Getting Closer to the Weekend

Today lived up to all my expectations…HECTIC!!!  I didn’t even eat my pudding or my granola/golden graham while I was at work.  I did end up snacking on the granola/golden graham after Just. and I left the mall tonight because I was STARVING!  But the pudding will be nice and frozen for me tomorrow.

Workout #1

Headed to the gym over lunch

Exercise	Weights	Reps/Sets
Bench Press	50lbs	8/3
Shoulder Press	2/20lb weights	8/3
Bicep Curls	30lb barbell	8/3
Dead Lift	30lb barbell	10/3
Bicep Curls (again)	30lb barbell	8/3
Tricep Kickbacks	1 20lb weight	8/3 per arm
Lat Pulldown	60lb weight	8/3
Tricep kickback in plank	1 12.5 lb weight	10/3 per arm
Pushups on Bosu		10/3
Seated Rows	15lb (L) 17.5lb (R)	8/3

This took about 30 minutes.  Then I went and did my daily physical therapy workout/stretches which took another 10 minutes.

Work was beyond busy and I thought it would be done after my major 3:30 meeting, but basically I was simply tasked to represent my report after crunching some new numbers on Monday.  Well I obviously won’t be there Monday, so I need to get all of that done tomorrow so my boss can go pitch it for me.  And I still have all those things that I had put off until Friday because I assumed the day would be easy.  As long as I get a good amount of sleep tonight, I’ll be fine.  And it will mean the day will go quickly and then it will be Friday night—start of the vacation and time for a alcoholic beverage!!

Workout #2

I headed back to the gym after work and went swimming

Drill	Time
Warm-up-4 X 50m Freestyle	Rest 0:15 per 50m
2 X 25m freestyle Arm Catch-up	Rest 0:10 per 25m
2 X 25m Streamline Kicking	Rest 0:10 per 25m
2 X 100m Freestyle Swim: Target 2:00 minutes	Rest 0:30 per 100m
2 X 100m Freestyle Swim: Target 2:00 minutes	Rest 0:20 per 100m
2 X 100m Freestyle Swim: Target 2:00 minutes	Rest 0:30 per 100m
2 X 100m Freestyle Swim: Target 2:00 minutes	Rest 0:10 per 100m
1 X 100m Freestyle Swim: Target 2:00 minutes	Rest 0:30 per 100m
1 X 100m Freestyle Push & Glide	Rest 0:20 per 100m
Cool-down: 1 X 100m Freestyle Easy
Total: 1500 m
Time: 38:34

My arms were SO tired after the swim.  Taking off my suit in the shower was near torture.  After a hard day of lifting and then swimming….I bet I have some good bicep lines.

After work, I picked Just. up at work and headed to the mall so he could pick up a pair of sunglasses for the trip.  When I left the gym, I snacked on 1/2 a chocolate chip Clif Bar.

 

Then we left the mall and headed home (after 8:00pm) so that was when I had the granola/graham crackers.

Dinner

I wanted a quick dinner…and something that cleaned out some of the things in the fridge.  So here are the concoctions that I came up with (at least it was much better than last night!!) 

I made a box of Annie’s Whole Wheat Mac and Cheese.  I made the sauce with soy milk and then I added a cooked carrot, broccoli and 1 chicken sausage.  This was fabulous.

 

(I snacked on a carrot while making dinner, but well, I assumed you guys know what a carrot looks like. )

 

On the side, I had a piece of whole wheat bread with 2 leftover chicken meatballs with some of the Newman’s pasta sauce on it.  This was simply YUM!

The aim for tonight is to get all packed.  My mom is coming up tomorrow night so that we can all get to the airport at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning.  OH!  I just remembered that I need to stop and pick up some brainless celebrity magazines for the flight.  Must remember to do that tomorrow!!!  And I just realized that I don’t have any coffee.  Sheesh–tomorrow could be tough!

Okay, sorry about that….digress.

Pack and do abs tonight.  That will be 6 of 6 abs session in the past 12 days.

 

Have a great night.  Tomorrow morning is my weigh in day.  Fingers crossed that it isn’t brutal the day before my vacation!

Heavy, heavy eyelids

Okay, we have a cat.  Her name is stiletto and boy does she have a personality.  She is a cross between thinking she is a dog and…being a complete and utter brat.  Last night she chose to do the later and she did it with flying colors.  We lock her up at night in a back bedroom because she gets so bratty. Last night she woke us up at about 1AM meowing bloody murder, so I went to check on her.  Sneaky little thing basically leaped over my head to escape from the room.  Once she is out, there is no putting her back away.  Food doesn’t help, yelling doesn’t help, she simply is too fast.  For the next 5 hours she went on a mission to piss us off in every manner possible.  She makes noise, she breaks things, she runs around like a maniac, she eats any and everything she can get her little mouth on.

And then at about 6AM, she curled up on the end of the bed and went to sleep.  I probably could have killed her.  So, despite the fact that I need to be UBER productive today, I am running on about 20% of my normal sleep.  Caffeine here I come!

Last night (it was too late of a night for me with all the chores we were doing. I must get to bed early tonight!), I had a little snack in the evening: A handful of Golden Grahams (there are some chocolate chips hiding under that pile) and a small mug of soy milk.

Breakfast

Complete and total repeat of yesterday, so I don’t think I really need to go into details.

Pumpkin Oats:

AM Snack

Kefir and a little peach.  This was the last of the peaches.

 

Lunch

Again, this is a throw everything that is still remaining in the kitchen together to form some sort of meal.

I made a salad with arugula, blueberries, quinoa, grape tomatoes and a few raisins.  I packed 1T of Annie’s Green Goddess Dressing to add to it.

Then I made a wrap on a whole wheat tortilla with at least 1T of hummus, a little arugula, sliced carrots, cucs, onion, red bell pepper and some mint

All rolled up

And I have my trusty fat free pudding in the freezer right now to enjoy on the side.

PM Snack

I stole one of Justin’s yogurt (yep that’s right hun, I stole a yogurt. ) because he wasn’t going to eat all of them this week anyway and they would have gone bad while we are on vacation.  Therefore, I actually see this as me helping out. 

1 blueberry yogurt and a side of granola, golden grahams and a few pieces of dried fruit

I am going to the gym over lunch today and lifting.  I am planning on going back to the gym after work and swimming.  It is so humid here today that I am worried that it’ll be storming by 5PM tonight and I won’t be able to get my swim in. 

Okay, I just need to make it until 4PM basically today and then all my major meetings are over and I can start to breath again.

Bring on the caffeine!

Another Day, Another Dollar

I have survived through hump day.  This time tomorrow, I hope to only have busy work left to get through on Friday.  I feel bad.  I feel like I haven’t been able to put much effort into the blog and my photos this week and then I’ll be gone next week.  Hopefully I can step it back up for the next few days.  Unfortunately, dinner was such a let down tonight, I know that that won’t pick up the posting at all!!!

Quick recap of the day.  I ate my snack around 11:00 and by 12:!5 I was hungry again, so I had a cup of no-sugar added hot chocolate.

And then on the way to the gym, I had this:

Workout
I went to the gym over lunch and I did the treadmill.  Yep, that is right, I broke myself of the elliptical and it felt great.

Interval	Time	Speed	Incline
Warm-up	5 minutes	3.5 mph	7.0
Jog	2:30 minutes	4.7 mph	0.0
Walk	2:30 minutes	3.7mph	7.0
Jog	2:30 minutes	4.7 mph	0.0
Walk sideways facing right	2:30 minutes	1.6mph	0.0
Jog	2:30 minutes	4.6 mph	0.0
Walk sideways facing right	2:30 minutes	1.6mph	0.0
Jog	2:30 minutes	4.6 mph	0.0
Walk sideways facing left	2:30 minutes	1.5 mph	0.0
Jog	2:30 minutes	4.6 mph	0.0
Walk sideways facing left	2:30 minutes	1.5 mph	0.0
Jog	2:30 minutes	4.6 mph	0.0
Walk	2:30 minutes	3.7mph	7.0
Jog	2:30 minutes	4.7 mph	0.0
Cool-down	2:30 minutes	3.5mph	7.0

Total: 40 minutes

I felt a little sore afterwards. My IT band was very tight afterwards.

I got a lot of work done today at work.  It made some of my anxiety go away.  I head to physical therapy after work and was there for about 1 hour doing the same things that I have been doing for the past few weeks–just increasing the weights slowly.  Hopefully I am getting better!

When I got home from PT, I had a few bites of cereal/chocolate chips while getting ready to make dinner.

Dinner
I had a frozen salmon filet from Harris Teeter in the freezer that I took out this morning and put in the fridge to defrost.  I also defrosted some shrimp.  I made a glaze to put on the salmon that was brown sugar, garlic, cognac, dijon mustard, coriander, S&P.  I put this on the filet and then cooked the filet for about 3 minutes a side in a very hot non-stick skillet.

For the shrimp, I simply put them in boiling water for a few minutes.  Then I cooked them off and put a homemade BBQ sauce on them.  The sauce was a little brown sugar, some cognac, some molasses, a little organic ketchup and vinegar.  This turned out really well.

I took some red potatoes and sliced them very thin.  Then I heated the oven to 400 degrees and put the potatoes in a single layer on a baking sheet with a little soybean oil sprayed on top with salt and pepper.  I cooked for 10 minutes, then flipped and cooked 5 minutes.

Lastly, I simply boiled corn on the cob for a few minutes.  Luckily this corn was much better than the corn earlier this week!

My camera was acting up so I only was able to get a crappy picture, sorry!!!

I weighed out the salmon and it was a little more than 4 ounces, I had 5 shrimp, the smaller ear of corn and 1 sliced up small red red skin potato.

Then I took a bite of the salmon.  It was terrible.  It tasted very fishy and you could tell it had been frozen.  I had maybe 3 bites and then gave up on it.  Justin didn’t eat his either.  I also didn’t eat any of the burnt potato chips. 

It was a let down of a dinner.  Ugh!!  Hopefully tomorrow will be a better hit.  This is the risk you run when you are doing a ‘clean out the fridge’ week I guess.

Tonight, Justin and I cleaned the house from top to bottom.  Dusted, dishes, sheets, laundry.  And then we did abs.  That is now 5 out of my 6 ab workouts that I promised I would do by Friday. 

Hopefully by tomorrow afternoon I will be back into the blog world!

CHARGE!!

Let me begin by saying Happy Birthday to my friend Meg who I know reads my blog.  Have a great day and make sure to enjoy it!!

Today will probably be worse than yesterday.  I am thinking today and tomorrow will be the craziest and then Friday I hopefully can just chip away at all the busy work things that I am pushing off my plate until then.  So not a lot of blog reading allowed today.   The only time I even can check other blogs is when I am waiting on a report to run. 

Last night I had a small glass of kefir and a little slice of the cranberry orange bread.  I am not even sure how much I like this bread.  It is just in our kitchen and I now it cost like $5.50 at the farmer’s market, so I feel like I should enjoy it and it should be amazing.  But now that I think about it, I don’t really think it is delivering for a price tag like that for a small loaf of bread!

Breakfast
It was basically a repete of the last two days–but at least today I had enough time to eat it at home!!! And I had to use a real egg white instead of egg beaters because, well I am out.  1/2 cup of oats, 1 egg white, not quite 1/4 cup of pumpkin, 1/2 cup of water, nutmeg and cinnamon.  Cooked for about 3 minutes on 100%.  Added honey, flax seed and granola to it. This may be as good as blueberry oats in my book. 

AM Snack
I really couldn’t decide what I wanted to have for my morning snack.  The fridge is starting to run a little low on food and for some reason I just really did not want hummus and veggies.  The only other thing I could find/think of was graham crackers (3/4 of a serving) and about 2 tsps of cream cheese.  The cream cheese is fat free, which I don’t think I’ll buy again.  It is terrible. Yes, it is Philadelphia Cream Cheese, but I would rather eat a little reduced fat or full fat than something that taste nothing like cream cheese.

I will head to the gym again today over lunch (surprising, I know!).  I probably should try and switch it up again and get off the elliptical for once but I simply enjoy the elliptical the most.

Lunch
This definitely was everything but the kitchen sink type of lunch.  I packed up the remaining 3 sushi and then threw together a big salad.

In this salad there is spinach (the end of my spinach), 1/4 sweet potato, cucs, carrots, red bell pepper, mixed nuts, 1/4 of an avocado, a few raisins, about 2 broccoli florets, 2 button mushrooms, a white onion slice, and some grape tomatoes.

Then I remembered I had some quinua still, so I added some of that on top

I packed about 1T of Annie’s Organic Green Goddess Dressing to add to it.

I am kind of excited about this salad already.  I love salads that have so many ‘condiments’ added to them.

PM Snack
I am kind of already excited about my afternoon snack too.  Half an apple sliced up with some granola on top and about 2tsp of natural peanut butter.  This will be good.  And hopefully hold me over through physical therapy tonight!

Time to get cracking!  Work, physical therapy, clean the house.

And I mentioned watching a documentary on ABC last night about The Last Lecture.  I wanted to leave the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him and this documentary.  This video is the complete lecture, so obviously really long.  I just set it to run today while I am working so I can listen to it.  Simply amazing.

I heart Maker’s Mark

I didn’t even get home until nearly 9PM tonight.  I was exhausted and STARVING.  I had stopped at Whole Foods to get some things and that took forever because it was under-construction, crowded and I had no idea what I wanted to buy.  After reading Quinn’s blog, Daily Moderation, I was craving stuffed peppers, so I wandered around until I finally made decisions for what I wanted to stuff in there.

Workout #1

I went to the gym over lunch and did the elliptical set to incline 3.0 and did this: 

Interval	Level	Time
Warm-up	4	5 minutes
Hard	8	30 seconds
Easy	5	2 minutes
I did this for 20 minutes
Steady	6	10 minutes
Cool-down	4	5 minutes

Total: 40 minutes

Work went well today but I definitely could have stayed later but I had a non-work meeting at 6PM.  The day FLEW by because of all the things that I have to do.  The anxiety hit this afternoon that was just overwhelming. It was this worry that I will forget something or let someone down or that I simply will not get everything done.  I just can tell that I won’t be able to relax for the rest of the week.  But all I need to keep reminding myself is that I’ll be on vacation come Saturday morning.  GLEE!!! Totally worth working hard for!

Walking out of the meeting, there was a bowl of candy and I had a mini peanut butter cup.  I didn’t take a picture because I tore into that thing with such vengeance that taking my camera out of my bag would have only slowed down my fury.

Dinner

Like I said, I wanted a stuffed pepper.  I hollowed out a red bell pepper and put it in the oven on broil for about 15 minutes (until it started to blacken and blister) then I put it in a paper bag for about 20 minutes.  After the 20 minutes, I peeled off the skin of the pepper.

While that was broiling, I sauteed in a non-stick pan 1 garlic clove, a red onion slice, 1 mushroom, 2 brocolli florets, 1/4 carrot and about 1T of green peas. 

In a pot, I cooked 1/4 cup of brown rice with 1/2 cup of water and 2T of raisins.  I cooked this until done.  To the finished rice, I added 2 leftovers chicken meatballs.  Then I added in the sauteed veggies and about 2T of cheese.  I stuffed all this into the bell pepper.

Here is a tasty close-up

While the pepper was cooking, I had myself a first course.  sushi.   I grabbed some brown rice vegetable sushi (carrots, cucs and avocado) at Whole Foods.  Stealing another idea, this time from Jenn at Eating Bender.  She kept putting Annie’s Green Goddess dressing on sushi.  Well at whole foods, Annie salad dressings were on sale for $2.50, so I grabbed a bottle of organic green goddess (probably the highest calorie dressing I have ever purchased) and tried this combination out.

I had 5 of my sushies (what is the plural for sushi?) with 3 having 1/2 T of green goddess and then the other 3 with 3/4T of mango dressing.  I never could decide which of these two I liked more.  They both were SO different.  It kind of was a nice change–one sweet and fruity and the other dressing creamy.  I was very happy I got this sushi and tried this out!

 

Workout #2

After dinner, I pushed through and made myself do some lifting.  I did a 20 minute video on exercise TV.  I did the Envy Girls: Arms of Envy.  Lower weights than I have been doing recently but definitely higher reps.  I’ll let you know how I feel tomorrow and if I can tell I lifted today.

And as a little night cap, we celebrated a raise that Just. got.  And no better way to celebrate than fabulous mint juleps.  We have Maker’s Mark Green wax (already made mint juleps–only can be purchased in KY I think.) and I had some fresh mint.  So I stuffed glasses about 1/3 full of mint and about 80% full of ice, then poured in some of the tasty bourbon

I am ending tonight with watching a show on ABC, The Last Lecture, about a professor at Carnegie Melon–Randy Pausch.  It is so touching and really moving.  How he has handled cancer really reminds me of how my dad handled the entire situation….he saw it as an experience in life.  Nothing to be angry about, more than anything you just worry about the people you will be leaving me behind.  This was a fabulous documentary by ABC.  Just. was worried how I would handle watching it and instead of being upset, I was comforted by seeing this and knowing what grace he handled this experience and how proud his family must feel.

 

Okay, I am going to have a little glass of kefir and then head to bed so I can be ready to have another hectic day + physical therapy.