Random Musings & Thoughts 8/4/16

Well, pretty much almost immediately after I posted last week’s Random Musings & Thoughts, the South Padre Island marathon sent out an update email that revealed they had chosen one of the 2 designs for the medal and the design was official, pending some minor tweaks on some details.  Like I said, I would have been 100% happy with either choice, but really, the design that won was ever so slightly more my favorite than the other just because of its simplicity and the fact that it looked more like a cartoon than a recreation of a sandcastle.

A little bit of TMI, but it seems that with all my weight loss I may have starting having TTOTM (“that time of the month”) again.  I was wondering why I was feeling more snacky and why my weight was going up on the scale even though each day I had a 300-700 calorie deficit and should not have been gaining anything.  But then, after about 4 days of being up on the scale, the reason presented itself and it all made sense.  Once it was over, the weight did just melt right back off, so that’s a relief.  While I’ve loved not having TTOTM for the last 10 or so years thanks to my birth control, I have to say that I’d much rather be trim, fit, healthy and happy WITH a period than fat, uncomfortable in my own skin and completely unhealthy & unhappy with no period.  It’s a small price to pay.  Besides, I should start menopause in the next 5 years if my family history is any indication of when I’ll start that lovely moment in time.

I wasn’t really ready to talk about it last Wednesday because it was still super fresh and painful, but a coworker/mentor of mine was murdered last Monday in the early morning hours.  He was returning home from work, heard some noise in his backyard and went to investigate.  He found 2 people breaking into his shed.  He notified dispatch of the situation and gave chase.  At some point, the burglars turned on him, shooting him 4 times.  He later passed in the hospital.  This will never stop affecting me.  Never.  He was a great and wonderful man who was well respected by his peers, friends, family, neighbors, and community.

This whole taking a break from caffeine is kicking my behind, let me tell you!  I’m tired all the time and feeling somewhat unmotivated.  I mean, when it comes time that I really do need to get out and exercise, I make it happen, but up until that moment I have been dreading it.  I hate that.  Of course, it’s possible that I’m going through a depression cycle right now and the death of my coworker/mentor hasn’t helped me to feel peppy.  It probably didn’t help that I’ve been keeping the temp in my apartment on the slightly warm side in an attempt to save money on my electric bill.  Well, on Wednesday, I cranked it down a little bit to just cool off the whole apartment a little bit and then went back to setting it a little higher.

I was a little frustrated with the Club INB (INKnBURN) monthly item for July.  I don’t even know what they should do, except maybe  offer more than one option each month, but make it so you can only order one of them?  Anyway, July’s item was a drawstring backpack (though I did really love the design on it, but I hate, hate, hate drawstring backpacks AND I have a million of them that I’ve gotten as swag from races), a water bottle cover (already have the club fabric print one from the welcome box and have no need for a second one), and a tech tube (balaclava).  If they had done an actual backpack, even if it was on the smaller capacity side, I would have probably bought the kit.  But, in more positive INKnBURN news, since I was completely dissatisfied with the Club item, I decided I’d go ahead and buy the capris from medieval kit that is the Halloween pre-order.  I skipped the tech shirt because I didn’t think I’d wear it much without the capris for just at a race, and I figured I would definitely wear the capris more often. 

On Friday, I met with a friend and she gave me a bunch of knitting needles.  Do I knit right now?  Nope.  Do I have plans to pick it back up and learn to follow patterns and make fancy-ish things?  Yes.  I’d like to get started on that by the end of this year, but if I don’t manage to get that started by the end of this year, then it will definitely be a 2017 goal to achieve.  When I was learning to knit years ago, it was a lot of fun for me and very relaxing.

I went and bought a second craft storage cart!  The first one I bought a couple weeks ago is a nice seafoam-type color.  The new one a salmon-y pink-ish color.

I took a pretty good picture of my abs earlier in the week.

This week in food.  There was the giant-est piece of pizza I’ve ever had in my life.  Think NY style and how big those pieces are.  Okay now multiply that by another 50% bigger and you have the giant-est piece of pizza I ate.  And it was soooo good and I couldn’t help myself and ate the whole thing!  Haha.

There was also national cheesecake day last Friday, so OF COURSE I had a slice of cheesecake.  I just picked up a slice from the Buc-ee’s in New Braunfels on the way home from the waterpark on Thursday.  Otherwise, I probably would have found myself at Cheesecake Factory getting a slice of seriously fancy cheesecake instead.  Which I probably should have done that since apparently they were offering 50% all cheesecake slices Friday and Saturday.  Oh well.

I wrapped up my week of salmon patties with a bacon and cheese patty both Friday and Saturday (they come in packs of 2).  Saturday I added a side of sweet potato fries that I didn’t bake quite long enough so they weren’t crunchy at all.  Now that I’ve eaten all 3 varieties of the salmon burger patties that HEB offers, I have to say I didn’t much care for the bruschetta but loved the cranberry & gorgonzola and the bacon & cheese.  But the cranberry & gorgonzola was hands down my absolute favorite.

And, while waiting for my friend with the knitting needles, I got Starbucks new affogato something-er-other honeycomb drink.  It was decent.  Wasn’t coffee-y enough for me, so probably won’t get it again.  That and it was like 220 calories for a grande.  Meh.  If you know me at all, then you know I really don’t like drinking my calories.

Okay, so I mentioned a waterpark.  Let me tell you a little about that day.  I haven’t been to Schlitterbahn in like 12 years, so I was really looking forward to this day.  And I have a waterproof camera!  So there are definitely pictures!  Woot!  We just generally had the most fun ever floating in tubes and shooting through the soda straws and the like.

For “lunch” we had funnel cake.  I got the loaded funnel cake which is a funnel cake at the base, about a cup of vanilla (other option was chocolate) ice cream which was ringed with real whipped cream and then drizzled with chocolate syrup and sprinkles on top.  Needless to say, I did not finish mine but wow was it good!

At about a little after 4pm, it started raining…like pouring rain.  Wow the rain was COLD!  But then there was lightning, so they shut the park down.  Of course, like 30 minutes later, they reopened the park, but by that point we were all ready to just go have dinner.  We’d had a great day and were now all hungry.  So we headed over to the Faust Hotel & Brewing Co.  They had a build your own burger option and, since I’ve been CRAVING a burger for like a week or 2 now, that was perfect.  I got the bratwurst burger patty, a jalapeno & cheddar bun, onion, tomato, lettuce, peppered bacon, a fried egg and beer cheese sauce.  Added a smidge of mayo and boom, most perfect burger ever!

Since there was a troll hater (who was a total coward and deleted their own comment…go figure) who wanted to say how funny it was that my tattoos were totally different in the 2 pictures, I took a new “now” picture and paired it with my “fat girl” picture from 6+ years ago.

I’ve been playing Pokémon Go…don’t laugh.  It’s not something I’m doing “seriously” and haven’t even attempted to go to one of the gyms.  I’m just collecting Pokémons and it’s just something fun to do while I walk around my apartments and sometimes while on runs.

On Monday, my Texas bestie, Amanda, and I went to a Tex-Mex restaurant called Trudy’s.  We both got a mimosa and holy wow those things were strong!  I’m guessing they took their Mexican martini and added a tiny bit of champagne to them.  Haha.  They were really good, but both of us could only drink one.  I got the Mexican eggs benedict.  Oh my goodness these were the best version of eggs benedict I’ve EVER had…EVER!  Then I got one of their praline brownies to go and ate that later in the afternoon.  Yum!

After our visit to Trudy's, Amanda and I went to Hobby Lobby and I discovered one brand of the paper punches was all 50% off so I got a few of them, plus a few other items.  Then back to my place for SCRAPBOOKING!!!  I did 4 pages in my scrap journal and I’m really happy with it so far.  I’ll try to work on it a little more while I’m still on vacation, but I also need to make sure I get as much of my costumes done as possible while I’m on vacation first.  I have plenty of time to work on my scrap journal, but it will be soooo nice when it’s caught up to date.  Here's a few of my favorite pages so far.

My 5 new bands for my FitBit arrived on Monday!!!  I now have hot pink, yellow, blue, lime green, orange, red, white, the one I call the “tattoo” design, the purple anodized metal link one, and the purple one it came with.  There is also a pastel pink, pastel blue, black and brown bands, but I’m not inclined to get those.

My new Garmin 920xt also arrived on Monday!!!  It’s taking some trial and error but I think I’m getting it figured out and set up the way I like it.  My first run with it, even though while running it separated the mile splits, when I uploaded to Garmin Connect, it uploaded as one really long lap, but did break down my overall average pace.  Hopefully I fixed that by fiddling with the settings.

not a pic of my actual watch (stock photo)

And now for a couple random pictures from this week.

1 cup blueberries and 1/2 cup lite cool whip

chocolate-chocolate chip protein waffles - THE BOMB!!!

parmesan & cornflake crusted baked tilapia...very yummy!

someone loves his mama!

i'm a huge fan girl for Poe AND the raven

it's so hard to get him to look at the camera