Guy Fawkes Celebration

So I realize that last weekend is pretty much long gone, but I wanted to tell you about it anyways.  We have a friend that lives in our complex that is British and she wanted to celebrate a British holiday that occurrs on November 5^th. Its called Guy Fawkes day. For those of you that don’t know the story, I’ll give you the low down. Apparently, sometime in British history, there was a guy who tried to blow up parliament. Unfortunately for him, the plan failed and he was brutally tortured and executed. That’s the story in a teeny tiny nutshell.  So November 5^th became a holiday for the British to have big bonfires and burn a wooden man. (Sorry Heather, I realize that is a really lame explanation of the festivities, but that’s about as detailed as it gets for this non-British girl.) To celebrate we got our group of friends together and went up the canyon to celebrate and it was tons of fun.

Here’s the group before the celebration began:

This is our own Guy Fawkes. Heather sneaked all the free newspapers from the BYU creamery and we stuffed her old pajamas with newspaper and made him a head out of plastic bags. Aint he cute? Quite stylish too I think..

Me and my other half.. 

Us girls. Heather(on left) and Ali(on right): 

We roasted s’mores and starbursts before we burned our man. Mmmm mmmm good! 

Gabe proving that yes, he really can fit 4 of the extra large marshmallows into his mouth. That’s my man! Just another reason I love him. He provides great entertainment.

Burning our Guy Fawkes. He made a great bonfire. 

We have such awesome friends and Im glad we get to see them so often. It will definitely be a night to remember!

I Love...

oh my goodness, I LOVE this quote:

"I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with grass stains on my shoes from mowing Sister Schenk's lawn. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbor's children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someones garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived." -Marjorie Hinckley

I love Marjorie Hinckley. I read this quote today and couldn't stop smiling. She has always been such a huge example to me of what I want to be. What a sweet lady. Her and President Hinckley had such a beautiful marriage and I strive every day to follow their example of a happy marriage.

Time Flies

So I guess I could say that a lot has happened in our life lately, but it’s mostly just because I haven’t blogged in a while. First things first, I got a job. Happy me J I work about 35 hours a week at the UPS Store in American Fork. I didn’t think I’d want to come back to UPS ever again, but I actually enjoy it most of the time. I work with some good co-workers and the customers aren’t quite as crazy as the Orem customers. But I do still get my fair share of crazy people. Some days it’s crazy-people-overdose and I run out of patience quick. Like people that don’t understand that boxes are 3 dimensional, not 2… that I can’t text message them the corporate number through a land line… that I really don’t care to hear about your conversation with the T-mobile lady for 40 minutes… the list goes on and on. I have also seen a lot of people walk into the glass window. It’s pretty entertaining sometimes. We kill flies with a swatter when it gets slow… Caught 19 before 11:00 on Wednesday. Gabe has been a trooper and walks to school every day. I hope we can come up with a good solution for that once the snow starts falling. Also, I wish we had covered parking so I don’t have to wipe the windows off every morning. I’m totally not a winter person.

The most exciting news, at least in my opinion, is that we put an offer in on a new condo. We found out that the place we were waiting on before had a plumbing problem and started to grow mold.. and the bank was just taking their precious time to accept our offer. So we decided to look around some more and I am glad we did. We found a cute place that’s all updated, has an HOA that’s a third of the price as the other place, has its own washer and dryer and has hard wood floors. It seems to fit us quite well I think. A good majority of my day is spent thinking about how I want to decorate the condo. I memorized it perfectly so that I can walk through it in my head and see everything. I walk through it in my mind and imagine where I want the TV, what colors I want to paint the walls and on and on and on and on. I almost have everything planned out completely. We put in an offer on Monday I think and have already heard back from them on a counter offer. So it’s definitely moving a lot quicker than the last place and we are THRILLED!!

Besides being super sick the past 3 days, everything is pretty wonderful. I’m really grateful for our friends. We have both been blessed with really good groups of friends. We’re planning a Harry Potter couples date night with some friends in November and are way excited for it. It’s nice having friends so close to us that we enjoy having over and spending time with.

Lets see…

We might not do installs this next summer so that Gabe can finish school sooner.

I’m trying to decide what to do with my hair next. Might grow it out and go a bit darker.

Had an awesome photo shoot with my sister, check it out here: chelsyannphoto.blogspot.com

Gabe’s hair is getting ginormous. He says he wants to grow it out to Halloween, but I may try to convince him otherwise.

We get our backend check this coming week. **Big grin**

Went shooting for the first time in a long time and loved it.

Yup. That’s probably about it this time. Love you all!

I'd Rather be Skinny

About a month and a half ago, while we were still in Alaska, I was watching Oprah on the television. Yes, I DO like Oprah. There was an author on her show talking about a new book that he just wrote about healthy eating. I was super intrigued because I agreed with everything he was saying. Halfway through the show, my sweet husband noticed how excited I was about it and took me to Barnes and Noble to get a couple of his books, “Food Rules” and “The Omnivores Dilemma.” Really really good books, and I recommend them to anyone interested in health. I LOVED “Food Rules” and am about to the last chapter in “The Omnivores Dilemma.” Once I read the first book, I vowed I would try and follow the rules he gives. The general idea of his books is to eat foods that are as minimally processed as possible. He talks about how the food industry is really tricky about how they advertize and how they make money. They can make sooooo many ingredients out of a kernel of corn it’s insane! It’s what surprised me the most. The food industry can buy corn for super cheap so they’ve been busy figuring out how they can make more and more ingredients out of it so they can make money off of consumers. Michael Pollan, the author of these books, believes it is making Americans sick. So I started researching it and decided once we got back from Alaska I would try and make as much of our food from scratch as I could. Amongst the obvious homemade bread, I wanted to make my own foods like ketchup, and mayo. Yeah, I was pretty ambitious and was determined it would be better for our health. I grew up eating margarine instead of butter because it didn’t contain as much fat, but after reading Pollan’s book I found out butter is actually better for you because its not processed. I know that’s hard for some people to believe, but I believed it. So.. after a couple weeks of trying it out, and eating real butter instead of margarine, this is what I told my husband:

“I know that this new way of eating is supposed to be healthier for me, but I don’t think it’s making me any thinner. Healthy doesn’t always mean skinny. I’d rather be skinny.”

I was just frustrated because I had been involved in a really good exercise regime and I wasn’t getting the results I thought I would get with the “clean eating.” For some reason, we’ve been going through a lot (a lot, a lot!) of butter within the last week or two and that just doesn’t seem to be helping. I went out and bought margarine today. Oh happy day! I agree with a good majority of what Pollan talks about in his books, rules that I will stick to, (like: “The whiter bread, the sooner you’ll be dead” and “Don’t eat breakfast cerals that change the color of milk.”) and I agree whole heartedly that processed foods are horrible for a person, but I’m not about to change some of my ways if it will make me go up a pant size. I don’t think most females would. So back to “regular” healthy eating.. we’ll see if I see the results I want this time around :)

Catch Up Time

Things have been a bit hectic around our little household lately. I apologize ahead of time that this may be a bit of a venting post for me today. Gabe started school this week at BYU and from what I can tell, he is excited to be back. He’s been figuring out when to take certain classes so that he can be on schedule for getting his degree. For those of you that don’t know, he is planning on becoming an oral surgeon (yes, I know, lucky me :) ) and so we are going to be in it for the long haul. We decided that while he is going through dental school, I’ll work to put him through and pay our bills. So right now I feel like I’m going through a tiny mid-mid-life crisis. I’m trying to figure out what I want to do with myself. After I graduated from high school I decided to go to school to become a dietician and I had dreams of opening my own practice and being my own boss. I soon realized how expensive school was and I didn’t want to take out anymore school loans so I decided to put school on hold until I earned a bit more money to pay for more schooling. Well, life happened. I eventually got a full time job and started making some decent money. Didn’t save any, because I liked spending it so much, but I made money nonetheless. Other things happened in my life and school wasn’t that big of a priority for me anymore. But now that we’re back home and Gabe is back in school, it’s time for me to earn us some money so that we don’t have to take from our savings we earned this summer. The last couple weeks I have been trying really hard to find a good job. By good job I mean: full time, morning through afternoon, pays at least $9.00 an hour, busy, and any benefits surely wouldn’t hurt. I don’t think most people understand how rare that is in this fine Provo town. I have already scoured this city at least 4 times before, so I know where everything is, and I know what most places will offer me before I even ask. I applied for a super extremely good job last week and they had over 80 applicants so I didn’t even get an interview. I even took a typing/grammar/basic knowledge/spelling test that I thought I did pretty darn well at. So in the meantime, I wake up early and get ready for the day, sit at the computer and go through 8+ job websites every day to see if anything new pops up. No luck. I stay busy so my husband doesn’t feel like he’s the only one doing anything. I do so many dishes, try and organize anything, clean, cook. But sometimes I just want to work. I want a job where I can go in 9-5, sit at a desk, have a list of to-do items, and stay busy all day working hard. Then I can come home and feel accomplished. But I feel anything less than accomplished right now. I feel like I have to be working my butt off to be acknowledged. I’m consistently on my knees praying something will come up. . .Please keep us in your prayers. Hopefully we’ll have some luck soon. So in the meantime, while sittin at home pondering about what to do I have been thinking a lot about going back to school and wondering what online classes would entail. I love school and learning new things. It would be great if I could go to work and during the slow times I could study. So that is a possible option right now, I just don’t know enough about online class options yet. Among going back to school and finding a good job, we’ve put an offer in for a townhome. Actually, we put the offer in during the summer, but we’ve been more proactive about it since we’ve gotten home. It’s a short sale and so it takes FOREVER to hear back from the bank. Our realtor has been trying for months and months to hear back from them. We went to see the place last week and there were a few problems with the place that we weren’t aware of. We found out they are no biggie, easy problems to fix and we knocked down the price a little, so we’re hopeful that we will hear back from the bank soon. We found out that if we buy a place, our monthly payment will be the same as if we were renting, so it’s a no brainer that we want to put it towards something that we can call “ours.” Pretty exciting stuff, huh? So that’s the basics of what is going on with us right now. Maybe soon I’ll be blogging from OUR house..

We love Utah

Okay, so after some poking and prodding from people, I am here to update my blog. WE ARE HOME!!!! We got home ….. 3 days ago I think? But I have been so busy at unpacking and trying to make our apartment look nice that whenever I sit down I just want to sit, I don’t even want to type. Sad, I know. So we left Saturday morning from Fairbanks Alaska and it took us til Tuesday early afternoon to get home. It was a grueling 55 hour drive and we slept in the car for 3 nights. Gabe drove all the way, with the exception of me driving at the rest stop from where we pulled in to closer to the bathroom. Gabe is great, that’s a long drive for one person. But his deer maneuvering skills are a lot better than mine. Sleeping in the car was not fun whatsoever. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it, but Gabe got like $700 worth of audio equipment from a guy for free, so we took it home with us and it took up the back seat, so we could barely recline our seats to sleep. We basically drove until we passed out from exhaustion, so that we would be able to sleep in such an uncomfortable position. I missed our bed so much, it’s one of my favorite things we own. The last night we drove we looked at the GPS and it said if we kept driving we could get to Riverton at 7:00 the next morning and so we figured we could just drive straight and get there at 7:00. We needed a break in between all the driving so we started looking for a casino. We were in Montana, where even all the gas stations have casinos, and me being 21 hasn’t done any gambling yet. So we stopped in one of the towns and found one open. We put in $10 and played til we ran out of money. There was a really nice older lady that worked there and she kept bringing us complimentary sodas and snacks :) We found out we were in there for almost 2 hours eating snacks and playing a game together, so it was great! After a couple more hours of driving we started to get WAY loopy. We were making stupid jokes and laughing at things that weren’t even funny, so we decided we should probably get some sleep. We got home the next day and have been busy getting settled in and visiting all our family. We went out to dinner with his brother and sister in law last night and it was lots of fun.. I’m glad I have awesome in laws. We are living in BYU housing month to month for now. It’s not the greatest, but you know it’s so much better than living in a hotel. And.... drum roll please…. We have a stove!! I’ve cooked a few times on it already and I have the next weeks menu all planned out so I can cook dinner every night. I cannot wait!


We love Utah. Glad to be home.

Any day now!

We are so completely itching to head back to Utah. What a fun time we've had this summer, but we are ready to have a place to stay for longer than a week. We moved into 3 different hotels within the last week and we have to move everything from our car every time... lets just say we're a bit tired of it. You'd be amazed and how quickly it wears a person out.

I can't wait to:
Meet my new nephew
See all our family and friends
Cook big Sunday meals for my husband
Have a schedule
Sleep on our own bed
Set up our new sound system
Get my hair done
Have a freezer
Eat Little Caesars
Buy cheap food

And the list goes on and on and on and on...

Here's to crossing our fingers we can go home this week!!!

Off to the North Pole

Check out the fun weekend we had:

We took a walk around the block and went to a place called the "Fudge Pot" It was delish! They made blueberry fudge, my new favorite.. And then we ordered pizza to the hotel and watched a movie together

On Sunday we took a short trip to the North Pole :) Yes, that's right, the North Pole! There is a city in Alaska just outside Fairbanks named North Pole and its all decked out in Christmas decorations and most of the street names are Christmas and santa oriented. It made me excited for the holidays! 

And then... we met the reindeer! That was really neat for both of us, I don't think we've ever seen a reindeer before. One of the reindeer followed Gabe around and then he sneezed on his arm! ha ha it was pretty great

No way, jose!

Only about a month left in Alaska and then we're headed home.. Its way crazy to think about because I know its going to go by super fast. It'll be good to get home and see our family though, I just hope we'll be able to jump back into our regular schedule quickly.
So yesterday we drove another 9 hours to a new area. It's gotten to the point where a 9 hour drive isn't so bad. As long as its not above 20 miles, the drive doesn't seem that long. It's pretty funny I think. So last night around 10:00 pm we get to the new city and its like this tiny podunk town in the middle of nowhere and me and Gabe are looking at each other going "what the freak?!" and we arrive at the motel we're booked to stay at while we're here and it was like an old long school portable that some handyman put up walls in, looked like it hadn't been decorated since the 70's and was just in super bad shape. The first thing I think about are bed bugs, there's no way we're going through that again! There were pipes coming out of the walls, different colors of shag carpet in every room, and painted on faux wallpaper borders. Gabe and I had a room in another building that you had to get to from the outside, after climbing up a rickety old staircase. Not to mention our first impression of the place - we walk up to the main building to check in and there's 4 grungy lookin guys standing out front by their truck and as we walk up, a kid with one front tooth looks up at us and says, "sup homies!" and gives us a half chuckle, half snorted laugh. After a bunch of complaining from everyone, it was decided that we needed to find a different place to stay. We stopped by another "hotel" and asked for recommendations on where to stay and she recommended a bed and breakfast place, so that's where we're at right now. Its a cute place! Right now we're just a group of 3 sales guys and 2 technicians and we're staying in a big house away from the "city." We woke up this morning and the couple that owns the place made us biscuits and gravy and hash browns. Whats ironic is that the dumpy motel we were going to stay at is the same price as this super nice bed and breakfast. It seems like we all just took a big long road trip and are staying at one of the guys aunts house. Its quite the adventure... Quite a bit different than I had expected. The drive up here was really really pretty and we got lots of cool pictures. I love that we have a camera and are able to document everywhere we've been. Here's the pictures we took of comparison of the two places:

If you can on the one below, zoom in, their faces are priceless.

     

 Bed and Breakfast:

Time for a trip to Walmart!

I opened the fridge today and laughed. The Pepsi has taken over our hotel fridge! We should probably go to the grocery store....

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Sunday we decided to go explore. Gabe was told by a couple customers that there is this one spot in Alaska where it opens up and if you go there at dusk and look out you can see moose and bears and all kinds of wildlife. We haven't seen any bears in Alaska yet, so we decided to go on a bear hunt. We went with a couple other guys from the company and made them drive so it would be more enjoyable for us :) We found a couple campgrounds and stopped to look at the bulletin boards to see if they said anything about bears in the area. We knew if we found a bear warning on one of them then it would be a good place to start. And we found one! The paper on the bulletin board said that there was a "problem bear" that had been recently sighted in the area. I just wanted to find a nice cuddly bear, not a problem bear! That just sounds like trouble. We wandered around a bit (I left the car door open, just in case) but all we ended up seeing was a moose across the river. There was a couple trails that you could take up the mountain, but we saw a family getting out of their car and the guy was taking his gun with him. Naturally, I chickened out and decided we weren't quite prepared to meet a bear. 

We left and drove out to the end of the road and found a cool beach spot. We wandered around and looked for interesting things in the rocks. Gabe actually found a glass bubble that had formed from lightning hitting the sand. That was an awesome find, apparently those are really rare.

Isn't it cool?

Something new is that I finally have something to do that'll keep me busy. At least for just a week. The office manager out here had to leave town and so I'm helping out and taking her place for the week. It's a fairly simple job. All I have to do is text the techs when a job comes in and scan the paperwork. And I get paid a couple hundred dollars to do it. So it aint too bad of a gig I'd say.
Work is going well, Gabe is still doing AWE-SOME. Every install he goes to he has the opportunity to sell the customer some "upgrades" or extra equipment and he gets money for what he sells. Right now he is #2 in the company for upgrades! And its not a small company, that's for sure. So proud of my husband for his hard work.

We spent a little "Wii time" together

At 11:30 at Walmart last night I gave in and this was the result:

I’m still not too sure how I feel about it:

I vowed I would never ever own a game system, but here we are. Gabe has been talking about getting a wii for a long time and so he got it as his belated birthday present and it made him pretty darn happy!

We’ll see how it goes..

No Tresspassing

There is an episode from the tv show “The Office” where the boss, Michael, uses a GPS to get somewhere and the GPS sends him the wrong way. He continues to go that way assuming that the GPS knows the way and he ends up driving his car into a lake. Such a funny episode by the way, if you have not yet seen it. We love “The Office.” But anyways, we had a similar experience this weekend. It didn’t end up the same way for us though. We weren’t that stupid, thank goodness. Thanks to our parents who passed along the smart genes!

Here’s our story.

Gabe got a text Saturday afternoon letting him know that he got a job and he was texted an address of the house. We have already figured out that the GPS isn’t that reliable out here in Alaska, but it’s usually just a couple streets off. So we start driving out there and we turn down a dirt road, which isn’t uncommon. There were houses but they were a bit, pardon my phrase, uh umm “white trash-like.” It was a slummy area. After a few houses there are signs on the sides of the road which read:

PRIVATE PROPERTY

NO TRESPASSING

AREA UNDER 24/7 VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

The signs kept popping up further down the dirt road and I didn’t make much of it until I started seeing weird objects off the side of the road. There were old broken appliances, white trash bags of who knows what, and what caught me off guard – a ratty boot with a hole in the bottom of it. I convinced myself it was a bullet hole. I told Gabe, “I think they take the “Trespassers will be prosecuted” phrase a bit serious.” Only joking. The road got narrower and bumpier. We were off-roading in our Honda civic. But we figured the road had to be taking us somewhere. There was a tree that had fallen across the road and we drove right over it, and we passed a shooting area of some sorts. We drove maybe like 2 and a ½ miles on this road without seeing a sign of life and decided that maybe we ought to turn around when we saw two big mud holes in the road ahead of us. We had to back up for ½ a mile because the road was too skinny. Thankfully, Gabe inherited the good-backer-upper gene too. The GPS told us we still had 3 miles to go and I don’t think we would have made it there safely. It should have taken us 10 minutes to get there but it took us 45.

At least we weren’t as stupid as Michael.

Sincerely,

Sun Deprived Me

What was I thinking??

I honestly thought that I could go without running and just do pilates ALL the time. Was I crazy?! After a few weeks of not running, I got out of the habit and something possessed me to stop. I forced myself get up this morning out of my comfy bed and go running.. not just for a quick easy run, but for a long intense run. And I feel AMAZING right now. On cloud nine.

Yes, I definitely was crazy.

Boredom .. Solved!

I think I have found something to do during the day. Halleluiah! Yesterday I decided to go out on a service call with Gabe in the morning and ended up staying with him the whole day. It was fun to see what my husband does when he goes out to work. He meets some wacky people. I would go inside with him and hand him his tools from his tool bucket and run upstairs to grab anything he needed. I also talked to the crazy home owners and listened to their random stories. Gabe told me after that that saved him a lot of time cause he didn’t have to stop his work to chit chat with them. I talked to an old lady who was talking to her 4 lb dog sitting on her stomach. She told me all about how they got their dog, and why their dog has that color of hair, how she ran over a baby moose and about why they had cut down their trees.  

Me and Gabe went to Taco Bell for lunch and went inside and sat down to eat. (We hardly ever go inside. We usually use the drive thru so it was different for us.) For some reason, it was especially fun to me. I was so excited just to be with my husband during work. I realized how awesome it would be to work with my husband on a regular basis. I got lucky. Ever since our first date Gabe always invited me to do things with him and his friends, he always wanted me with him and I loved that from the beginning. We are still the same way. We could be with each other 24/7 and never get sick of one another. I love my husband and I love being with him. I think it would be awesome to find a job that we could do together and hope that’s something that’s possible for us in the future. As for right now, I’ll happily be his little helper and keep his customers entertained.

Night out on the town

I went out to a couple jobs with Gabe Saturday morning. We had to get up at like 10:30 – super early! Yes I’m serious, we have such a weird schedule during the summer. We go to bed at 3:00 and wake up around 12 usually. It makes us feel like we’re staying young J Anyway, it was a bit of a drive so we got to see some pretty places of the city.  On our way back to the hotel, we saw a bunch of cars pulled over to the side of the road so we pulled over to see what all the fuss was about. There was a herd of caribou, probably like 15-20 or so, running around. We got out our camera to take pictures and the song from the Lion King, “In The Jungle” came on and the caribou started prancing around and the babies started chasing each other. It was super funny, it made us laugh. We saw a couple moose earlier that morning too. I love seeing the wildlife and the feeling of being in the mountains nonstop.

One of the moose we saw:

Saturday night Gabe got off earlier than usual, and we wanted to go try out the bowling alley. We got dressed up in our fancy date night clothes and headed over there to see the CLOSED sign on the doors. We went to good old McDonalds for dinner. It was delish. We had to get creative on what to do so we went to Home Depot and walked around the store for a while.  It was fun to pick out things that we would choose for our home and just to hold hands and chat. Gabe taught me how to play poker on Sunday. I like learning things from each other and having time to spend with each other. Marriage is such a blessing.

Mmm... Mmm... Good

Can the food cravings get any more intense?! I mean seriously. I try to keep myself busy during the day and have been adding to my list of recipes I want to try. But looking at pictures of delicious foods that I cannot have right now is almost killing me. They all look soooooooo delicious!

        ** Like this: **

 

        ** And this: **

(Aren’t those just the cutest ever!! They make me happy just looking at them.)

It makes my stomach growl and all I can do to satisfy my cravings is to pour myself a huge bowl of dry cereal covered in sugar. SO extremely jealous of anyone with a stove and oven right now.

On a positive note, Gabe is doing especially awesome with work this week. He’s got lots of jobs so far and we’re off to a great start this week.  Keep up the great work babe!

Catching Design Fever

My creative juices having been flowing like crazy these last few weeks. Other than fitness, another passion that I have is for interior design. In high school I took a couple interior design classes and it made me have a temporary wish to become an interior decorator. I tend to stress very easily and after realizing how much stress having to decorate someone else’s house would be, my wants to be an interior decorator slowly dwindled over time. If I did end up with a serious career, it would definitely be in fitness and nutrition, which is excellent for someone like me, because exercise is a super stress reducer. Although I probably will never design clients’ houses, I still dream about designing my own home. As Gabe can very much validate, I’d say that 90% of the shows I currently watch on TV are like home decorating/remodeling type shows.  I get excited looking at rooms and figuring out what I would change to it, where I would put furniture, and what I could add to it to make it more interesting. I used to want to build my own house from the ground up. Ambitious, right? Me and Gabe want to buy a house with awesome structure and fix it up, tear walls down and all that dirty work, and be able to decorate it myself and make it our own. Needless to say, I cannot wait. I want to make a house a home. Corny phrase, I know, but it’s something that makes me happy. I want our home to be a place that we actually want to spend our time, and a place where others feel welcome and want to be as well.

I read a talk this morning where President David O. McKay said the following:

“I know of no place other than home where true happiness can be found in this life. It is possible to make home a bit of heaven; indeed, I picture heaven to be a continuation of the ideal home.”

What a blessing I have of making our home a bit of heaven.

I huff and I puff and I end up with shin splints

I am a fitness fanatic at heart. I started exercising at a fairly young age and I fell in love with it. I went to college in hopes of getting a degree in fitness and nutrition and maybe eventually opening my own business. I love anything and everything fitness!  My hope is to be able to eat healthy AND to get down a workout schedule. It always seemed like I had control of only one of those things. So.. I figured this summer would give me a good opportunity to try and achieve both things. I was wrong. Moving all over the place, we stay in hotels and as of right now, all we have to cook with is a microwave. Deep down I absolutely despise frozen packaged foods. I do not like them one bit. And that seems to be the majority of the food in our hotel room.  Bleh! Luckily for me, hotels usually have an exercise room included in their amenities. Unlucky for me, not all the machines in the exercise room work. I think maintaining the equipment is low on their maintenance list.  I have been setting goals for my running and I had recently read a fitness blog about a new, more effective way to run, and I was all pumped up to give it a try. A couple days into it I got shin splints. They are horrendous. I have had minor shin splints before, but I usually just ran them off and they’d be gone in a day or two. This time it was not the same story. Even walking hurts. Our current hotel has a treadmill and an exercise bike, but only the treadmill works. I can’t let myself go without exercising at all, so I knew I had to come up with something. Yoga and pilates was something I wasn’t ever able to get into, but I decided to give it a try. I always thought it was too “gentle looking” to be effective, but I have been proved wrong. The last couple days I have been doing yoga and pilates because I haven’t been able to use the treadmill, and I am very excited to find that I like it a lot! To try and make my long story short, I am excited to get back to running, and very excited to have learned something new.  

 

                       Maybe soon I’ll be able to do this: