noBOLOGNA

Wonderful FABuary!

Hi there!  My blog posts continue to be few & far between, but I’m excited about what February has to offer!  I have a few different “challenges” going on with myself this month that I believe are going to tremendously improve my quality of life, my discipline, and my mental/physical health.

  • NO TV

I have committed to watching ZERO television this month.  I realized in January that I was getting very addicted to Netflix (mostly Criminal Minds – which I’ve already seen!)  I felt like a lot of time was being wasted with Netflix playing in the background, distracting me from what I should be doing, or I would stay up late to continue watching it, allowing it play in the background as I fell asleep.  We all know that’s not the medicine for a good night’s rest.  I believe that cutting out television will allow more time for blogging (yippee!), more time for reading and self development, more time for fitness, more time for cooking, more time with Nick, and more time working my Arbonne business.

  • DISNEY PRINCESS HALF MARATHON

My half-marathon is this month and I haven’t done a great job of blogging about training, etc. so my guess is that most of you don’t even have a clue that I’m running a half marathon this month!  But surprise, I am!  I’m actually really excited because it’ll be another opportunity to see my sweet and dearly loved blog friend, Meg!  Training has been a lot better this time around than most.  I’m up to about 9.5 miles, should be at around 11 or 13, but my knee has still been giving me trouble.  I have finally accepted the fact that it’s my IT band and I’ve been doing a lot of stretching and foam rolling to work it out.  It has proven to help tremendously with pain during a run.  I just completed 5 miles this evening after work and didn’t stop to walk once.  That’s a huge accomplishment for me!  I’ve been getting miles in, but they haven’t been great miles.  They’re either painful, or I have to take a lot of walking breaks to get through it.  I seriously wanted to take a nap instead of go for a run today, but I pushed my butt out the door and completely surprised myself!

5-beautiful-pictures-2

**(left) Disney Wine & Dine with Meg (right) Me before the 2012 Disney Princess when I was in the College Program**

  • 30 DAYS TO HEALTHY LIVING

I’m doing Arbonne’s 30 Days to Healthy Living Program this month.  I was supposed to do it in January, but that fell apart pretty quickly.  Nothing like next month, I guess!  I started it today and for the most part I’ve done really well so far.  We had donuts brought in for our staff meeting this morning and I said NO even though I had been craving donuts the day before.  Later in the day, someone dropped by some cookies for me.  I would love to say that I 100% refrained, but that’s not the case.  I ate half a cookie.  I wasn’t proud of myself, in fact I was disappointed, but tomorrow is another day and I get another chance to say no to temptation.  Also, the rest of my day was great, food wise!  I get in a really bad habit of consuming sugar & sweets so I needed something to help combat that before race day.  I love all the Arbonne products and the protein shakes are delicious!

 

I can already tell that my month of no tv is going to change my life!  Tonight, I got home, went for my 5 mile run, came home and showered, finished a book that I’ve been reading for far too long, made dinner, started a load of laundry, and now I’m about to head off to bed.  I’ll be in bed by 10pm tonight!  I definitely think I’ll be well rested by the end of the month, my Arbonne business will be strong, my training would have been successful, my quality time with Nick will be more interactive and fun, you’ll see more than just this blog post, and I my self-development will be off the charts!

Cheers to a wonderful FABuary!

Life Update

Hey y’all!  Let’s do some catching up since I haven’t blogged in over a week! {yikes}

LABOR DAY WEEKEND

Nick and I went to Florida again to help his brother & sister-in-law move into their new house!  It turned into quite an adventure of a weekend though when Nick’s dad ended up in the hospital.  Thankfully, the doctors/nurses took great care of him and worked hard to get him out as soon as possible so we could all drive back to Mississippi.  He’s doing good (per my latest update), but has some health issues to take care of now that we’re back home.  Prayers would be greatly appreciated!  Nick and I decided to stick around a little later than anticipated so we could drive back with them in case something happened.  That left me behind for the rest of the week which is why I didn’t get much blogging done.  Even though it was an up & down kind of weekend, we made the most of it and thoroughly enjoyed some quality family time!  Nick and I still managed a very short trip down to Disney World once everything settled.  It was good to see my friend David and we visited Hollywood Studios, Epcot, and Magic Kingdom while we were there.  I’m pretty sure I had more than my fair share of Starbucks throughout the trip and managed to take zero pictures.  Oh well, there will definitely be a next time!  Nick and I will probably be back down in October for the birth of his nephew – now that will be a short trip because I don’t think we’re taking off or missing school for it, so we’ll be down Friday night and back up Sunday night, but it will be well worth it to experience the joy that his brother & sister-in-law have been praying about for the past few years!  We won’t get much baby time, but we want to be there for any errand running necessary while the parents & grandmothers soak it all in!  **Don’t worry about the Starbucks, Trey!  I’ll have us both well caffeinated!**

ROAD TRIP

It’s no surprise to any of you who have been reading for… well a minute (see above) that Nick and I are no strangers to traveling and road trips.  We love them!  I kind of think they’re our “thing”!  Well folks, we’re about to embark on the ultimate road trip and I could NOT be more excited!!

4 Days.

16 States.

5 Friends.

1 Wedding.

45 Hours on the Road.

disney-wine-dine-me-meg

It all started with a wedding invitation… from my sweet, amazing, wonderful blog friend & Bliss Co-host, Meg!  I was originally going to fly out there because there was no way I was taking the Alero up to Massachusetts!  I went back and forth on the decision because it was going to be a costly short trip and I’d only be in town for a day and a half, plus I didn’t want to go by myself so Nick would have had to pay for a flight as well.  Then my Alero broke.  Then I was practically forced to get a new car.  Well, because of our love to travel & road trip, we decided that a Prius would be a good investment for me since it gets 50mpg!  Then the debate was whether or not we should spend the money driving up there when I ended up with so many unexpected expenses in August.  I felt so torn between what we should do, but we ultimately decided that the trip was not in our best interest…. then…. THEN…. I filled out the RSVP card with a big fat NO and a sad face, then sent a picture of the saddest note I’ve ever had to send to Nick and expressed my deepest sadness about not going and well…. we went back to the drawing board to really figure out if we could make this work.  We realized that we could visit a lot of people on our way up and back down, with us splitting all costs, it really won’t be that much money in the end for an epic road trip such as this!  We’ll get to see my best friend Lacy in Virginia and shower & stay with her, we’ll get to have Breakfast with our friends, Adam & Tiffany who recently moved to New Jersey, and we’ll get to have lunch in D.C. with one of Nick’s good friends from high school who recently got engaged and we’re excited about meeting her fiance!

soak-up-the-sun-triathlon

new-orleans-me-lacy

It boiled down to this…. we purchased this car for road trips and we finally had the opportunity and availability to make one heck of a road trip up the East Coast and we can manage it within our budget, so we’ll be off next Thursday to Virginia for our first pit stop!  I’ll be heavily documenting the entire thing and hope to have some pointers for you wanna-be road trippers out there!  I’m so excited about this new adventure, it’s something we’ve never done before, but I have no doubt that it’s going to be an awesome good time!  I’m so stoked to see my sweet friend Meg and to also meet another blog friend (she no longer blogs though), Amanda!

WORK UPDATE

I mentioned in my last post that I passed my Series 6 test for Investments, but now it’s on to my Series 63 test.  I scheduled the test for Friday, September 26th at 3:30pm.  Prayers are greatly appreciated!  I shouldn’t have any tests for a couple of months after this one.  We have a new girl working in our office, so I’m spending a good bit of time training her, but I love management & I love working with people!  This also gives me the opportunity to learn even more because if I don’t know the answer, I want to find it out so I’ll know for future use as well.   I really do love who I work with and where I work, which is such a huge blessing!

LIFE UPDATE

I completed the 28 Day Challenge and loved just about every minute of it.  I thought it would change the way I lived, but sure enough… I’ve reverted back to some old ways.   There were so many things that I missed while on the challenge that it was difficult to resist once the challenge was over.  I think I got it out of my system though and I’m slowly finding my balance.  I haven’t been working out as much lately either, but I’m finally on track for this week.  I went to the gym last night and then today I attended my favorite HIIT class – which… holy moly!  I’m going to be sore tomorrow!  I’m not a fan when she decides to take us across the room and that’s practically what we did for the entire 30 minutes!  Tomorrow morning, I’m joining a running group and depending on how that goes, I may be taking a rest day on Thursday, but I have a Kickboxing class planned for Friday!  This week has proven to be a good one and I’m excited about what else I have planned.

So tell me….

  • What’s the biggest road trip you’ve been on?
  • What’s going on in your life?  Share some posts from the past week because I haven’t done any blog reading either!
  • How are your eating habits & workouts going?

Pool Ready in a Jiffy

flat-tire

Good Morning!

That’s not a great sign, is it?  Apparently I ran over whatever the heck that thing is on my way home from work yesterday.  Luckily I noticed it before heading to church last night.  I was pulling out of my drive way, but felt like my front tire might be flat, so I got out and looked, but it was fine.  I went ahead and looked at all of them and sure enough my back tire was flat.

I went ahead and made an appointment last night so I could get my car in quickly this morning.  Thankfully my boss has been out of town these past few days and so I’m not extremely busy at work or I’d be a wreck right now.  I was caught up on everything when I left work yesterday.

What’s really funny is I’m picking my friend Lacy up from the airport today and she said her plane was delayed due to a flat tire also!  We’re all having tire trouble apparently.

It’s a dreary day here in Mississippi.  In a weird way, I love days like this.  I would love a day like this more if I could curl up on the couch reading blog posts and updating my own blog.  What’s your weather looking like?

me-karla-stephen

I’ll be visiting my cousin in a week & a half.  The excitement is overwhelming.  My friend Lacy is joining me and then we’ll be greeted by our friend Noelle who just accepted a job in Texas! I plan on parking myself by the pool pretty much all weekend.  In order to do that though, I need to ramp up my workouts.  I did the 30 day squat challenge a few months ago and saw a lot of improvement with that so I’m going to start that again today.  I also need to take all the ab classes offered at my gym between now and then!

Some other necessities to get pool ready in a jiffy:

30-day-squat-challenge

{source}

Besides spending the greatest quality time in the world with my sweet Cousin and her beyond wonderful family, I’ll also be attending the Houston Veg Fest!  I probably won’t attend the entire day, but I’ll be there for a few hours learning about vegans/vegetarians, listening to speakers, and trying products!  You’ll for sure see a re-cap on the blog!

Did I mention that Nick and I want to do the Goofy Challenge?  It’s at Walt Disney World and it’s a Half-Marathon on Saturday, Full-Marathon on Sunday.  The problem is, I’ve never done a marathon.  I’ve done a hand-full of Half’s though.  We haven’t signed up yet because it’s not full and I’d like to see how I feel in a few months.  To kick off our training, we’re doing a Half in Starkville on October 18th.  When I trained for the Disney Wine & Dine Half-Marathon, I planned on using this great training plan I found that was created by (or for) Ellie Goulding.  The training didn’t go so great, the longest I ended up running was about 8 miles and I didn’t have a gym membership so rainy days were a problem and I also didn’t have a good yoga class to go to or a decent DVD / floor space for my yoga.  I still believe the training plan is one of the best I’ve seen because of the heavy amount of x-training and strength training involved as well as yoga.  I’m giving it a try again for this training and I feel it’s going to flow more smoothly now that I have a gym membership with yoga classes offered and a rainy day option on longer runs that are critical to my training!

  • What do you do to get pool ready in a jiffy?
  • Have you attended or even heard of a Veg Fest?  How was it?  What can I expect?
  • Share your favorite half-marathon training plan!
  • What’s the likelihood that I’ll succeed at doing a half & full in about 6 months when I’ve never done a full?

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