Rainy Weekender

Happy Sunday!! It finally feels like fall out! Surely there can't be too many more days of ninety degree weather left right?!?!

We had grand plans of getting out into nature this weekend but alas the rain poo-pooed our plans. So instead, we braved the rain yesterday at Farmer's Market. 

These are just some of the goodies that we set out in preparation for fruit salad.

Kyle's fruit salad. It was/ is delicious!

He also made some tomato salad which shall be pictured at a later date!

What else do you do on a rainy Saturday? Go to the movies!!

This was one of those movies where I wasn't quite sure how I felt about it until the very end. We're talking final scene. I decided that I really liked it! It wasn't at all what I was expecting but I definitely recommend it. I have to also mention that Joseph Gordon-Levitt wears green contacts in it and it totally freaked me out the whole movie. Plus he looks exceptionally old. Maybe we're getting old? Maybe it's the contacts. Yeah, must be the contacts.

Today we are enjoying a lazy Sunday. I was hoping to get out of the usual Sunday football watching since the Cowboys don't play until tomorrow but alas, no such luck. So in exchange for football to come, Kyle gave in to my whims to do a little bit of running around this morning. We were actually quite productive. After I got my butt kicked my sergeant Jillan (Michaels), we ran to do a couple of boring errands followed by a pop in at Old Navy. Kyle and I decided that every week we should get to buy ourselves one little treat for working so hard/ whatever. This week was Old Navy. It's hit or miss, but today was a hit! We both got a little something out of the deal!

Hooray for the first week in October! Kyle and I are both very much in to Halloween. So stay tuned for some decoration fun! Kyle is determined that he will get me in to a haunted house this year but I don't know. At least if he succeeds, it might get me out of them for the rest of my life...what with the crying, crawling/ whatever I have to do to get out there embarrassing scene that will ensue.

I'm off to do some a couple more Sunday chores. Happy end of your weekend!

Playing Catch Up

As I've mentioned before, my week days are pretty uneventful. They usually end with something like this.....

I did happen to do one interesting thing this week. I meant to take pictures but I was too busy stuffing my face to think about it. I attended the wine dinner at Carino's in Rockwall with my mom on Tuesday. This used to happen at the Carino's in Mesquite but since that one has closed down, they moved the party to Rockwall. This was my first one but my mom attends often. They prepare a special four course meal and pair wine with each. I'm not much of a wine drinker but I enjoyed trying a taste of each one. The delicious food was definitely worth it.

This was all that was left of my food....

(Of course my menu was slightly altered to be gluten free...)

No What I ate Wednesday this week.. my eats were too boring and I forgot to take pictures. I felt bad for Kyle for being a slacker lately so I did actually make a couple of dinner this week but alas, too busy eating to stop for a pic. Kyle is actually a great cook himself so we take turns. Maybe next week. I kind of suck at healthy living blogging. My workouts this week have mostly consisted of the Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred dvd with some extra cardio mixed in. Her dvds are no joke. I haven't even made it to level 2 yet ( I'm intimidated about what others say about it!)

I hope to give this blog a facelift very soon! I think it will inspire me to keep it up. I feel like it really helps me to have a creative outlet, even if it's just rambling on about what I did today. I hope that as I make it more of a habit, my blog will grow and shape itself into something really special. I love the community that I have encountered in the blogging world. My newest dream (after owning a food truck of course) is attending a blogging conference. Yes I have odd dreams :)

Favorite student conversation this week....

Student: "Are you sure that a woman has never been president? I'm pretty sure there has been one..I thought Hillary Clinton?"

Anonymous student...You are my new best friend!

Happy (soon-to-be) Friday Ya'll!

The Road to Healthy

I think I am going for a record with number of blog posts this week. I started thinking about this one after I laid down to go to sleep the other night so I decided to go ahead and get it out there. 

A little more about my journey thus far....

Growing up I was horrible eater. I was very picky and only had a limited list of things that I would eat. I have always been a cyclical eater.. I eat the same few things over and over until I get sick of them and then I move on to something else. At this point, it is probably due to laziness just as much as anything else. Every week I try to psych myself up for meal planning...I look at all the pre-made weekly planners on pinterest and consider printing some. This has gotten better in the past year but the thought of figuring out a million ingredients that I have to buy for the week still completely overwhelms me. I think I shall list "meal planning" as one of my weaknesses in every future job interview.  All of this to say, I love to eat. I hate to plan meals. I never cared about what I ate growing up....Calories? eh. Nutrients? eh. Balance? Overrated.

That all changed right after I started college. All of a sudden my stomach started hurting ALL the time. I started getting sick after eating all the time. It literally started to rule my life. I lost friends because they were either a) tired of me talking about my stomach hurting or b) tired of me blowing them off because of my anxiety about my stomach hurting. I spent months planning my life around available bathrooms. I don't know if you have ever been really sick and stuck in a car....but just the thought gives me nightmares still. Eventually I "cured" myself by eating only safe foods. Primarily Fritos. I lost a lot of weight fairly quickly (and no 
 I don't recommend the fritos diet). After a few trips to the doctor and nutritionist, we figured out that I have Celiac's Disease and needed to go gluten free ( ah ha! The fritos diet makes sense..I love you corn!). My stomach and intestines were so damaged by that point that I also went dairy free for a few months since dairy is hard to digest even with healthy insides.

I rarely think about being gluten free anymore. It's been seven years! I can't believe it.

Another health issue that I have always struggled with is Candida...This is all probably TMI, but you are here on my blog so you must care a little. I got oral thrush often as a baby and really struggled with whole body Candida (Yeast) infections pretty much from then on. Finally, after a couple of rounds of other "mystery illnesses", I decided to really focus on cutting my sugar intake. I LOVE sugar. My body does not. I still treat myself to sugary treats when I really want them but in my every day diet I try to stay away...getting my sugar from natural sources like fruit. Now I know that "fake sugar" products are really bad for you but a girl has to satisfy her sweet tooth. I highly recommend sugar free pudding. One step at a time.

After making these two changes, I have to say that I feel so much better. I've made little baby steps from then on (still making them) to really eat to live. I don't want to be that person who gains weight, goes on a diet, goes off the diet, gains weight, and so on and so forth. I want to eat what I want in moderation. I want to eat to fuel my body for the day. I don't want to step on a scale every day. I want to live a healthy lifestyle. Sometimes this looks like ice cream for breakfast..followed by a little extra exercise and good clean food the next day. I'm learning to love exercise and not feel guilty when all I can fit in is thirty minutes. It's about balance.

I try to keep this illustration in mind in all parts of my life...

What I Ate Wednesday Among Other Things

TWO whole blogs in one week! Hold on to your hats folks! ( Also known as...Kyle gets a new video game week..LOVE YOU :) )

I decided to join in on some fun that my favorite bloggers participate every week...

To learn more about WIAW...check it out here

Breakfast

Lately this has been my "congratulations you got up for work today" treat to myself a couple of times a week. (That's a mocha frappucino light FYI ). This was also paired with an apple but I didn't take a picture of that.

Lunch

I typically eat in cycles..I get hooked on one meal for awhile and eat it often until I am sick of it. This is my typical lunch in this cycle. Gluten free bread paired with PB2 and sugar free blueberry preserves. And of course my apple. Since they are in season right now I eat two, sometimes three, a day. ADDICTED, I know. But there are worse addictions right?

Dinner

 

 

 I was clearly too hungry to actually take a picture of my dinner so this logo will have to do. People often ask Kyle and I what our "go-to" restaurants are. Usually we have to say Company Cafe and Subway because we don't actually eat out very often. We ate out a lot when we first started dating and then realized how much money it was costing us. So now we usually try to cook at home except for usually once on the weekends...with the exception of Subway. We can walk to Subway from our house so it's too easy to pass up. I had a gluten free roast beef sandwich with an apple on the side of course. 

Most of the other bloggers who participate in this have super delicious well-balanced meals that they just threw together but let's face it.. I am too busy ( read: too lazy) for that! So I will just continue to lust after their delicious treats and try to do better next week! I did attempt some gluten free pumpkin muffins but I was only loosely following a few different recipes and left out a very important ingredient. Hopefully you will see version #2 of those appearing soon.

I am LOVING the fall air around here lately! I know the high is 90 this week but you can literally SMELL fall. 

Okay creepers, time to participate. What would you like to see on this blog? Leave a comment on this blog or go HERE  to ask an anonymous question and I will answer in a post!

Dystopia...Everywhere you look!

I'm sorry for the lull in entries lately, I haven't had much to blog about. It turns out my normal life is pretty boring. The stress of being in Houston has taken me awhile to recover from I think. Plus we are really busy at work right now. Already tired + long days= blogging gets put on the back burner.

I have to admit that a big part has also been that there has been just SO MUCH going on in the world, in the blogosphere, on facebook....everywhere! EVERYONE has SOMETHING to say. Pretty much everyone who knows me well, knows that I have pretty strong opinions. But shoving them down people's throats is just not my thing. I longed for just a few weeks of silence. Since things have calmed down a bit, I feel there is space for me again. :)

One thing I picked back up this summer was reading. I seem to go through phases where I just have too much going on to read. However, I always feel a little more balanced when I have a good book that I am in the middle of. I think too many of us forget how important it is to carve some time out just for us at some point in the day. Even if it is just on my lunch break, the escape from reality is so nice for me.


Generally I like to read books that are somewhat relatable to me ( characters around my age, situations that seem plausible). While this is not always the case ( I can't say that I strongly related to 50 shades or Gone Girl but those are topics all on their own), it is usually what I'm scouting for when I'm browsing for fun. There seems to be a huge gap in the book genres. It skips from high school drama (over it) to thirty-somethings with kids ( not there yet). This seems odd to me because there is so much content waiting to be written about your twenties. Where are these books?!?! In their absence, I have generally been picking books out of the "young adult" category.  I have been on a big dystopian kick lately. I read through the first two books in the divergent series pretty quickly.... I highly recommend them!

 Along those same lines, I also flew through the first couple of books in the chemical garden series....

 Rounding out the dystopian summer theme..... I also highly recommend Lauren Oliver's series...

If anyone has some good recommendations, they would be received very warmly!

 

A Laborious Labor Day Weekend

Happy Labor Day weekend everyone!

On Saturday, Kyle and I knew we wanted to do something adventurous this weekend. At first I wanted to go the wildlife refuge in Oklahoma but then decided that I didn't want to drive for two hours. It's still on the list though. Instead, we decided to head over to Ft. Worth and check out the Trinity trails on our bikes. 

It started off great...We found a pretty easy access site in Trinity Park across the street from the botanical gardens. We biked from there up to the stock yards.

  Road hazard...Longhorns in the road.

We biked around eight miles or so and then we stopped around the stock yards to eat our lunch.

Right as we were about to get going again...I went to grab my bike and saw this....

We decided to walk up to the main road and look for a gas station where we could put air in my tire and see if it would last long enough to make it back to the car. We walked a few blocks, got air in the tire and by the time we were back at where I saw the flat tire....BOTH of my tires were flat again. After a minute of whining (by me), we decided just to try to make the walk back to the car the way we came.

Let me tell you, it SUCKED. I whined A LOT. I drank the rest of the gatorade supply. But I kept walking. Kyle was a trooper too...he had a working bike and still walked all the way back with me. This was no ordinary walk. This was an EIGHT mile walk in 103 degree weather...on the never ending, no shade white trail of death. It took us about two hours to walk back. We contemplated other options... calling a cab ( Do they have one we could fit our bikes in?) him riding to the car and coming back to get me ( Would he be able to find me? Did I really feel safe just hanging out in the blazing sun by myself? The answer to that is no, by the way. I think its engrained in me that I don't hang out on trails alone even in the middle of the day. I would NOT like to end up on Unsolved Mysteries thanks.)

All in all, it was a bigger adventure than we bargained for...about 16 miles..half biked...half walked. Have I mentioned that I can't wait for fall??

After all of our hard work on Saturday, we decided that we deserved our favorite weekend tradition...

Mmmmmm Company Cafe!

We finished off the weekend with some disc golf. The guys play, I just walk a long. Kyle tried to teach me last summer...I was ALMOST successful...but it turns out.. I like to be awesome at things right away. So trying to learn  while playing with the most naturally athletic (and amazing disc golfer) person ever, did not go well ultimately. A frustrated Allison is not a good thing and really bad at disc golf. Maybe I'll try again once it starts cooling off again.. we'll see.

Today has been a much needed, much lazier day. Getting ready for a new week. I'm still soaking up being back at home! It's so nice not to end every weekend with a long drive!

I hope you all have had a great weekend!