Happy 4th!

Today I am a little sad that I am not at the Peachtree Road race. For the last 9 4th of Julys that has been how I started my day! I feel like it is what you are supposed to do on the 4th...followed by a pool and then a cookout and some fireworks. Well, I guess I will have to settle for a lazy morning, watching the tour, followed by some shopping and then a soccer game with fireworks. Not bad!

Last night Craig and I went to a little festival in downtown Dayton to see some fireworks. It was nuts. I saw a lot of people that were very different from the surburban life that I have! It was interesting. We had fun though (we didn't get to look at many booths because it was so crowded so we just got food and then waited for the fireworks). The fireworks were really good. They had some cool news ones or at least ones that I haven't seen. For those of you who don't partipate in FB, on the way back from the fireworks when we were walking to the car, I felt a drip from a building awning. Huh, it hasn't rained in days. I turned to Craig and said "that better not be bird shit"....and then put my hand in my hair..oh, it was! UGH, gross. I told him and he said "are you serious?" um, YEAH! Ugh, I had to wash it out of my hair as soon as I got home. It was so disgusting.

You guys know I am obsessed with Lance Armstrong and his uncanny abilities. Well, the Tour de France starts today with an individual time trial...I am so excited and am sitting here watching it alone in my undies while Craig still sleeps (he takes the REALLY lazy approach on weekends :-)). I am a little sad that Lance is supposed to ride as a support rider for Alberto Contador (who isn't even American) because I want him to be the lead person. I sort of wonder if it will stay that way. As you might or might not know, Lance has won 7 Tours but Contador is 10 years younger and won the Tour last year. It just depends on how Contador does early on to see whether the shift can be made to Lance. Of course all the announcers want Lance to be the guy and so do I! He also has Levi Leipheimer (American) on his team and the announcers just said that Contador doesn't speak any English and thinks that the two Americans might gang up on him. I wish that Contador was on a different team because I think that it would push Lance a lot harder and I am scared he will sit back too much...then again, I am not sure he can sit back, not sure he can even think about it in the race that has defined him as a rider.

Ok, geekiness over :-) I had great aspirations of getting a ton of stuff done this weekend but it is not looking like I am going to get through it all. I meant to post this list on Thursday as a motivator but, um, that didn't happen so here it is now.

--Need to go through all the pictures I have taken of clients in the last year and pick which ones I want on my new Ohio website (I did this about 4 months ago but I need to update for some of my favs from the last 4 months and need to actually upload them to the galleries. I just tried to log in though and I can't so I need to now figure that out...ugh).

--Need to go through all my pictures from Greece to through out the bad ones and keep the good ones.
--need to make a CD for the two Jenns.

--Need to go through all my pictures from Glacier and Canada and do the same thing. Need to upload those.

--I want to make a book of my trips each year. Um, I think that I am on 2007.

--I wanted to design a book of Ariyana's first year (she is 21 months old now!!). UGH!

--I also would like to design some birth announcements, Christmas cards, and the like. Trying to get ahead.

--Need to decide and get together some ideas for how to transition this photography gig to Ohio.

As you can see, most of it is related to photography. I miss it. I feel like my skills are going to deteriorate if I don't get back into it pretty quickly so I am still aiming for January (though I doubt anyone will come out in January for photos but it will start the process at least). Well, I guess I should get to it.

In Defense of Food

I finally finished it tonight and I really liked it. He uses the word "nutrition" a bit too much for my liking but other than that it was a good book that brings up some interesting points. The basic premise is that we barely eat food anymore because everything is so processed. After reading it I started looking at the ingredients in some of the foods I have in my cupboard...don't do it. I can barely understand half of them. He also talks about different 'fads' that scientists have gone through. At one point they said that carbs were bad, then it was protein, and now it is fat. I guess the overall point is just that scientists have tried so hard to break food down into the different nutrients that make them but you just can't do that. You have to look at the whole food and you have to look at what other foods are eaten in the same meal. He talked about how any traditional diet (French, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese) works better than our "Western diet" as he coins it. They all eat things that we consider to be fattening and bad for you yet they have lower disease rates for every major disease that can be linked to diet. And, further, as soon as they adopt our diet they get the same diseases we do from it. He talks about how there are nutrients that are the "nutrient de jour" if you will. They are deemed to be a good nutrient so the food scientists inject it into every food. The problem is that they have to take out something that is in there and often times that can be worse for you. Omega-3s are the popular one right now. Listen to commercials...everything from bread to yogurt to whatever have Omega-3s added. They discovered that these are good for us and are actually replaced by Omega-6s because of the way our farming (animals and plants) are done...so now they are adding them back in. Weird huh. Oh, and supplements almost never work...but, people who take them do tend to be healthier, he says it is because people who would take the time to buy supplements are probably already health conscience.

It is just a really good read and you can wade through what you want of it. I recommend it. Especially for all you with children. I sort of had this thought the other day of where our eating goes wrong. Most of you read the books about what to give your baby when in their development and knew how different foods made their bodies react...fruit makes you poop, stuff like that. Well, where do we lose that knowledge and how much do our bodies really change if we didn't force them to change by putting more processed food into them? I don't know the answer, but it just got me to thinking. So, in the last few days I have cooked all my meals and I am trying to use up the processed foods I have by mixing them in with whole foods. After that I am going to see if I can just mostly eat whole foods. The general rule the guy in the book gave (those he has many other rules) was that if your great-grandmother (or great-great-grandmother) wouldn't recognize it as food then you should pass. The example he gave was that your great-grandmother would recognize yogurt, but wouldn't know what the heck Go-gurt was. Craig's mom gave him her old breadmaker a while back so this weekend I am going to attempt to make bread :-) I went to the store tonight and found whole wheat flour (and then I found it at Kroger too) so I am going to use that and see how it turns out. Sadly I only have 14 more days here before I travel for an eternity again but for those 14 days I am going to try to only eat out (or processed in general) once or twice...one being on the 4th :-) I am sort of interested in how hard it will be and if it will be costly or not. I think that now would be easy with all the cheap and yummy friuts and veggies at the stores, but what about the winter?

Anyway, sorry to ramble, let me know if you are interested in the book. In other news, the neck is finally improving. Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I think that I am going to look into a massage tomorrow or Friday....now, do you guys go to spas or the chiro? Think it makes a difference in this case? Also, thanks Molly for the pillow and desk suggestions...I did change how I have been sleeping and I think that has helped. As for the desk, that is a hard one since I am never in the same place and most of the time I am stuck in a conference room or am sitting on my couch, but I will try to work on that one...I need to improve my posture, maybe some yoga classes will help. I went to spin class tonight and it hasn't seemed to affect the neck too negatively. I tried not to lean on that arm at all and took it a little easier than normal. I nearly laughed when the teacher said you burn 600-800 calories in her class (maybe if you are a lot bigger than me but I only burned 411 :-))

I feel like I want to have a contest, and for a good prize, but I just don't know what the contest should be.....

Oh my neck....

Ok, this whole neck thing is getting old....I have done everything I could think of and still it bothers me. Yesterday and today it has been especially sore..was it because I took a 15 mile bike ride, or the 3 hours in the garden or did I sleep on it funny again? Who knows but this is getting old....fast. Today I tried the 3 advil at a time (Dr. Erin said I could take up to 4) and tried the heating pad. It seems to have helped a little bit. So, I am going to keep that up for tonight and see how I am doing in the morning. I have held off on exercise for the last couple of days but I think that I am going to have to hit the gym again tomorrow.

Not much else going on here. The weather was so cool today that I had the windows open and no air on....they say that it is unseasonably cool here but I like it. I am so glad that the week is almost over and am looking forward to a long weekend. I am looking forward to being home for the second weekend in a row with nothing to do really...it should be nice. And, the Tour de France starts this weekend!! YAY, I am super excited (I know that none of you probably watch it but it is awesome). You know I love me some Lance and the whole teamwork and other aspects of the race just really amaze me. Craig watches it too so I am sure we will be those dorks for the next 3-4 weeks :-)

In other news...I finally gave up on the nails. Today I had the acrylic taken off (which was sort of painful) and got a regular manicure. The lady told me that my nails looked really good considering I had the acrylic on there for 3 years. Hopefully they will hold up. The whole reason I even got the acrylic to begin with was because my nails always broke and it was painful. We will see. It feels so weird right now. The tops of my nails are super sensitive and I don't have any nail that goes past my finger so I feel everything with my finger now that used to be blocked by my nails. It also makes it harder to text :-p

Anyway, nothing exciting here!

Ouchie...

That is sort of how I feel. Just achy. It is achy in a good way though...well, all except for that stupid neck muscle that will not chill out. It was getting better on Friday but two plane rides and two nights of sharing the bed with someone else and it is starting to hurt again :-( Hopefully it will be back on the rebound soon.

Friday I got home at about 3:30 which was preceeded by fun events :-) On the way to the airport in Charlotte we hit traffic because of an accident and were pushed for time at the airport. Since my senior's flight was 35 mins before mine I dropped her off before returning the rental car. Once I pulled off I realized that she forgot her cell phone...UGH. So, after returning the car and getting through security I had to make it all the was to E20. It was pretty far considering I went in at the B gate and my flight was at A1. Luckily I made it down there fine and then made it to my flight, so it wasn't too much drama, especially compared to my normal travels :-)

When I got home on Friday I decided to go to the bank to open a savings account for Craig and my trip. He had mentioned once that he had a hard time saving coins cause he would always want to know how much he had so I had looked into savings accounts with no minimums. Well, it turns out that there is a special program in Ohio that is called SaveNOW. You can make as many deposits and you want, up to $500 at a time until you reach $5,000 and after 10 months the state of Ohio sends you a questionnaire. Once you fill out the questionnaire they give you 3.25% interest as a bonus. This is on top of the bank's .75% that they give for this type of account. You can pull the money out at any time and after a year it just turns into a regular savings account. Not sure how many of you have checked the interest on your savings accounts (other then ING) but they are around .4-.5%...not even a full %, so 4% sounds great! I also thought that this would be easier for Rebecca's idea of putting my savings from Kroger in there (which by the way was $24 today and my total purchase was only $39)...this way I can just transfer the money without having to go to the bank. We will see how it goes....

After the bank Craig and I went for a bike ride...not your run of the mill easy bike ride either..this was a 15 miler on my mountain bike...which is not easy if you are not going down a mountain. It was a good workout for me (and probably the reason that my neck is still sore). We were going to go again tonight but we ran out of time today. They have trails here like the Silver Comet Trail but they are more far reaching.

Last night we went to the Crew (Major League Soccer) and today I spent 3 hours in my garden. It had been pretty neglected since I have been gone for 3 weeks. Craig watered it for me if it didn't rain (which it does pretty regularly here but not enough to be annoying) but he didn't pull weeds or sort it all out. If you remember, I had planted peas, snap peas, green beans, carrots, zucchini, a pumpkin, and some pepper plants. Well, I picked enough green beans and peas for a meal so that was fun. The zucchini is out of control but no actual zucchinis yet :( And, apparently a pumpkin that I broke the stem off of when I transplanted, ,has survived and we have a nice long vine now! What did I spend 3 hours doing? Well, first I had to weed the whole thing, then I gently moved the zucchinis so they wouldn't invade other plants, I thinned the carrots and then I set out to untangle the peas! Oh the peas...that was probably an hour and a half by itself. The peas grew to be about 4ft tall and since I didn't have stakes for them to vine up they were one big tangled mess. They were all attached to each other and growing in every direction. Now they are all sorted out so I hope they will produce more veggies. Finally, my strawberries have sprouted little runners. If you put them in soil (or lay them on it) then they will root and grow a new plant so I did some of that. If it works I will have turned 4 plants into about 20...weird huh. We will see!

So, I am thankful to have been home all weekend and I think that I made the most of it. The eating healthy thing is still going....I felt like I made really good decisions last week with all of my eating (other than ice cream twice) and I am trying to eat non processed food almost exclusively when at home so we will see how it goes. There are still a couple meals (breakfast) that I am trying to figure out but I am definitely making progress. I am now reading this book. It is really good and sort of scary at the same time. I heard that they were trying to make a movie (or had) but the food industry is trying to block its release. Basically it is about how scientists try to break down food into nutrients and tell us which nutrients are good and bad but because food is made of so many different things, it isn't really practical to break it down like that. The prove being that no supplement works as well as the food in which the vitamin is contained. It also talks about how low fat diets have pretty much done nothing to prevent heart disease or other chronic diseases linked to diet and how all those "studies" are really not accurate because it is really hard to isolate anyone's diet. I don't know, I just saw him on Bill Mahr one night and what he said seemed to make sense so I thought I would check his book out. It also went along with my eating less processed stuff so I am checking it out. He does use the word "nutrition" too much but other than that I like it, 70 pages in! I will let you know if I like it in the end and anyone is welcome to borrow it!

Ok, this much be the longest post EVER so if you are still around, then I hope you have a good week! Only 4 days this week for me and I have so much to do that I think that it will go by really fast!

Exhausted

This has been one of the most frustrating weeks of work. On the one hand I have learned a lot but on the other hand, there is so much that needs to be done at this location that it is not even funny! I don't have much confidence in the Controller here but maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt and I worked 12 hours today..UGH....oh, and my neck still hurts!

This is a little random but I got curious about my stats on my photography website since I had stopped advertising and had been doing less with clients and I now have at least one visitor from every state except Vermont and New Mexico..so if you know someone from either of those states and they visit my website I will send you a prize. I also crossed another thing off because I sold something out of my etsy shop finally. I had sold stuff that was in there but never through them so I was excited. Now I need to update it.

I can't WAIT to go home tomorrow. Unfortunately I have to leave here at 7:45am and will not get home until 3:30pm but whatever, I will be home!!! I can't wait!! It has been so long since I have been home longer than 24 hours and I have so much to do! So many sewing ideas coming :-)

And finally, a sad day...Michael Jackson :-( I am convinced that it was due to the fact that he weighed 90 pounds and was rehearsing for 8 hours a day. I had one of his posters when I was young...I got it as a prize for some fundraising event and I really did love his songs. I was always sad that he seemed to lose it a little later in life but I am really glad that nothing about all of that has been mentioned in the wake of his death.

Slacker

I feel like a blogger slacker lately :-( I have just been all over the place and my routine is a little out of whack. I am in Darlington, SC now for those who keep up. Yesterday I left Craig's house at 5:40am (after getting up for a shower and stuff) and I got to the office here at 3pm. Ridiculous. This place is so hard to get to. Everyone said to fly into Charlotte and not Florence but it is the same price...geez...that was 4 hours of driving I wouldn't have had to do. The place here is a disaster....literally. I could spend the rest of the summer here every week and I am still not sure they would be clean....geez again. The good news in all of this is that I will be here (1hr from Myrtle Beach) when my family is coming in a month and I was planning on going so that means I will not have to pay to fly here. We are going to fly into MB that week..YAY. It also means that if we get the girls weekend together, there is a good change I will be here then too. Bad news is that I have less time with Craig :-(

Not much else is going on with me...I am ready to be home for a weekend in Ohio and out of this crazy southern weather :-) I have done well eating this week on the road and I actually feel a lot better. Hopefully I can finish out the week strong.

I STILL have a crick in my neck, though I am pretty sure I pulled/strained/pinched something. The pain goes all the way to the mid part of my back...on the back of my shoulder blade. Weird huh? It has also been almost 3 weeks now! I am about to put on ICYHOT (sexy) and take a muscle relaxer that Dr. Erin said I could probably take...sweet dreams!

My little bb is growing up!

Seriously, how cute is she??? I love her to pieces. I got to see her this last weekend and she is so much fun. She calls herself "nana"....close to Ariyana...we don't know where the second N (or the first one I guess) comes into play but Alyson said that all little kids call her that so it must come from somewhere.

She is a little parrot now and just repeats things once she warms up...can say lots of animals and all their sounds, she knows colors and will pretty much repeat whatever you want her too. She is still working on my name...she mumbles a little and then there is "lissa" at the end....it is cute. Yesterday when I asked who the cutie pie was she pointed at me so I guess that is a point for me :-) Then again, if you asked her if she loves mommy she says no...and we know that is not true!

The next time I am in town my mom is going to bring her to Atlanta to hang out on that Friday (my mom doesn't work Fridays). I can't wait!