesterday, I had a field trip to the UC Davis campus for one of my classes. I planned on going to the gym afterward, but forgot my sports bra in my gym bag. Sad panda! I ran around my neighborhood instead and did 3.4 miles in 28:15. The legs felt strong and good :) After the run, I made a pretty random meal of steamed broccoli, 2 hard boiled eggs, and a blueberry/raspberry bran muffin from Trader Joe's.

Yes, that's most definitely a Cookie Monster bowl from when I was 3.

I had to go with my grandma and mom to the airport to pick up my cousin since she's visiting for her spring break. Her flight was supposed to come in at 10:30 PM, but as most airlines go, it was late. I amused myself with taking pictures to pass the time.

SUPER fluffy and blurry Chow that pulled this lady's wheelchair. Talk about slave labor!

Me and my grandma

Ruby finally got off the plane and we managed to get home by 12 AM. I was a tired pup!

Ok, so onto to the BEST holiday of the year! UC Davis has an annual tradition of hosting Picnic Day, which is an open house for the public to come visit all of the departments, learn, interact, and have fun. It is also a big tradition for the students to drink copiously, which has caused a lot of problems in the past, but they cracked down a lot this year since last year was so bad that they threatened to shut down Picnic Day indefinitely! This year, I met up with some friends and we meandered around campus, enjoying the 80* sunny weather and good company.

Kristen, her friend, me, and Misty with our new tomato and pepper plants

Buzzy bees!

Yummy honey jelly beans from the Entomology department

Action Jackson, the jack at the horse barn

Me and Misty on a random couch tier. Gotta love my school!

We shucked our own corn cobs and got popcorn!

My tomato and pepper plants somehow survived the day unscathed!

Super dirty feet from walking around in flip flops all day. Not my best idea ever.

Now, it's time to sleep after a long day walking around in the sun.

2 Day Ketchup...err...Catch-up!

Hey bloggy buddies! Sorry I haven't been around the last 2 days. Life got hectic. But I'm back with adventures and stories.

Ok, let's start off with workouts. On Wednesday, I wanted to give my legs a break from running because they held me well for the 5 miler and besides weight lifting, I haven't been crosstraining at all. I did this free range Precor machine that's sort of like an elliptical but not. It's hard to describe. Anyway, I did that and a bunch of leg exercises. They gym was super busy and it was easier to get to the leg machines than fight with the brahs over the use of the arm machines.

Yesterday, I did a weird spontaneous speed workout at the gym on the mill. Most of the time, the incline was set at .5%, but I started off at 1%. At 1 mile in, I picked the pace up from 8:57 min mile to 8:24 or something close to that. I held that to 1.5 miles, then dropped down to 8:57 again until the 2 mile mark. Then I picked up to 8:30 pace until the 2.5 mile mark. It was an odd workout, I'll tell you. I had no plan, as is very apparent. Oh well, my legs still feel good today. I also did arm exercises afterward.

Have I told you guys that I'm the ONLY girl at my gym who does the bench press?! Can you believe that?! Very few of the women even do any arm workouts, much less the "manly" bench press. I can say with confidence that my girls are looking mighty prettier since having done the bench press. C'mon girls, work those pecs!

Ok, food time! I came up with this awesome "recipe" on Wednesday and wanted to share. I put recipe in quotes because when I cook, I throw things together and 99% of the time, I think they taste awesome!

So I started with quinoa:

I made the whole box, like a fool, thinking it wouldn't make that much. Now I have 2 very full Tupperwares of the stuff and have to eat it everyday so it doesn't go bad! Good thing I love quinoa!

This is one of my biggest pots and it was FULL!

Then, I chopped up a bunch of different veggies: celery, carrots, mushrooms, crushed garlic, and green onions. I also added in some chopped almonds. I sauteed them together with Annie's Natural Roasted Garlic EVOO. If you don't have that stuff, I highly recommend getting it. It tastes so good!

Once they were done, I put the quinoa in a bowl and piled the veggies on top. I mixed in a little salt and dried basil to add some flavor.

It was very tasty and easy to make, plus you get a lot of nutrients out of this meal, which is always my goal.

Last night, my uncle came into town to visit and I went over to my grandma's for a family dinner. My grandma looooves celebrating any holiday she can. I think she would celebrate Labor Day if she could. She makes cupcakes and buys you pretty useless presents, but it brings her so much joy that we can't really tell her to stop. Even if we did, she would still do it, so there's no use! She made up Easter presents for my mom and me.

How stinking cute is this?!

Bunny bag filled with chocolate eggs, egg bath gel, and hand towels for when I get my apartment.

Grandmas are the best! My cousin, Ruby, is coming in tonight from college to spend her Spring Break with us! I'm so excited!

Puppy is happy too!