A New Chapter...for him

So this past weekend was one of the greatest in a long time. My boyfriend decided to drive over and visit me for 3 days before embarking on a new job that takes him to Arkansas for the next few weeks and then across country pretty much indefinitely. Even though our relationship has primarily been a long distance one, we were always only about 3-hrs apart and saw each other about once a month. Now that seems like it's going to be next to impossible and we won't even be able to talk on the phone for the majority of the day. Major BUMMER is an understatement. i'm glad he's moving on to a more fulfilling job that pays more, but a part of me will miss being in constant contact with him. At least we went out with a bang!

On Wednesday we went out for ramen, sake, and sushi, then just hung out at his hotel (napping) and grabbed dinner. Thursday we set out with big plans to tackle the Zoo AND the Aquarium, but after a few hours in the heat while wandering around looking for the kangaroos and tigers, we decided to call it quits after lunch at O'Henry's. At least my pasta was good. And my nap was even better! :) Friday was a bittersweet day since he had to go home, but seeing X-Men: First Class, bowling (I beat him 2-1, take that!), and a few pictures in the park made it a little more bearable.

After shedding only a few tears (I promised I wouldn't cry), it was time to say goodbye and good luck!

Up in Flames....

Saturday was one of the scariest days of my life!!! What started as a somewhat comical event worthy of some crazy sitcom could have ended in tragedy for my family. My cousin called my mom's cell phone and asked where my grandma was, so my mom hands the cell to me and tells me to bring it to her... I walk down the hall, see the front door open, so I figure as usual my grandma decided to go sit on the porch. When I get outside, I see her sitting in a chair on the sidewalk in front of our house talking to some strange woman I didn't know. I decide to ignore this and just hand my grandma the phone and tell her that my cousin wanted to talk. It's then that I find out from the stranger that she was from across the street and my grandma had told her that some strangers had just pushed her out of a car and left her. When I explained the situation, she tell me that she had called the police and that my mom needed to come out. Then we spent another comical 10 minutes or so explaining to the officer that my grandma had moved all of the stuff from in front of our front door, snuck out, and forgot where she was. So we all had a good laugh, we calmed my grandma down, and called my cousin back to tell her what was going on. As it turns out, that earlier phone call is partially what precipitated all of these other events because she heard on her police radio that an elderly woman with my grandma's name said that she had been pushed out of someone's car. As the ruckus died down and we headed inside, things headed downhill. While my mom was outside she had left a pot of grease on to fry shrimp for dinner and it was starting to smoke. When I went out to relay what had happened to my family, the pot burst into flames. I partially blame myself for the rest of these happenings because I didn't turn the pot off, but at the moment I could only try to remember how to put out a grease fire. WATER IS NOT AN OPTION! So I handed my mom a pot top to smother the flames that had began to inch towards our ceiling. That didn't work. The flames were curling up around the side of the top. My mom then grabs a dish towel to try to knock out the excess flames. Then, in a moment when time seemed to simultaneously stop and go into overdrive, the pot fell off the stove and onto the floor. A huge fireball leaped up from the pot and scalding grease flew everywhere. At that moment I felt as if the world was burning to the ground. I ducked into the next room and feared for my mom's life because I could no longer see her through the flames. At this point I was coughing from the thick smoke that now blanketed our kitchen, thinking to myself that this is how those actors on TV would feel if they were in this situation for real instead of in another thrilling primetime slot. I ducked my head back in and was now relieved to see that my mom was ok and that while the flames had now spread to the rug (who puts rugs in kitchens), the flames had not engulfed the room and that my mom was still safe. As we continued to try to beat the flames into submission, my mom announced that it was futile and that the best we could do was try to drag the flaming rug out through the back door without setting the rest of the house on fire. So she grabbed the burning rug and I followed, smothering anything that was set alight as we made a calculated procession to the back door. Thankfully, we made it to the back steps without any further incident. It was at this time that my mom tells me that the grease hit her and her arm was painfully burning... She sent me to get something to put on it, the best thing being aloe vera. Being the wreck that I am, I had no idea she meant the plant by the back steps, instead I am shakily running through all of the room looking for a bottle of aloe. Literally shaking like a leaf, I put some aloe on her and beg her to go to the ER. At first she refuses, but after I buy her all sorts of OTC sprays and creams, she grudgingly agrees that we need a trip to the hospital. It is after midnight that we see an RN that somewhat indifferently tells us that it "sucks" that she got 1st and 2nd degree burns all over her right arm and hand, but that she would be fine. He then proceeds to tell me that he hates New Orleans and that I should join their ER staff because they all dislike people just like me...

Thank God we all survived mostly intact and with a home still, but I think it will be many years if ever that I can forget the emotions that this ordeal evoked, and the images of those flames are burned into my memory, just as the grease burned into my mother's skin.

Workout Day 3

So I loosely kept up with me meals today. I think my calorie count for today was so much lower just because normally I just eat whatever, but today when I knew I was going to write stuff down it made me so much more aware and careful of the foods I was taking in.

Breakfast 1 Doughnut, calories: Who knows?!?! Wasn't on the box! Who does that?
Lunch 2 Turkey sandwich on wheat with mayo and Dijon and 1.5 of a pickle spear, calories: approx. 600 calories, ½ slice cake, 75 calories
Snack ½ serving Chips and salsa, calories: 80 calories
Dinner 9pc popeye’s nugget, ½ biscuit, ½ regular red bean, calories: approx. 546

Beside tea at dinner, all I drank today was water, which is unusual for me, but everytime I picked up a bottle I thought, "Man! This is more calories added to my total," and I put it back in the fridge. So the total for my day was roughly 1,500 calories. Since I need to take in about 2,200- 2,500 per day, I think I need to stop stressing over calories as much tomorrow. It's not like I got huge eating the stuff that I normally eat, even when I'm not exercising, so if I eat my normal amount but eat healthier stuff then I should fairly good. Same food and more exercise still means weight loss, so now I just need to find healthier alternatives than Pringles and personal apple pies...

I guess I'll trying to workout through the pain tonight...or make it up on Saturday.

Inspiration for the day: Believe with all of your heart that you will do what you were made to do.
Orison Swett Marden

17 Magazine's 5-Week Workout Challenge

OK, so as everyone who knows me knows, it's against my nature to workout. I hate running, walking, lifting weights, the whole 9-yards. The only acceptable forms of exercise in my opinion all involve dance: Zumba, going out with friends for Latin Dance Night, etc. Every time I try to start a routine, it falls through after about a week.

So I figure that I wanna get more toned, I'm not 100% happy with my body, why not give this challenge a shot? I think the hardest part will be motivating myself to keep going and even HARDER will be eating right for this challenge. I'm a super-picky eater, so that makes it tough to take advantage of healthy eating tips when I don't eat any of the ingredients of a meal.

Side note: I wanna flatten my abs, tone my legs and KEEP MY BUTT!!! If it goes, I go (lol)!!! I guess we'll see... Wish me luck, peeps!!!

Shall We Dance?

So, minor breakdown today... For some reason I was on this music video kick today, I watched "Love Sex Magic" with Ciara and JT. Then I watched "Bad Girl, Good Girl" by Miss A (awesome Korean group, if you've never heard it, youtube it), and then finished it off with a few songs by PCD. This led me to miss dancing immensely!!! While I have only taken 2 formal dance class in college, I have always been drawn to dance. As a musician (or former musician, I guess) I have always been drawn to music and when I hear a good beat I can't help but want to get up and bust a move! I've always wanted to take dance, and regret that my mom made me quit tap in elementary because she was tired of hearing me practice (who does that?). I love just about any kind of dance, but my absolute favorite right now is merengue! It has a great beat and is super easy to learn. I don't get to go out much as I would like since I hate going out alone, plus it's prolly not the safest thing in the world for a female going out in the middle night alone :(

The downside of going out when friends are in town is that my boyfriend seems to hate dancing. This is always a tough situation to be in because I don't want to seem like I am disrespecting him by dancing with other guys right in his face, but when I hear the music it makes me feel like I'm slowly dying inside to sit on the sidelines and do nothing. I don't know exactly when this happened, but it did. Music is in my body and soul, and dance is it's escape route to the outside world when I can't control it anymore. Maybe one day I'll convince him to love dance as much as I do, or at least get him to take classes with me so that he won't be as self-conscious and he'll know a few moves to bust out on the dance floor. Until then, we we'll be a living incarnation of N.E.R.D's song, "She Wants to Move".

So feelings all these different emotions swirling today kind of set me off in a whirlwind of depression today, but the bright side is that I started looking into a few dance classes that I can take. Maybe a daily dose of Zumba or getting back into Friday night Latin Night downtown can cure me of this funk I've been in.

NYX Rant!!! Sale = FAIL

Ok, so this unfortunately will be my first makeup blog. It suck that it will start on such a sour note. As many fans of NYX Cosmetics know, there was a 12th anniversary sale on their website yesterday from 2pm to 2am CST. From about 1:45 until today around 5pm their website gave me SOOO much trouble!!!! I spent the first 3 hours trying to h=get to the home page. Then like good companies should, they extended the hours from 5 to 5, since no one was able to get on. So I spent that vast majority of my time from 5pm to 2am just trying to get the stuff added to my cart. From about 2:30 to 4am I filled my basket successfully (finally) and began trying to check out. At 4, I decided I needed sleep more than a good deal and so I went to sleep. I got up again at 8am to try to finish the transaction. I then spent from that time until AFTER the sale was over at 2pm trying to check out!!! While we stayed up all night the ppl at NYX went home and went to sleep, offering no kind of updates or solutions for about a 12hr period. Then call began pouring into the NYX office where it was reported that the sale would NOT be extended and even though we had our stuff in the cart PRIOR to the sale being over, we would not get to take advantage of the sale price. So I spent until about 4pm trying very unsuccessfully to check out still since my cart said the sale prices. When it finally went through with no problems at 6pm, I went to calculate the shipping, and it struck me as odd that I was not being charged fro shipping. This was strange because anything shipped under $50 is charged and I only had $19.20 worth in my shopping cart. That's when I saw my "new and improved" price of $105.00!!!!! You have got to be fucking kidding me! Then the NYX reps want to ignore this whole fiasco and try to placate ppl by forcing US to go to THEM for a 50% off/no shipping coupon. This is NOT cutting it! And even then I tried to give them the benefit of taking the coupon and still picking up a few items, about $30 or so.... But it has been HOURS and I have not gotten any sort of response. I have pretty much given up on them. I really feel like I wasted a day of my life to be scammed... That saddens me because this is my first experience with this company that I have herd so many good things about. And while I may still one day (not today) pick up one of their MILK pencils, it may be a long time if EVER that I decide to buy much more from this company that has disappointed so many...

Eyes of the Storm

On April 27, 2011, many locations across the southeast U.S. were hit by tornadoes. One of the hardest hit locales was the town of Tuscaloosa, AL, the location of my alma mater. The University of Alabama was my home for 5 of the most challenging years of my life, including the horror that was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was here that I found my second home, my second family, and my first love. Now to see it 5 years later in ruins brings back horrible memories of doing the exact thing before during my freshman year. Thank God that none of my friends were seriously injured or killed, and I wish the best to all of those that lost loved ones and all of their possessions.... On the bright side, things can only get better from here. ROLL TIDE ROLL!