Perfect Cold Hair

Well, today I woke up with my nose running like a faucet and my tonsils as big as tennis balls sticking out the sides of my neck. Now my nose is still runny, but it's raw and red from being rubbed and blown a million times a day.

It's really a shame, because along with all of the nastiness that I woke up to this morning, I also woke up to my gorgeous head of hair looking as fantastic as it had when I went to bed last night. That is ridiculous. It's a very rare occasion when I wake up to my hair looking amazing. More often than not, it is smashed in some areas, and in other areas looks like Suzie's:

It's always sad when a great hair day goes to waste. I think I may be more upset about that than actually being sick.

Now I'm off to drink some tea with honey and apple cider vinegar. Yep, it's disgusting, but I'm pretty sure it worked to kick my last cold, so I'm going to give it another go.

Giveaway from one of my favorite fabulous places!!!

OK- Here's the deal. This blog is written by the owners and designers at Alice Lane Home, a design firm and adorable store up in Utah that I will be taking a trip to soon.

Anyway, they are giving away this adorable bird pillow... You should enter... even those friends of mine who are boys who read my blog (you can enter, and if you win, you can give me the bird

pillow for Christmas. Thanks in advance).

Enter Here:

http://blog.alicelanehome.com/uncategorized/giveaway-time-2/

Good Luck, and I hope I win, or that one of you who will give me the pillow wins, but if one of my friends who wants to keep the pillow wins, I will still be happy. :)

Drueling...

OK- So I'm working at the fab design firm where I am a lowly intern, doing what I do as a lowly intern, which is search for crap. In other words, I shop online. It just so happens that it's one of my very favorite things in the world to do, so it's pretty frickin fun. Anyway, I was searching for nesting tables today, and I found this:

And this:

Do you see these chandeliers????? It looks like water or lace or something dripping... like the druel dripping down my face just looking at this thing!!!

Excuse me now while I clean myself up and go back to looking for boring nesting tables...

Photos property of Hudson Furniture

Poor, Neglected Bloggie.

I haven't written anything on my blog since JUNE. I suck. I have been busy as hell though. School, internship, family, etc... You know, all the usual excuses. As if I'm not on my computer for at least 2 hours a day, much of that time specifically reading blogs, and couldn't at least type a quick "HELLO!" to my poor bloggie.

I vow to post on my bloggie more often... Maybe I'll make my goal, at least for the short-term, to post at least once a week. Sounds easy enough, right? I'll write it on my cute calendar with a cute colored marker. I do have lots of exciting things happening, some of which are still kind of in the works, so it's too soon to talk about them yet, but as soon as I get my balls rolling (haha, I said balls), I will be sure to blog about them.

For now, have a grand night, and I promise to post a bloggie-worthy-blog this week. Yay Blog!

3am: An Odd Rambling.

Well, it's 3am. I'm awake. Norman is snoring louder than a freight train and is shaking my entire bedroom. Suzie is kicking me in the side. The chief is out of town for work, as he has been every weekend this month, and will be for the next few. It is cold in here - usually that helps me sleep, but apparently not tonight.

I am jealous of all who are sleeping right now. Especially my dogs. They both look really comfortable. I think I will dress them up for a photo shoot tomorrow as payback. Could be fun, and guaranteed to be highly entertaining for me.

My house smells like onions because I made French Onion Soup yesterday. My hands also smell like onions because I spent about 20 minutes chopping them up. The chief walked in the kitchen and it was like that scene from "Julie & Julia", when Julia is practicing chopping onions, has the entire counter top covered in them, and Paul walks in and just walks back out because he is about to cry. So funny. Great movie. I love Meryl Streep. And Amy Adams. I also loved "Enchanted", and if you haven't seen it, you are missing out BIG TIME.

"Big time... Big time..." I love the scene in "I Love You Man" when Peter Klaven is trying to talk Reggae, and Zoey tries to teach him, but he still sounds like a Leprechaun...

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, food...

Sometimes I want to open up a restaurant. I think it would be successful. I make really good food. Don't believe me? Come over for dinner. I'll knock your socks off (or the chief will, and he will knock your socks off too), I promise. I should start blogging recipes... what a good idea! Next time.

Alright. I think the pointlessness of this blog is making me tired. Or maybe I'm just delirious. Whatever, I need to stop. I did not proof read this post, so if the grammar is bad or it just plain doesn't make sense, well then, I'm sorry for wasting the 3 minutes it took you to read it.

Goodnight.

Indoor Air Quality Extreme

Did you know that the air in your house is likely more toxic to you than any amount of pollution you can find outside? Yep, true story. With all of the chemicals in everything from paint to furniture to cleaning products, we fill our homes with toxins and create unhealthy spaces for ourselves to live. We introduce chemicals such as formaldehyde, benzene and carbon monoxide into our air with most things that we bring into our homes.

But, there is something you can do! Plants! Plants clean the air.

I learned about this in one of my classes a few weeks ago, and came home and told the chief about it. I told him that it is recommended that there be 1 plant per 100 square feet of home. So, we embarked on the houseplant journey.

We started with a few smaller plants (we bought most of the pots at HomeGoods... they are cheap and sooo cute!). Then we went to Lowes for plants. I found out that I have a soft spot for almost-dead-plants, and ended up buying a few brown, sad looking specimens for $1 each.

We went back and forth a few times, and then, on our last trip to Lowes, we found the most brilliant, gigantic, beautiful plant either of us had ever seen. We were curious as to how much this plant was, because it was about 12ft tall and gorgeous, so we both guessed around $300. Turns out it was called a White Bird of Paradise, and it was only $50. SOLD! We wheeled the plant through the store, hitting the cameras and almost did not even make it out the door.

Then we had to figure out how to get it into the car... We got it about half way in the car... We had to drive really slowly...

The next obstacle was getting the thing into a pot and into the house. We tried putting it in the pot first, but then we couldn't lift the pot. So, we took it out of the pot, moved the pot to its spot, and then took the plant to the pot, tracking dirt through the entire living room.

After all the work and laughing at each other trying to figure out how to get this massive thing into our house, I am so glad that is that it's here, it's gorgeous, and I think it must count for at least 300 square feet of clean air, right?

The skinny on getting skinny.

I used to be skinny. You know, back in the day when my schedule looked like this:

6:00am- Wake up

7:00am- Get to school an hour early, sometimes because I had something to do, but most times because I just did

3:00- Out of school and onto some random activity, be it swimming, volleyball (where I did more bench-sitting than actual playing because I was AWFUL, but had a great attitude), rehearsal for a play or whatever activity correlated with that season, that year

5:30- Either go to another rehearsal (2 years of Operetta rehearsals), or go home to start homework.

Until 10:00- Homework, dinner, family time

10:00- Phone time (boyfriends, best friends, 3-way-calls when the 3rd person didn't know I was there)

11:00- Sleep.

REPEAT x4

Weekends were usually just as busy, but not as structured.

But then I went to college, where I was stuck in a dorm room, eating terrible cafeteria food (and trust me, it was worse than most... APU didn't have the delish cafe like Concordia). From then on, I have developed a much more sedentary lifestyle and packed on the pounds. I don't know how much I weighed in high school, but I know that I got to see some pretty scary numbers. I finally took charge, and have been watching those numbers turn the opposite direction.

Since mid-December I have been on the Atkins diet (mid-December?? What a GREAT time to start a diet, huh????), and been exercising more regularly, just doing basic cardio-- treadmill, elliptical, or walking the dogs a few miles. So far, I have dropped 21 pounds and am fitting into jeans that are 2 sizes smaller, but I still have about 40 to lose until I reach my goal weight.

Well, today I embarked on a new journey. I started P90X. Yep, the one from the informercial. It is really hard. I did it at about 6:00pm. It is about 11:00pm now and I am already sore. My butt, my thighs, my tummy and my back. At least I can confidently say that I did the whole thing!! I ordered this program a few months ago, and when I first tried it, I couldn't even make it through half of the first video. Well now, guess what... I'm going to make those videos my b****. (excuse my french stars, I needed to psych myself up a little... gotta keep the energy up so I can stay excited about this scary thing!).

It's going to be a tough 90 days, but I am so excited! I don't want to post a picture right now, or tell you what my high point (or low point, depending on how you want to look at it, really) was; I am still pretty self-conscious (not to mention STILL scared of the number), but I will definitely post before/after pictures when I get down to my goal!

If you, like me, ever have a hard time working out, just tell yourself, "If I can get through this, I'm going to be skinny tomorrow!" Obviously the statement is completely flawed, untrue, and probably psychologically unhealthy somehow, but it works for me!

Monday, May 17, 2010: -21 pounds

STAY TUNED!!!