Neon Dash 5k

I've been wanting to do some type of color run for quite a while now and thanks to Groupon, I finally got my color on! Originally I had bought a Groupon for a color run back in December, but stuff got in the way of that one so sadly I missed it. But wouldn't you know another deal became available and #bonus it was at night! Sign. Me. Up. The one thing I hate about most races is that they start so freakin' early. A girl needs her beauty sleep!

Anyways...I bought two vouchers for this night time run called the Neon Dash...one for me and one for my brother as a Christmas gift. Neither of us had done a color run so we were both super excited. I always like to train for a run (I'm not a long distance person), but this time training did not go so well because of my knee. Do I sound like a broken record yet about my knee?!?!

Race day comes and we were ready to get colored. When I was reading about the race, everything said that what we would be colored with with non-toxic water. Turns out during the race it was still the regular colored powdered stuff not water :( But at the "after party" is when we were sprayed with the colored water. Also at the after party, they had black light photo booths set up so you could capture your glow in the dark awesomness.

Ok...enough of my rambling...on to the pictures...

Of course we had to take a #selfie before the race. And yes I know we look nothing a like, but I promise we are related...ha ha. 

Luckily were were toward the front of the race group so we got to leave with the first wave of runners

Just running on an overpass...it was pretty cool being able to see down town all lit up during our run. Ignore the fuzzy pic...I put my phone in a protective pouch ha ha. 

aftermath...

my knee brace still has a few pink spots on it...ha ha

Just dancing to the techno music with a big pink spot on my nose...

We had a great time! 

March Catch up

Where did we leave off? Oh yes...with me freezing my booty off in the snow! March means two things in Texas...Rodeo and the start of crawfish season!!! Okay...maybe it just means those things to me...ha ha.

Our one and only rodeo performance we attended this year was to see Chris Young. He put on a really good performance and even did an acoustic set to Text Me Texas. Soooo gooood! 

My still bearded man! #beardtastic

Since ending the yeast free diet and after going to the "witch" doctor, I'm still trying to eat mostly grain free. These little nuggets are strawberry banana chocolate chip protein mini muffins. Try to say that 10 times fast...whew. The "flour" in these is just protein powder. I'm not sure if it matters what kind you use, but I used Perfect Fit Vanilla.  

I went with my Dad, Brother and Future SIL to grab my first batch of crawfish for the season. While still on the small side, they tasted so good! Can't wait for my company's annual crawfish boil! Bring it on!!

For a belated St. Patty's day breakfast I made green protein pancakes. Yeah they look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, but they really weren't bad. They consist of spinach, Perfect Fit vanilla protein powder, egg whites and a banana. I topped them with organic agave syrup since they were quite dry since I didn't add fruit or chocolate chips. 

My second trip to the "witch" doctor went really well. My stomach issues are starting to decrease finally! However, he gave me a few more supplements to take...

Late March, my baby brother and I ran a night time color run called the Neon Dash. I'll have a recap and more pics in a later post. 

I made the most amazing gluten free banana chocolate chip muffins. This is the only pic I have of them so I probably won't do another post about them until I make them again.

Oh and I bought a house. Say what?!?! 

February Catch Up

I've had lots of photos hanging out on my phone for months because I kept forgetting to upload them and make a post. But today is the day I finally share. If you can remember, my last "life" post was valentines (I'm not counting the yeast-free as "life")! So let's catch up with the rest of February.

I actually bought a new nail polish and it wasn't black! This is Essie Naughty Nautical. I love it! My toes however will always be painted black...ha ha.

 

I continued to rehab my knee by adding a little more distance each time I went to the gym. I was also trying to train for a 5k I was running in March.

 

 

For my baby brother's birthday, I whipped up some amazing mini bananas fosters cakes. They are definitely worth breaking any diet for. Recipe to come.

 

 

My man finally came home from half way around the world and we celebrated by getting on yet another airplane and flying to go see his family. I absolutely love flying at night and seeing all the lights below. So beautiful.

While visiting his family, good ol mother nature decided to dump a ton of snow. Granted it was beautiful, but let me tell ya this girl was not prepared. I mean this was the last weekend of February/first weekend of March! There should not have been this much snow!!! Ha ha. The only shoes I packed were Sperrys and flip flops. Talk about some cold feet. Luckily I did bring a jacket.

 

Weekend Update: 2/14 - 2/16

This picture is actually from 2 weekends ago when I went to the Hill Country to visit my Aunt. This is my new friend, Stormy, the only horse out of 6 horses that came to say hello. I love how we are both actually looking at the camera...ha ha.

Now to this past week/weekend...

I finally found almond milk yogurt!!!! I used it in my red velvet pancake recipe. Let's just say I was a little surprised when I opened it and it didn't look like regular yogurt...ha ha. I haven't tried it by itself yet, but I know there will be a night I forget to prep my breakfast for the morning, so I'm saving it for such an occasion.

As we were all reminded every day since Christmas, Valentines day was this past Friday. I didn't have much planned, other than trying not to eat the entire bag of m&m's sitting on my counter, and was completely surprised when I got this special delivery from a very special guy who is currently half way around the world!! I even rationed the 24 chocolate covered strawberries to last me through Sunday night...trust me that is a lot of self control for me!

Saturday, I did my one and only work out for the week, (shame shame) an hour and 5 mins on the treadmill! Two weeks ago, I instagrammed that I actually ran a mile for the first time since injuring my knee and since I was able to walk after that I decided to up it a little this time. I ran for a total of 1.5 miles and could still walk Sunday...woo hoo! After my workout, I let my heart rate monitor run a little longer and was surprised to see over 1000 calories when I finally stopped it! I've never seen the calories burned number that high, but then again most of my workouts are 20-45 mins. After my workout, I went back home to a pretty sad looking lunch...tuna and apple. I literally had nothing else...ha ha...I needed to go to the store bad!

To avoid eating tuna and apple for lunch and dinner, I went to the store and picked up some quick and easy meal items. Since starting the yeast free diet (which is more like 80/20 yeast free now) I crave Chipotle all. the. time. But my wallet just can't handle their expensive bowls :( So I decided to create my own! I heated up some black beans and pinto beans with a little seasoning, put those over a bed of torn spinach, put shredded chicken over that and finally some avocado...Delicious! Was it as good as Chipotle?!?! Of course not, but it didn't cost me quite as much ha ha. I had it for lunch Sunday as well and will probably eat the rest of it for lunch Tuesday.

After a very lazy Sunday morning of watching movies (I watched American beauty...one of two Oscar best picture movies I watched this weekend...the other one was In the Heat of the Night), I started working on a winter mesh wreath for Barrett's mom. His mom gave me a mesh wreath idea book for Christmas and picked out two that she "wanted" ha ha. Since all the Christmas/winter stuff went on sale right after I received the book, I decided to go scoop some stuff up and make one of the wreaths she liked. I think it turned out pretty decent. I'm going to surprise her with it this weekend when they are in town. Hopefully, I'll have two surprises for her, but the other one may not happen/get spoiled...ha ha The rest of Sunday was spent doing laundry and other chores while my dinner was cooking in the crock pot (more on that later).

How was y'alls weekend?

Weekend Update: 1/24 - 1/26

After surviving the ice apocalypse part 1 last Friday, the rest of my weekend looked like this...

We had a beard shaving party Friday night. It was sad to see the beard go :( And yes I did love the crazy beard.



 

Before and After of the beard shaving party

 

 

Saturday, early afternoon, I watched as he left for his grand adventure.

 

Saturday night I finally got around to trying my hand at Cauliflower mashed potatoes again. Having a legit steamer basket and an amazing food processor really helped. I added a little bit of olive oil, almond milk, salt, pepper and garlic powder to the cauliflower. I love that it made my plate look more like a normal meal!

 

 

Sunday I woke up to enjoy a new favorite of mine, a breakfast cookie along with a new tea. The tea is called natural energy (you might have seen a commercial with Kat Dennings for it) and I don't know if it was the tea or just a good amount of sleep, but I didn't feel tired at all yesterday! Maybe it was all mental...ha ha...who knows.

 

After breakfast, I was a good girl and did my knee rehab for the day. I've been battling pain in my knee for a few months now and over the past few weeks it got pretty bad. With the encouragement of Barrett and Elizabeth, I finally went to the doctor. Apparently, I have something called Jumper's Knee. My knee cap has not been tracking properly so the pain I feel when squatting down is because my knee cap slides to the inside of my leg. The doc has given me several exercises to help it not do that anymore and wearing tape is supposed to help as well. Hopefully by the end of next week I will be cleared for running and jumping again. Since starting the rehab, I have noticed it is less painful to walk up and down the stairs! Yay!!

After rehabbing my knee and face timing with Barrett, it was time to start meal prepping for the week. I made pumpkin blueberry pancakes, coconut tortillas, turkey taco meat, guacamole and hamburgers. I may or may not have done a little happy dance when I saw how perfect my avocados looked...it's the little things :)

 

While all my food was cooling, I took advantage of the nice day and sat outside on my balcony and tortured myself by looking through lots of yummy food magazines...ha ha. I tore out a few recipes to save for when I'm not on a super strict diet. Then it was time for dinner and to watch the Grammy Awards. I wasn't too impressed with them this year.

 

How was y'alls weekend? Did you make anything yummy? Did you watch the Grammys? What did you think?

#nomnomnom

Sooooo...I started a yeast free for thirty days diet. I'm one week and two days into this thing and it has not been easy. I'm doing this more to see if this will help any of the stomach issues I have and the minor weight loss is a bonus. This means no sugar, dairy or carbs for thirty days. This includes no fruit for the first two weeks. For the people who have had to put up with me, I applaud you...the mood swings are not fun...ha ha. I'm slowly learning new foods to eat and have found some I'm in love with...



Roasted chickpeas are hands down my new favorite snack. I made them for the first time this past weekend and already went through one batch. I can eat them just like I eat popcorn. They are made with cumin, chili powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. Yummy in my tummy.

Next up, we have chocolate delights. These little guys have really helped with my sweet tooth cravings. They are made with coconut oil, cocoa powder and a little bit of almond milk with stevia. These can be catered to any ones taste, it just so happens I like them more dark chocolaty. You could easily make them more milk chocolaty by adding more milk and stevia. You can also get fancy and add things to the middle, but I'm in the super strict phase of the YF diet so they are only chocolate. Oh and yes those are tiki mask molds...ha ha...what can I say I don't have any other flexible ice cube trays.



This last new food item was an absolute life saver last week. This is called a breakfast cookie and it is delicious! The first two days of the YF challenge I just had egg muffins, but then felt so completely disgusting (which happens a lot when I eat eggs) that I just couldn't stomach eating them the rest of the week. So then I tried almond flour pancakes. While they weren't bad, they were super dry and since I can't add any fruit, until January 27th, to help add some moisture to them I decided I needed something else to try again. Then came this cookie! I was a little worried about it since I don't really care for protein powder, but honestly after the initial bite everything was smooth sailing! I ate this Thursday through Sunday. Thank goodness you can have oats in things on this food plan.

I will try to remember to recap my whole experience after the thirty days are up, but don't hold me to it...ha ha.

Life according to my phone

This past weekend my family celebrated my Aunt's 50th birthday up at her new lake house and since Barrett was still in town we took a little road trip up to the hill country to celebrate with her and as a bonus he could finally meet the rest of the family...ha ha...4 and a half years later.

This is the view from her backyard. The lake is still down a lot, but one day it will be back to normal. We spent a good amount of time outside playing bocce ball. Since we were first timers, we may or may not have made up our own rules. Then my little cousins (ages 1 through 4) wanted to play so it turned into just rolling the balls back and forth and trying to not let them eat the dirt...yep...still not ready for kids...ha ha.

We also have made it to the movies twice. Figured we should try to go to some we really wanted to see before he leaves for work. The first movie we saw was Lone Survivor. Great movie! If you haven't seen this yet...go see it now. Or don't know if you want to see this movie, just go see it. I don't think I've heard anything bad about it so far. We also saw Ride Along. Pretty funny...Kevin Hart opposite Ice Cube is hilarious. And the way they ended it could be a set up for a sequel.

I also took the dialect quiz that was going around from the NY Times. That's some pretty interesting and accurate stuff. I even took it a second time and made the boyfriend take it as well. Pretty much if I didn't think you would see it from a different blog I told you go to take it...ha ha.

Lastly, I took a Friends Character quiz (I love a good quiz) and some how came out with the character Gunther. I promise I'm not a creep...well not all the time he he.

What have y'all been up to lately? Do you have a fun quiz I should take?!? Let me know!!

November Recap via my iPhone

So I was a little MIA in November (seems to be happening a lot lately, but life gets busy sometimes) so I thought I would give everyone an update of what's been going on according to my iPhone. If you follow me on instagram, you've seen most of these before...ha ha.

A few weeks ago I started working on some Christmas gifts...several people are getting hand made gifts I just hope they turn out ok

I made my usual Thanksgiving dessert for my office's pot luck lunch...

A Sopapilla cheesecake!! I feel a little bad that not everyone was able to get a piece, but some special peeps get VIP access to it first ha ha

To keep warm in my apartment I made a cup of dark hot chocolate! so good!

To make the boyfriend a little jealous I sent him this pic of my new snuggle buddy...Petey the Penguin...that'll teach him to leave me for over a week...ha ha.

The last week of November is a busy one birthday wise for me...one special birthday girl put in her order for a Pumpkin Sopapilla Cheescake...I'll make another post about this disaster later.

Like I said above...I had to try and stay warm in my apartment by utilizing blankets, halloween panda costumes with the tail in tact and hot chocolate all because I refused to turn on my heat. This is the coldest temp reading I saw...who knows how cold it actually got overnight.

Back to birthdays...I wanted to practice making bows and wanted to try out a polka dot technique I saw on pinterest. Polka dots were made using a pencil eraser and pink stamp ink...easy as pie!

My favorite new candle from Bath and Body Works...also the first candle I've burned in my apt! I also recently smelled fluffy towels from Yankee Candle...might have to try that next.

My job the past 3 or 4 years for Thanksgiving is to carry on the tradition of making the chess pie.

Chess pie is such a hit in my family and pretty easy to make. A few lucky people might be getting a piece tomorrow if I can sneak a few pieces out of the house...ha ha.

The night before Thanksgiving we host a turkey injecting party at the house. While the men deal with the turkeys, us ladies sit around the fire and chit chat and some may or may not consume lots of wine.

Ahhh...Turkey Day! Every year we host a turkey fry Thanksgiving morning for friends and family! This year we had 12 birds to be fried! I think the most we've ever fried in one morning is close to 20!

That's everything I have for the last half of November. Let's hope I can get back to posting more frequently in December!

Hope everyone had a great November and a very Happy Thanksgiving!