Sick Day

I'm sick. Again. This time it is in the form of a raging cold that even my trusty Alka Seltzer couldn't take down last night. I'm hoping it does a better job tonight. This morning (after calling into work and going back to sleep) I was woken up by Mr. T to a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice from the tree that hangs into our back yard. I can't even remember the last time I had fresh squeezed juice at home. What a guy huh? I don't know that I can go back to minute maid after this one though. I liked it so much, he made me another glass this afternoon.
Not a whole lot of excitement today other than our second CSA box from First Light Farm, check them out here It's only our second week in but it is already apparent that we are making the right choice for our community, bodies, and bank account. For $20 a week we're getting more veggies that we can eat in that time (so now we share it with Mr. T's parents) This week we have:

Rapini (aka Broccoli Raab)

Frisee

Cauliflower

Celery

Tangerines

Hannah Sweet Potatoes

Kale

Cherry Belle radishes

Aunt Thelma’s Sweet Potato Squash

Yellow onions 

YUM!

Who dat?!

Thank you New Orleans for a great game tonight. I'll see you in 2 weeks at the Superbowl!

To Grandmother's house we went

Today we went to Grandma B's (Mrs. T's paternal Granny) and had a fabulous visit. My Grandma is an amazing woman. She is such a kind and caring person. She drives all of her elderly neighbors to all of their appointments (keep in mind Grandma B is 88 and her neighbors are younger,) catches the stray cats in the neighborhood and takes them to get fixed, and is all around awesome. She makes me want to be a better person.
So today we surprised her. Or I did, Mr. T was actually out walking B and I couldn't wait any longer (sorry Mr. T.) My Dad and I have decided that we are going to fulfill Grandma's lifelong dream of a trip to Ireland and take her for her 90th birthday next year. It's going to be a family wide excursion, we're talking aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, the whole nine! ***If anyone knows a good travel agent, please give me a heads up!*** Anywho, I haven't seen my Grandma smile that wide in a very long time. It felt good. Yay for us!

Grandma B circa 2008

Does my love ever reach you?

Do you ever wonder if your friends and family that have passed on to the other side can feel/understand how much you miss and love them?
Background:
I woke up this morning (1 hour and 10 minutes after my alarm should have woken me up) from a dream about my Gram who passed away almost 4 years ago. After she passed away I used to wish that I would dream about her just to see her again but I didn't really start dreaming about her until her husband Rick passed away last year. Now when I do dream of her it makes it hard to move on and start my day. It just reminds me how much I miss her and wish that I could still spend time with her. She is definitely a person that I never conveyed my appreciation to and don't feel like I spent the time I could have with. She was sick for about 3 years before she died and there were many times that I feel like I should have made the time and gone home to see her. With the recent passing of my second Grandpa it definitely brings the feelings of all that we've lost closer to the surface.
I remember thinking after my Grandpa passed away that it was just too hard to care about all of these people and that it might be easier to not have so many people in my life but I quickly realized that:
1. I'm an idiot, and extremely naive
2. My life would have been very empty without these people that I care about, and that cared so much for me. Which is really a blessing that I can't be grateful enough for.
So that brings me to today, when I'm aching for the loss of that person are they getting the reverse, the positive feeling of having someone that cares so much for them? I really hope so and believe that they at least know how much I love and care for them still. On days like these I am happy to have a higher power to hand things over to.

Big thanks to Rick James and Duffy

For rocking my very un-motivated work out tonight. It totally throws me off when the machines don't pick up my heart rate since I'm not exactly sure how to keep my own pace. The results? Almost 100 extra calories burned w/o calculating my heart rate. According to the machine it was between 50-60 (even when I wasn't holding the heart rate spot lol) when it should have been around 180. Grr.
In other news: I gave up my French class ambitions when I discovered it would put me in the car another 1.5 hours minimum on top of my 2 hours commute every day and would severely hose my work out schedule and the ability to spend some evenings with my husband. Better to figure out it would be too much before I got into it right? I hope so. Someday my goal is to live, work, and go to school all in the same town.... Someday...

Love my kids!

Today was our first class back to Sunday school after the Christmas/New Year's holidays and it was a blast! My kids are so much fun, even if they can be a little bit crazy! Today we found out they were all born in the year of the monkey- so fitting! We also did lots of physical activity and read the creation story (age appropriately illustrated) and the biggest topic was "They're naked!" Of course the children's bible doesn't go into why they are naked so I had to sum it up for them and tell them that Adam and Eve had to wear clothes because they had misbehaved. The kids looked so depressed, like they were disappointed in Adam & Eve. Priceless.
One of my boys informed me today that on New Year's you have to kiss someone, so I asked him who he kissed. He said no one and that his Mom and Dad didn't kiss either. Such a crack up. I love getting to see how much the kids have changed in just the 4 months that we've been doing class. They love prayer time and I think it especially flattered them today when we were thanking God for making us so special. Meanwhile, I'm thankful to have them!

Oh and ps

I made my goal this week of going to the gym 3 times! I pushed myself more than I have been for the last month and I'm pretty pleased with the results. Now all I need to do is keep it up and get back into my 6's... :)

Feelings

Do you ever feel like you're coming off wrong but don't know how to fix it or make the other person understand? I feel this way often. Mostly because I'm afraid I'm coming off as cold and it freaks me out. My worst fear is that someone won't understand how concerned I am for them or how much I care about them. I try to balance this out with family by always saying I love you, at the end of every phone call and every time we leave each other. But then there's the times that that is not enough. Like last night.
    My older bub, C, has been having some issues lately that I won't go into detail with but I will say this: Originally doctors thought that he had an ulcer (he's had them before and he's only 33!) They did a scope on his stomach and it was not an ulcer, they determined that it must be his esophagus. Our family has quite the history with chronic heart burn and stomach issues and C suffers from these as well. So when they said it was his esophagus we thought "okay- he has chronic heart burn, used to chew (GROSS! I know) and has had ulcers, it is probably bothering his esophagus as well." Well yesterday he had a sonogram done on his esophagus and they found some discoloration but not much else. He is now waiting for blood work to come back to find out if there is something else going on. The scary part? Possible results could be cancer.
    So what do I say to him? I don't want him to know that I'm stressed, because I'm trying not to be, and I don't want him to stress at all. I told him that he is young and healthy (for the most part) and if it is something terrible he will be able to fight it. His concerns are mainly for his family: wife and 3 children, that basically depend on his income. My family is tight, there is no way that any of them are going to go without so I told him "worst case scenario you've got the whole family up in your business for a while to take care of you and help out, you're not going to be living on the street or anything." I don't know if it helped because he is a chronic worrier (another thing my family is infamous for) and this is a really scary situation. I like to think he knows me well enough to know how concerned I am for him and that my world is not complete without him, and in other cases I'm pretty sure he does, but this is unknown territory. For now the only thing to do is pray and wait and hope that the results will be nothing more than he needs to take it easy on his digestive system for a while.
If you've made it this far you're an Angel, thanks for reading.

Love ya bub!

Ornery Day

Ever have one of those days where you feel that you have the right to tell everyone you come across to "shove it"? Yeah, I'm having one of those. I am laughing at others' misfortune, egging people on, everything I say is dripping with sarcasm and I'm not being very nice. And you know, it feels great. I'm sure I'll feel guilty later but for today it feels really nice not to be nice. Of course I'm not laughing at real misfortunes and I'm not being mean, but I'm definitely not being the person I normally try to be, especially at work. There are multiple stressful and irritating events that led to my attitude today which I'm hoping are resolved soon but in the mean time I'm going to continue to be Mary *expletive* Sunshine.
Have a wonderful day everyone!

Day 2

OMG I am so exhausted! Yesterday my 45 minutes flew by and I felt great the whole time. Today... Not so much. I found I had to force myself to wait until the end of each song to look at time elapsed so that I didn't jump off the elliptical right then. This working out stuff is hard! And I think all of those peanut M & M's* are coming back to haunt me in the form of heart burn that killed me the entire time I was at the gym.
The good news is that I'm feeling the burn for reals now. All I have to do is make it to the gym on Friday and my goal for the first week of 2010 will be complete. What's that book with the little train that keeps going called? The Little Engine That Could? Definitely feeling like I need to read that before bed tonight.
On another note, guess what was on while I was at the gym?

Link to MTV's Teen Mom Trailer

Maddy blogged earlier here about this show, and wow. I had my iPod on but read all the captions. What a fabulous tribute to our society this one is... (Where's the sarcasm font when you need it?) Can I just say I am so thankful that I never put myself into the position these girls are in? Yikes.
As for my other goals: We haven't been speaking much French at home since Jared has been working every night and we don't see each other for more than 30 minutes in the morning but I have signed up to take French 2 at my local JC. I'm a little nervous and hoping that I'm not overbooking myself but I think that this is going to be the perfect semester to take it and get it over with. It's one more class that can go towards my Associate degree and or to transfer and will keep me in the groove with my Francais so that I don't lose it. Mr. T and I definitely want our (future, currently non-existant) children to have the same opportunity that he did and to do that we will have to speak French primarily at home and worry about English second. We'll see how that goes...


*A well meaning co-worker dropped a 56 oz, YES 56 ounce, bag of peanut M & M's on my desk today at work. I'll get him later.

500 calories later...

So if I was on the elliptical for a total of 4 miles and 500 burned calories what does that mean? That I burned off a total of one of the See's candies that I ate over the holidays?
The last few weeks have been rough for my gym schedule with sickness/nephews here/sick again I didn't have much time to make it to the gym. I was pretty nervous about going back today, I really thought I would be worse off but I am really proud that I did my full 45 minutes on the elliptical which is actually 10 more minutes than I normally do. I definitely felt weak trying to do abs but at least I burned some calories! I'm sure I'm going to be feeling the burn tomorrow as my legs and back are already tight but that's a good thing.
About the only thing that gets me moving at the gym is my iPod which got me thinking- what does everyone else listen to at the gym? My favs tonight were definitely Free Your Mind by En Vogue, Big Pimpin' by Jay Z and The Way You Make Me Feel by Michael Jackson. I love a beat and some catchy lyrics while I'm trying not to focus on how out of breath I am. What do you guys like?

Leavin' on a jet plane!

Today is a very exciting day in the household of Mr. and Mrs. T! Today is the day that I booked out flight to Switzerland. This will be my first trip and the latest of several for Mr. T. We have been talking about this trip for approximately 4.5 years- basically since we started dating- and we are finally going! I have been brushing up on my French thanks to the Rosetta Stone program Mr. T got from a co-worker and we are trying to speak more of it at home. Mr. T's maternal Grandparents as well as some Aunts, an Uncle and cousins live there so we will be doing lots of visiting and hopefully lots of sight seeing.
I am really looking forward to meeting the rest of Mr. T's family and getting to experience Switzerland for myself. Mr. T and his parents have shared many stories and I have heard "oh you should try this or that food in Switzerland" so many times, I can't wait to actually try them and see the places they've been talking about. I'm also considering a french class for this semester and what better way to boost my vocabulary is there?
Since we only have 6 short weeks until our vacay I better get packing...

Shoutout to the Crazy Bunny Lady (you know who you are)

I loved your background so much that I had to go get one of my own, thanks!

You make me feel like dancing

I love music. I know everyone "loves" music but I think I have an extra special relationship with music and I am very much an audio learner so what I hear really touches me. I'm not musically inclined- at all as far as I know- but I do appreciate a good song, riff, beat or a beautiful voice. I grew up around people who loved very different types of music and it has turned me into quite an eclectic listener. I'm no expert but I'm definitely one of those people that thinks that my musical taste is superior to others even though I wouldn't ever admit to it. This can be our little secret. ;) I recently realized that I think part of that attitude comes from the two most influential women in my life (Mom and Gram) having a similar attitude. I know for sure that my Mom does, not positive about Gram but am forced to assume from memory since she's not here anymore. Well, not physically anyway, but that's a whole other topic. Luckily these women both have different and excellent taste in music that does overlap and has given me a lot of happy listening in my 24 years.
Yesterday my facebook status was posted as "Mrs. T is spending her life savings in the iTunes store." I honestly could without even trying too. I have run into a few songs that they don't carry O Holy Night by Josh Groban, Hey Good Lookin' featuring Clint Black and Kenny Chesney from Jimmy Buffet Live at Fenway Park, and my favorite version of Return of the Mack by Mark Morrison. But for the most part, I am a big spender at the iTunes store. Thanks to my little shopping spree yesterday I am currently enjoying the following:

20 of Hank Williams' Greatest Hits (gotta love Your Cheatin' Heart)

Cold Blooded and Give it to me Baby by Rick James

Live Your Life by T.I. featuring Rhiana

Margaritaville and Hey Good Lookin' (not the one I wanted) by Jimmy Buffett

Times They Are A-Changin' by Bob Dylan

Party In the U.S.A. by Miley Cyrus (it took me a while to decide whether or not to include this on here, I'm not a Miley fan but that song is just so damn catchy!)

Right Here (the clean version) by Erk tha Jerk

Wake Up by Arcade Fire

Kandi by One eskimO
If that's not eclectic I don't know what is.
If you haven't heard Kandi by One eskimO yet I highly recommend it. I'm not a big fan of the rest of the album but that track is definitely a stand out. Thanks for reading.

and a Happy New Year!

Hello everyone! I don't know about you but I am so ready for this new year! 2009 was a year of trials and tribulations for me, a good year but a tough one. I *think* I came out of it okay but I was definitely ready to move on to a new year as was Mr. T.
For my first post of 2010 I thought I would post the year's goals. I'm not big on resolutions because they're so typical. In my business we discuss our goals for the year and I think that's a great way to do it in my personal life as well. So here are the goals for Mrs. T this year:
10 for 2010
1. Go to Switzerland
2. Brush up on my Francais by speaking more of it at home with Mr. T
3. Get my state insurance licenses (also a work goal)
4. Take a sewing class in order to finish bub Jesse's quilt
5. Exercise 3 times a week regularly. (baby steps!)
6. Work through my new recipes: Cupcakes from bff Mad, Mastering The Art of French Cooking from Mr. T and plenty of new ones from Pampered Chef.
7. Be the best damn Sunday school teacher out there (not damned, just damn) hehe
8. Post on the blog more!
9. Teach Bretta the commands lay down, heel and play dead
10. Take my Pampered Chef business to the next level!

Good luck to you all with your goals for the year.

Obviously she's got the "sleep" command down...