Free Is My Favourite Price!

Dinner tonight was a late one. Luckily my little perogies held me over through a nearly 7k run, and even then I wasn’t feeling all that hungry, but I had been looking forward to dinner all day, so I couldn’t not make it!

I ended up whipping up a pot of comfort food — Annie’s Mac & Cheese — shortly after 8:30. Dumped my favourite condiment on top, and ate it before anyone could tell me to do otherwise.

I spent a good hour on the phone with my mother, talking about wedding stuff. It’s really hard living four hours away from your projected wedding site, and not being able to really check things out and solidify plans in person. My mom is checking a few things out for us this week, and we’re calling to make the final arrangements.

Joey did a fantastic job today getting ahold of the guy we wanted as our DJ, and asked how much he would charge for the evening. His response to Joey’s questions: of course, he would be honoured to DJ our wedding, and — were we kidding?! — it’s on the house! Wahoo! Free is my favourite price!

We’re thinking about honeymoon possibilities as well: we’re planning on going to Ireland in Spring 2011 with Joey’s grandmother and aunts [who are Irish through & through], so we were thinking of doing something really small for our actual honeymoon, and just relaxing. Let’s be honest here, there probably won’t be much sightseeing happening anyway! But I just got word of an interesting prospect thanks to a client of my father’s, so our honeymoon just might be getting upgraded to an overseas getaway instead of a cottage on the beach a few hours away [and again for free!].

Everything really seems to be falling into place for us, and if we can just get a few family members to bee a little less opinionated and more on board with what we want to do for our wedding, the next nine months of engagement will be super fantastic ones.

I love being engaged!

Crunch Time

One word can sum up my day today:

COFFEE

I got up this morning and listened to a sermon by Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, on Luke. I need to get back to listening to sermons online more often, because it’s not often that I get to attend church on Sundays due to work, and when I do, the church we usually go to here is not exactly my kind of church. The people are lovely and the music is fantastic, but the preaching always leaves me wanting some solid teaching that stays with one topic instead of bouncing around from verse to verse, seemingly without anything tying them together. I’m thinking of starting to go to another protestant church in town whenever I get the day off work, so we’ll see how that goes. We did go to that church in our first year of university and liked it a lot, so hopefully that will cater more to our needs.

I finished the sermon in time to make myself a quick lunch of chicken & sausage gumbo [with extra hot sauce added].

I was feeling a bit of hunger, but not enough for a meal around 5, so I had a couple of cheesy perogies for a snack [not pictured].

Some serious work has simply GOT to get done tonight on one of my five papers due within the next week. It’s just nuts around here. I’ve got so much work to do that I get overwhelmed and then nothing at all gets done! Can’t let that happen the next few days, otherwise I’m screwed!

Back to Dairy & Meat!

Phew! Yesterday was a whirlwind day, semi-unexpected and impulsive, but so good!

I was home all morning and part of the afternoon with nothing to do, because my one Friday class was cancelled for this week. I didn’t plan on it, but I ended up taking the day off from schoolwork, and just relaxed. So nice.

I had a simple breakfast of a yogurt cup – strawberry and lychee – delicious!

Joey had planned on coming over to my place around 3pm, and I had a whole pizza that I had cooked on Thursday that I figured we could have as a really early dinner [probably around 4/4:30], so I didn’t want to eat anything big. I ended up with an open-faced hummus and turkey sandwich on whole grain bread [with the obligatory hot sauce addition] while watching The Price Is Right.

I wanted something sweet after my deliciously savoury lunch, but decided to hold off as long as I could before finding something for dessert. I wasn’t exactly full from my light lunch, but I held off until about 2, when I remembered that Jane had bought some incredible-looking ice cream the day before, of course on Vegan-4-a-Day day, when I couldn’t eat it. So I figured I would seize this opportunity to have some!

It was “Triple Chocolate”, and of course I took a bit of each! The white chocolate was by far my favourite, although all chocolate is a-okay in my books

My wonderful fiancé came by very early, around 2:15, and caught me redhanded with the ice cream. I mentioned the pizza that I had in the fridge, but he offered instead to take me out for pizza, so of course I obliged. We headed first to Telus, where we wanted to check prices and plans for iPhones, and I actually ended up getting one on the spot! Well, kind of. They didn’t have the one I wanted in-store [he said that he sold the last one just a few days ago!], so they are ordering it in and it will be here on Thursday hopefully! I can’t wait to go and pick it up!

We went out to Pizza Delight [sorry, no pictures!] where we had the best garlic fingers ever along with a chicken, bacon & tomato pizza. It’s the only kind we ever get, and it’s so delicious. I think they should put it on the menu as the “Courtney & Joey special”. We’re there enough …

Future Vegan? [Doubtful!]

I got hungry for a snack shortly after 4:00 this afternoon, which isn’t too bad. Way to go hummus! So I decided on some more! Unfortunately I gobbled it down so fast that I didn’t even have time for a photo, but just know that it was a whole lot of this:

And some of this:

On top of a sandwich thin. Yummmmmmmy!

I had planned on making a pizza for dinner, and make my own crust, and then I realized that I wouldn’t be able to put cheese on my pizza! That simply wouldn’t do, so I changed my plans halfway through [I actually ended up making the pizza in addition to tonight's dinner!] and made a tofu stir-fry instead!

This puppy was so delicious! I used frozen veggies because I had a ton of them in the freezer, plus a few fresh mushrooms. I used a sesame ginger dressing [vegan of course!] and a whole whack of silken tofu. Oh and hot sauce of course! Served over brown rice:

For dessert, I ate what I had been waiting for all day long: the bottom of the container of So Delicious coconut milk “ice cream”.

This stuff really is so delicious! I honestly can’t get enough of it! It’s a treat I don’t get very often [at $6.99 for this tiny 500g container, it's far too expensive to buy on a regular basis], but when I do, watch out! I’m a woman obsessed.

I had a lot of fun with Vegan-4-A-Day today. It was certainly interesting trying to figure out what I could and couldn’t eat [almost like a scavenger hunt with my own food!]. And while I know that I could definitely do it without much trouble on my part, I also know that I’m not super crazy about animal rights [I believe that they were created to be eaten], and that I could never go without yogurt and real cheese.

I have purchased Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and that will be my Christmas reading material, and I hope to be able to watch Food, Inc. very soon [if my schoolwork allows], so maybe those will have an impact on how I view my carnivorous lifestyle. If anything, though, I would probably go “halfway” and do the vegetarian thing instead of all the way vegan. Not only would it be difficult for me, but it also affects the way my family cooks when I’m around, and I know for a fact that my fiancé will not be going vegan anytime soon [unless he's forced to do so by a medical condition], and I don’t plan on cooking separate meals for each of us throughout our entire marriage. That’s just silly.

In the end, however, I do think that I will try and incorporate more vegan-friendly foods into my diet, and maybe I can be vegan-4-a-day more often! Maybe once a month? We could turn the 19th of every month into a vegan challenge! What do you think, Michelle & Katy?

Vegan For A Day

I must have been excited about playing vegan today for the Vegan-4-A-Day challenge put out by EatingJourney & SillyTaterTot, because I woke up an hour and a half before my alarm, and there was no way I was getting back to sleep. It was even still pitch dark outside, which didn’t make me want to get up at all, but you gotta do what your body makes you do, right? So I was up.

I got up [at 5:45], grabbed my books, and started studying for the test that I thought I would have in Greek this morning. There was no test, but at least I knew my stuff when I went in for my independent study with my prof! I didn’t look quite as stupid as I would have without it I guess.

My Greek meeting wasn’t until 9, but I still managed to spend three hours studying [with frequent twitter/email breaks ] and didn’t have time to eat before I had to run out the door. My stomach was in a knot worrying about the test I thought I would have anyway, so I wasn’t thinking about food in the least. When I got back, however, fully pleased with the fact that I hadn’t failed [yet] today, I was hungry. And I knew exactly what I wanted …

A Green Monster, of course! In the Magic Bullet went:

• ~1/3 cup of unsweetened soy milk
• ~1 cup spinach
• a little less than half a banana
• a whole, juicy, ripe pear!
• a little squirt of agave nectar, just because

THIS GUY WAS SO FREAKING TASTY! I was super impressed with it. And of course, he kept me full for a good two hours, until after noon when I knew I had to eat lunch, otherwise I wouldn’t eat until after class at 2. So I whipped up a quick little spinach and tomato salad. I would have added more to it, but I had very limited time!

With this dressing [oh. so. delicious.]:

I also packed a few goodies for class, just in case.

A hummus sandwich [oh yeah, just hummus - because I'm that cool]:

Another one of those juicy and delicious pears, a clementine, and a multivitamin:

My travel mug full of hot mint green tea [with another little agave squirt]:

And an unpictured bottle of water, for when thirst attacks. Because it always does.

I’m off to class now, but you’d better believe that I will most certainly be back later on tonight with whatever vegan concoction I come up with for dinner!

[I'm excited!]

Everything is a CHOICE

It feels like forever since I last wrote anything. In fact it has actually been over a month. In addition, not only have I not written anything in a month, but I haven’t been keeping track of what I’m eating on a regular basis [occasionally I think to pay attention to some kind of count or mental note, but more often than not that tally gets pushed aside by the end of the day -- usually by a bag of chips or something].

This hasn’t been only one month of eating whatever I please either. Other than the few days that I really try [which are becoming fewer and fewer all the time], I haven’t been eating healthfully for quite some time now. I find myself stuffing my face with whatever is nearby, and the bad eating habits of one of my favourite co-workers is slowly rubbing off on me, to the point that during my last shift, I went down the hall to buy snacks for the three hours remaining before we were finished — a big bag of dill pickle chips, a box of junior mints, and a box of macaroons. Granted, we shared about half of the bag of chips and half of the junior mints, and the macaroons are still unopened. But still. Definitely not good choices!

Since the end of April [before exams and crazy schedules at a fast food restaurant], I’ve noticed not only my healthy habits decreasing, but also my love handles increasing.

I recently got engaged. Less than two weeks ago, my wonderful boyfriend — ahem, excuse me, fiancé — set up a wonderful surprise for me, taking me out of town on a date and having someone decorate my backyard with tons of white lights. He tucked me into bed without a clue, and twenty minutes later woke me up again by throwing rocks at my window. Upon looking out the window, I was greeted with this sight, and him standing in the middle of it all:

I went outside, where he met me at the front door and took me around back, said his little spiel [which I know was beautiful, but I can't remember a word of it because I was half-asleep [having just been awoken], freezing cold [it was raining out], laughing and crying all at once], then got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. It was so beautiful, and I’m so proud of him for actually pulling one over on me — that almost never happens!

[click through to see the photo on flickr in all its glory]

I love being engaged — I feel like I’ve been waiting for it for so long, and I can’t believe that in nine months [on August 20, 2010] I’ll be getting married! The scary part is that I only have nine months to make myself smoking hot. I don’t really care whether I lose a bunch of weight to fit into a wedding dress — I’ve already bought the dress that I want to wear, and it fits me like a glove — but I do want to feel my best and not look at wedding pictures a few years down the road and wish that I had looked healthier and better on my big day.

That said, I’m going to make myself a promise, here and now, in front of friends and family, as well as others all over who are reading, whether you know me or not. I know that I can do it. I loosely followed Weight Watchers from January through April, counting points most of the time and not restricting myself, and I lost 30 lbs easily and without much exercise other than the occasional yoga class online. If I can do that in four months, imagine what I can do in nine, especially with my new-found love of running as well as some of my real-life friends and of course my fiancé, who are very much integrated into my online life and can be a constant support and encouragement to me [right guys?!].

So here we go. This is it. I don’t have any more chances, I can’t tell myself that my wedding day could be years away, so I’ll just worry about it when the time comes. The time has come, and there aren’t any more excuses.

Gobble All The Way

Well. Thanksgiving was quite the time.

After a whole lot of food [three turkey dinners in two days!], we headed back to Nova Scotia on Monday morning, not quite ready to get back into work mode. We stopped in Moncton again on the way back, and had lunch with a few friends there at Pizza Hut. I ordered a small Mediterranean Veggie pizza, loaded up with the vegetables! It was really tasty, although Pizza Hut is always so greasy!

The two-and-a-half hour drive from Moncton the rest of the way to Antigonish was very long — the longest it has seemed since probably first year. I have a hard time sleeping in cars to begin with, and all I could think about was the Greek oral midterm that I had the next day, and my books for said midterm, which were waiting for me when we finally arrived. I got to work after a brisk walk downtown with two of my roommates, and studied until almost 1am, when I finally gave up and went to bed.

I guess it must have been enough though, because when I got to our meeting and my professor asked me if I could recite the Lord’s Prayer, I did it perfectly! Greek’s got nothing on me! I was very pleased with how well it went, even though I sucked at the little vocabulary quiz after the midterm was over.

Tuesdays are always so long, with classes all afternoon and then night class from 7-9:30, and of course I’m not ready to go to bed right after class, so I stay up far too late and then sleep in on Wednesday mornings.

No exception to that rule today; I set my alarm for 8:30 this morning, and although I woke up, I rolled right back over and hit the snooze button every five minutes until almost 10. No joke. I got up then and printed out an article that has to be read for tomorrow’s abnormal psychology class, and puttered around doing menial things. I didn’t even shower until after 2pm! I don’t know what exactly I’ve been doing all day.

I ate some mashed potatoes with a bit of gravy around 10:30, and then polished off the leftover Annie’s Mac & Cheese. Of course, since I ate lunch so early, I got hungry again at 3:30, and held off eating until 4, when I had a bowl of chicken & sausage gumbo soup [with extra added hot sauce!].

Our friend Kelley, who graduated from StFX last year and is now working as a nurse in southern NS, is coming tonight to stay until Saturday, and I’m not exactly sure what’s in the cards for tonight. Our friends generally love getting together and going out to eat, especially for a special occasion, and Kelley coming to visit is certainly the kind of special occasion we would normally use as an excuse to go out. But I haven’t really heard much about it, so I don’t know if anything is happening after all.

I need to get out of this chair and get to work before I eat twenty pounds of chocolate!

Chipotle Chicken

I’m home for Thanksgiving! We left yesterday afternoon, after a partial lunch in class [I was nice and split my sandwich -- hummus, chicken, laughing cow & hot sauce -- and granola bar with Jonathan], and made our way to Moncton. My parents and brother were at the movie theatre, and since we were too late getting to Moncton to get to the movie in time, we went and had a nice supper at Montana’s. Joey and Leah each got hamburgers, and I ordered the buffalo chicken sandwich with a side of sweet potato fries.

My brother texted me when their movie ended, and we met them at Dairy Queen for ice cream. I ordered a pumpkin pie blizzard, but only got through half of it before I was too stuffed [not to mention freezing cold] to finish it.

The rest of the drive home was uneventful, and once we got home, we stayed up until after 1am talking with my family.

This morning we planned on getting. up to work, but we ended up staying in bed until almost ten o’clock, and even now, three hours later, we’re still just sitting in the tv room watching Friends.

Dinner tonight is Joey’s grandmother’s turkey dinner, and tomorrow we’ve got two more [Joey's other grandmother and my family]. It’s going to be tough, especially by the end of tomorrow, to put anything into my mouth, but it’s always all so delicious, hopefully I won’t have much trouble.

Back in the Green

I’ve been slacking. I actually have photos from yesterday [not today though!], but I didn’t have a minute to post them last night before I fell asleep.

Yesterday I ate the last of the turkey sausages, but only had one bun between them, so I ate them “open-faced”, if you will, with mustard and hot sauce [of course].

With a diet pepsi:

And for dessert: a GREEN MONSTER!

It’s been so long since I’ve had one, and it was SO GOOD. Along with my spinach and skim milk, I threw in some frozen fruit, since that’s all I had. A handful of little mango chunks, pineapple, and strawberry. I mixed it all together in the magic bullet, and decided it wasn’t quite green enough, so I threw in some more spinach, and went at it again. It turned out wonderfully!

For dinner, we went to Pizza Delight to celebrate Rochelle’s birthday, where I overindulged in garlic fingers and pizza. It tasted so good, but I was definitely regretting it afterwards. At least Pizza Delight pizza isn’t greasy, otherwise I would have felt twice as bad.

Today’s eats were fairly minimal, including half a bagel with a laughing cow wedge for lunch, along with a chocolate carnation breakfast shake. I tried to eat some shrimp for protein in the afternoon, but it tasted kind of funky, so I only got through a few little shrimpies before I called it quits. Dinner was Spaghetti Thursday! I had a fairly large plate of noodles & tomato sauce, as well as a “two bite brownie” for dessert. So good.

I got home around 7:30 and went to work on an online quiz for one of my Psych classes. I finished in less than half an hour, just in time for the girls to come back in a mad rush to get ready for the gym, and so I tagged along with them. I had planned on running on the indoor track around one of our ice rinks, but there was hockey practice going on, and a few guys were playing on the track as well, and I was the only runner there so I felt a bit awkward. Instead I went outside, planning on just walking home, since it was raining fairly hard. I walked for a few minutes and decided that maybe running outside wouldn’t be such a bad idea, so I went for it.

I started the Couch to 5K running plan this past week, and although I feel like I’m going super slowly, I’m trying to stick with the schedule and work my way up slowly instead of doing what I want and hurting myself. I did a week one run tonight, and got back home soaking wet but feeling good. I was talking to my roommate, Tiffany, about the program and she sounded interested, and asked if I would go out for a second time tonight. Tiffany is not a runner — she has never run in her entire life, and because of her weight, she is intimidated by the thought of it. So there was no way I was going to turn her down tonight! We went out together, and she did so well! She is proof that this plan will work for anyone, because she was running every time we were supposed to, and didn’t stop before the allotted time was up! I’m so proud of her! Hopefully she will keep it up, and if she needs me to go at it with her, hopefully I’ll have the time to do my runs plus the additional runs with her, because I really want to see her do this.

I got home and was starving — I’m sure I was mostly craving protein after a day with very little — and I made myself some soup: chicken and sausage gumbo [again!]. It was an extremely welcome snack/meal while watching The Office. [YAY PAM AND JIM!]

I’ve been ready for bed for an hour now, since I got off the “Pam & Jim are married!” high, and am just now really winding down and feeling pooped. Sarai wants to go for a run in the morning, although with two runs tonight, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be up for that. We’ll see how I’m feeling …

It’s All Greek To Me

Yesterday’s post had to wait until now to be written up, because of my super hectic day yesterday and today. Mondays and Tuesdays are my busiest days of the week, and this week was absolutely no exception … probably even worse, since I was scheduled to work all weekend too. I got no break whatsoever this week, which makes it very hard to keep plugging away.

I didn’t really have time for breakfast yesterday, between trying to get ready for class and getting a start on homework. So I dug through my bookbag in my first class to find half of a chocolate almond fudge Clif bar, which I gobbled down.

Halfway through my next class [about an hour later] I started feeling hungry again, so I rummaged through my bag to find yet another half-eaten bar, this time a cashew cookie Larabar.

After class, I came home and had lunch: a bowl of chicken & sausage gumbo. With extra added hot sauce, of course.

I have honestly never eaten a canned soup that tastes as good as this gumbo. I had real gumbo for the first time this summer, in Maine, and it was fantastic, much better than the soup version, but I must admit that the soup is better than the gumbo prepared by a group of people from Louisiana who were visiting my church back home. It didn’t have much flavour to it at all! Although I’m sure that had to do with the fact that they were cooking for a bunch of wimpy Canadians …

I ate again before going to work, around 4pm. I figured I should probably get something into me, knowing I wouldn’t be eating again until 9:30. The boyfriend had left two sausages behind when he was here the other night, so I cooked those up and ate them in buns with mustard and hot sauce. So tasty!

I worked with Sheila last night, a middle-aged lady who is very into her job. Which meant that I didn’t get a chance to study at all for my test, and instead helped with re-tagging a ton of pieces all over our store. Fun fun. It actually made the night go by really quickly though, and got my mind off of the fact that I wasn’t getting any homework done, so for that I was thankful.

When I got home after work, Jonathan was here and ready to do an online quiz together for one of our classes. We got that out of the way, and I started studying for Greek. I was up until well past 2am, just trying to memorize grammar rules, case endings, and vocabulary. Not so much a time. But oh well.

This morning I got up, studied a bit more, packed some food for the day, and left for class, where I studied some more, had half an hour in between classes to heat up some soup for lunch [while studying still, of course], and then I had my Greek test. Which actually went alright. I was completely shocked and ecstatic with how well it went, and the whole time I couldn’t help but think to myself, “oh! I know this! … and I know this! … and this!” It was fantastic. I was giving some serious thanks and praise the whole time.

I floated through the next class, happy as a clam, and then came home for some protein. I cooked some ham [random, yes, I know], and ate a bowl of fruit loops with skim milk. Not the most nutritious or well-rounded meal, but it satisfied. I also drank half a big mug of coffee, which got cold fairly quickly. But I kind of want more. I might end up making another cup before class tonight …