Happy Birthday Daddy-O!!

Yesterday my dad began the last year of his 50's.  We celebrated by heading down to his house for a day of food and family.  My dad loves to BBQ and be surrounded by all of his children/grandchildren, so that's exactly what we did.  We got there early-ish for a little brunch action with mimosas and bloody marys and stayed until dinner time for tri-tip and asparagus. 


With the fam

Forgot one!  Seester had to take the group pic.

No cake is big enough for 59 candles :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!  I hope you got everything you wanted!  Love you!!!

Fitness Friday

It's been a while since I have written one of these.  Mostly because it has been a while since I have had any sort of workout routine going on.  I was hitting it hard for a solid 2 months and then classes got crazy and then I started working my second job and was too tired to get up in the morning and working til bed time.  Yes, those sound like excuses, but I believe proper nutrition and needed rest are what help keep you in good shape, so I will take those over running myself down to get mo' fit.

Wanna hear something crazy?  Since I stopped working out in November, I have lost 10 lbs.  Your eyes do not deceive you, my friend, you read that correctly.  TEN.POUNDS.  This would be great if I was obsessed with the scale.  I still only weigh myself at the gym on the same scale, but I have only been weighing myself when I go in to get my hair done.  Yes, the gym has a salon in it, which my friend works at.  So anywho, back to that 10 lbs....

I started to notice a change in my body as soon as I stopped working out.  It was like my body waited to respond to all the work I was doing until after I stopped doing all the work.  I haven't really changed my eating habits since I stopped working out, except for cutting out the extra protein shakes after workouts and I have been able to maintain.  Knowing what little I know about body composition, I knew that if I my body seemed to be staying the same as I was losing weight, it was because I was losing muscle.  I had hubs measure my body fat and sure enough, even though I had lost 10 lbs, I had gained 5% body fat, meaning my muscles were dwindling away.

I refuse to have my body looking it's best during the winter months when it is hiding under all these layers and then plump up just in time for summer, so I need to get back on track.  Luckily, tax season is slowing down and will be over on April 20th, so I can get back to the grind.  Apparently if you don't use your muscles, you lose them.  And from what I have heard, it's harder for women to maintain muscle mass, which means I have to work that much harder.

I do my best to encourage people who are working on their fitness goals to focus on the changes they see in their body instead of the numbers on the scale and to use a different form of measurement than just their weight.  For me, standing at 5'6" and weighing 155 isn't an issue when my body fat is only 20%.  I am currently 146 with a 26% body fat and that tells me there is room for improvement.  Hubs sent me a photo he found online to prove my point:

It will be interesting to see if the number on the scale starts to creep back up as my body fat percentage decreases.  I'll be sure to keep you posted.

Monkey Turns 1!

We had little Monkey's first birthday party on the 12th, but I have been waiting for my SIL to post pics so I could share them with you because we all know I am incapable of bringing a camera anywhere with me.  Let's see a little comparison of my Monkey Moo:

What a chunky monkey!!!  Look how itty bitty she was!  She is now standing up on her own and I think she is pretty close to walking.  I love to see her face light up when she recognizes me.  I get to babysit on Saturday and I can't wait!  Here are some pics of Cupcake with her cupcake:

 And one more shot of me, Monkey and her birthday twin/namesake, GG:

Weekend Wrap-Up

I had quite an eventful weekend, and amazingly enough there are some pics to prove it.  Okay, so they are just phone pics, but better than nothing, right?

Friday night I got some free tickets to see this hottie at The Davis Graduate:

That's country singer, David Nail.  He sings wonderful songs like "Red Light" and his newsest single, "Let it Rain".  I was surprised to see that the guy who opened for him was this man:

That's Tyler Hilton, and if you are a One Tree Hill fan, you may know him as Chris from season two.  He helped Hayley with her music career, but caused a rift in her marriage with Nathan.  That scoundrel.

Let me tell you how excited we were to be at "The Grad"...well, maybe a picture would explain it better:

Yep, that pretty much sums it up.  This is an all ages club right across from a college campus, so it always smells like shame and vomit.  The only good thing about this place is that they have a bazillion beers on tap.  We waited in a line for ten minutes for a beer and when we got to the front of the line we found out it was a cash only bar and they have no ATM inside.  We headed over to the other bar that accepted cards and had a shorter wait and got the most gigantic beers I have ever seen.  I only had one because I was the DD, and it got warm faster than I could drink the whole thing, so...

The problem with this place, other than the place itself, is that there are giant beams and pillars all over the place, making positioning yourself to see the stage a difficult task.  Instead, I took pics with my friendies:

and at almost Midnight, I took a pic with the birthday girl who turned 30 on Saturday:

The show was great, and I had a fun night out with my girls, but I ended up going home with a headache that stayed with me through the next morning so I couldn't get up and go to work at the tax office.  Raging migraine.  I slept until 10am and then had to pump myself full of coffee and ibuprofen to get the pain to subside.  I went and got my hair did and then we headed to an engagement party for this lovely couple:

Sunday we went wine tasting at some nearby wineries for Tiff's birthday.  It was a gorgeous day and we went out to Sugar Mill which has several wineries in one location, so you can just walk back and forth to all of them and we had a nice little lunch outside.

I think Todd Taylor was the favorite of the day.  We went there last and got to take a tour of the back room and see how they make their wines.  We all headed back to one of our friends' house for dinner and more wine.  It was a great weekend with a great group of people.  The whole weekend I just kept thinking to myself, "I love my friends."

And now I am thinking of this video, ugh:

You're welcome.

5 More Weeks!!!

Hunger Games opens on March 23rd and I just found and instantly fell in love with this little number today:



Hunger Games + Taylor Swift = Swoon!

Happy Friday!

Major Letdown

So, I was over reading Shades of Gray and Caroline was talking about her childhood crush, who also happened to be mine.  Good ol' Jonathan Taylor Thomas, or JTT.  I was OBSESSED!!  I shit you not.  Hardcore obsessed. 

Some examples for you:

• I had to buy every single issue of Bop, Big Bopper, Tiger Beat, YM, and any other magazine that has his picture on the cover. 
• I would tear out his centerfold pics and made them into a border around the top of my walls. 
• I watched the Lion King a ridiculous amount of times, and to date it's my favorite Disney movie simply because he was the voice of Simba. 
• I have the timeless classics Man of the House and Tom & Huck on VHS, which I have also watched countless times.  Well, not since DVDs became all the rage and I lost track of my VCR.  Sad face.

and the thing that gave me ultimate fan status...wait for iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit....

• When I got my braces off freshman year and they were ready to make my retainers, they told me I could pick out whatever color I wanted and if I wanted to put a design or picture in the actual retainer, I could bring one in.  I got teal, because teal and purple was the most awesome color combo of the mid-90s (and the colors of my Lion King bedding, obvi) and I gave them a magazine cut-out of JTT's HEAD!!!  I legit had homeboy's dome piece on the roof of my mouth 24/7. 

Yeah, that really happened.  Unfortunately I put it in a napkin while I was eating nachos at a wrestling tournament my brother was in and it got thrown away :(

So while I was reading Caroline's blog and saw that he had gone from this:


Yummy

 To this:

Yucky

I was extremely disappointed and had to come over here and write this blog immediately.  Honestly though, when I just googled images of JTT, I was taken back to sitting on my twin bed staring up and the amazing border of his pics around my room.  Sigh...

My V-Day

 What if this wasn't at all a post about my first Valentine's Day as a wifey and was actually about a trip to the Gyno?  I would probably lose some readers. 

Lucky you, it IS about the former, not the latter...

I was actually scheduled to work at the tax office until 9pm on Valentine's Day until I got to work on Monday and my boss realized that he had totally C-Blocked my first Valetine's Day with my new hubby.  He let me trade my shift for Thursday night instead.  Given the situation, hubs and I had no V-Day plans and decided to pretty much keep it that way.  We haven't really done anything for birthdays, anniversaries, or Valentine's day in the past few years because of finances, so we probably wouldn't have really planned anything anyway.

Yesterday afternoon hubs texted me from work and I said, "When are you going to come and take me to lunch?"  Something we rarely ever do because he leaves one job around 1 or 2pm and heads to the next one.  Turns out he didn't have to work at the afternoon one yesterday, so he was able to come pick me up for an impromptu lunch date.  We went to Chicago Fire and shared salad and pizza.  Basically we stuffed ourselves silly.

Later that afternoon we had the conversation about dinner, but we were both still so full.  After deciding on turkey burgers and sweet potato fries if we ever got hungry again, he laid out some ground turkey.  After work, I decided to stop by Coldstone and use my groupon to get us a treat to surprise him with.  It was almost 7pm when I got home and neither of us were really hungry yet, so we just opened a bottle of wine and hit up the DVR for some Smash (Fave show of all time, BTW!!).  About an hour and one bottle of wine later, we decided to forgo the turkey burgers and just share a plate of sweet potato fries.  We finished the night off watching Biggest Loser while stuffing our faces with ice cream.

  

With as much as I have been working and as little as we have seen each other in the last few months, this was the most perfect Valentine's Day I could have asked for.  I don't need cards and flowers and jewelry to have a good Valentine's Day.  I'm not saying I would refuse them either, just so we are clear.

Single or in a relationship, what did YOU do for Valentine's Day?

Show Me The Money!!

In case you haven't noticed, it's tax season.  I have been trying really hard to keep up with everyone's blogs, but working 70 yhours a week right now is not the business when it comes to blog reading/writing, as you may have noticed.  I posted one whole blog in January....

Anywhoooooo....

Hubs and I have been talking about all the things we might do with our tax refund this year, so I thought I might jot all of these ideas down and get your opinion.

The original plan:

We have quite a bit of credit card debt left over from the wedding and I need to get the 90,000 mile service done on my car, along with some new tires, so the plan was to get that taken care of and then put the rest toward the credit card debt.

Then...

Some friends of ours have a timeshare in Cabo and it's only $100/night that would be split among 3 couples ($33/night) for 8 days of tropical deliciousness in a 3 bed/3 bath beach front condo.  So we take the money for the car stuff and then the money for Cabo and then put the rest on the credit card.

But then...

I figured, we have been in our house for 2 years and still have nothing but dirt in our tiny backyard and our justification for not doing anything back there has been that we have no money.  How can we justify spending $2,000 on a trip to Cabo and not get the backyard done.  So....since the car service is a must in all of these scenarios, we take out that money and then get some estimates for the backyard and see what we can do back there with what we have and then put the rest on the credit card.  JB suggested maybe we just take a smaller trip for our anniversary to San Deigo for the World Fitness Convention in July.  I loved the idea, but when all was said and done, we would still be spending the same amount on that trip as we would be going to Cabo.  The upside was that next year JB can deduct the trip as a business expense because the expo offers continuing education units for some of his certifications.

We still haven't come to a conclusion on this.  The expo would be $500 for 3 days for him and almost $200 for me to go for one day.  I asked him to think about just picking the day he would most like to attend and then we both go that day.  Two one-day passes for the price of almost one three-day pass.  Luckily we can drive down there and we have friends we could stay with for free, so the only thing we would pay for is gas/food/expo.  Like I said, the jury is still out on this one.

Next up we have....

I am pretty set on the backyard idea and the car is a must.  The SD trip is up in the air, but one thing I know for certain, I really, really, really, really, really, really want an iPad.  For multiple reasons that are almost justifiable, but mostly that lately I have been in such a technology rut.  I love-love-loved my iPhone, but I gave it up because I couldn't get one through work and I couldn't afford the $100 monthly bill anymore.  Now I have a droid for work and I HATE it.  Nothing is easy to do from my phone, especially blogging/twitter/FB (plus it's a work phone, so I probably shouldn't be doing all of that from there anyway, LOL).  I know this sounds really trivial and I am almost embarrassed to be writing this for all of you to read (especially Sean), but it's so true.  So, I think when the iPad 3 comes out, I will just get a wireless-only 2, since they will be cheaper then.  We'll see. 

Then today...



Minus the DVDs and Treadmill

 I started thinking about our unfinished room upstairs that is attached to the loft and used as attic space right now.  We don't have much stuff to store so we could probably cut the storage space to only a quarter of the room, throw up some sheet rock/texture and throw down some rubber flooring, and turn that bad boy into a workout room.  Lucklily I am married to a personal trainer who knows how to design amazing workouts without any major equipment.  We would need some sandbags, kettle bells, a mounted TRX (or something similar) and a few other items and we would be good to go.  The room already has an AC register, so we don't have to worry about figuring out how to control the climate in there, and I know some pretty handy people who could help make this happen fairly easily.  This one is a definite possibility.

So, what do you think?  Which option would you go with?  Are you getting a refund this year?  Any big plans?  Wanna play 20 questions?