Major clothes shopping success!

Good morning! Finally, a real blog update! I feel like I have so much to share with you after just a few days away. The trip went pretty well. The shows were OK...nothing too special. But I got to try this beer:

(Yes, that does say Imperial Pumpkin Ale-8.0% alcohol! I was definitely tipsy after this!)

And for the only available breakfast I had a boring bowl of PLAIN oatmeal! Toppings, people, c'mon! ;-) (Oh wait, you mean non-food bloggers don't get so excited over adding ridiculous amounts of chopped Larabars, nut butters, granola, fresh fruit, etc?! Oh, why didn't anyone tell me?)

I got home, slept for 6 hours (more like 5 1/2) and woke up to a "real" bowl of cereal, Lisa-style:

But wait! I realized as I was sitting down to eat it that something was missing! One guess....

Peanut butter!! (Much better, by the way!)

I had various unphotographed snacks but somewhere along the way I had this bowl of overly processed vegetable barley soup. (Not that good, but hey, it was cheap!)

And a slice of bread with grated ff cheese on top. (Hence the lack of melting.)


For a random sugar burst, I ate this gummy which was being handed out (along with many other candies!) at work!


Next up was breakfast yesterday...back to oatmeal:

The most exciting part of this bar is that I added 1/3 of a Tropical Larabar! I loved this flavor (first time trying it!) I would DEFINITELY buy it again and instead of some of the other flavors! It tasted so fresh and tropical! (Over the course of the day the rest of the bar found its way into my mouth!)

While out and about yesterday (I was out from 9am-11pm!) I stopped for an Herby Turkey sandwich from Bruggers:

(times 2 for the other half, plus a pickle!)

And I had a lot of food that I didn't take pictures of. Mainly, I PB sandwich that I added one square of dark chocolate to!), a Raspberry Luna Bar, and two huge glasses of milk--mainly for the calories/protein because I was drinking them while teaching since I didn't have time for anything else!)


"So Lisa, what about the shopping success?"

Here it is!

First, a pair of knee high black boots that actually fit my calf perfectly!


And another pair of slightly-higher-than-ankle brown boots:

And my most exciting find...7 For All Mankind Jeans that fit me perfectly...for $39.95!! I couldn't believe it! (I definitely can't afford these usually!)

Onward...a cute Ralph Lauren coat that can be dressed up or down.

And several new tops:

Plus I got a great SUPER warm light blue down jacket (that I'll try to photograph at some point and put on here!) and for EVERYTHING listed I paid $160!! Talk about finding bargains! Woohoo! So exciting for me because I do love to shop! :)

Wow, talk about following that up with something not nearly as exciting...breakfast this morning:

(omelet with sauteed zucchini, mushrooms, cheddar cheese, and bell pepper plus leftover veggies on the side, and sweet potato with PB.)

With coffee, too:

Finally, I had this beautiful, freshly picked, locally grown apple when I was baby-sitting yesterday night.

Since I won Ellie's giveaway of a case of Chobani (so incredibly excited!!) I wanted to make sure to enter all of these, too. (I mean...spread the word for you all to enter! Hah!) So here are some more awesome giveaways.

Taylor is giving away See's Candy! I love this stuff, but it's only available (I think) on the West Coast, so I can't get it near me anymore!

Leslie is giving away some Raw Crunch loving!

I'm off now to get a workout in and then teach all night. See you all later!

I'm off to the NYC!

Good evening! It's late on Wednesday night and my boyfriend and I are leaving for New York City early tomorrow morning! I wanted to get one more blog post up and then I'll be out for three days, so bear with me. No need to send out the missing persons search team just yet. ;-) I'll try to take some cool pictures to share with you when I'm home on Sunday!

But I'll have to leave you with my yummy eats from the past couple days to make up for a 3 day hiatus. I'm also the tiniest bit tipsy from drinking two Blue Moons with my boyfriend. Shhh, don't tell anyone. :) Yay for "drogging" = drunk blogging. (I'm not really all that drunk!)

Today was a great day. It started off with a similar breakfast as yesterday's. The only difference was that I filled the omelet with some sauteed veggies that I made on Tuesday night. (Scroll down for more pictures). Yes, I had an adorable muffin again! Thanks for your comments. They are delicious and adorable and I actually had two with breakfast, even though only one got its picture taken! :)



Then I played racquetball for about an hour, probably burning around 400 calories. And way more importantly, it was fun! On my way home, I stopped by the Apple Store to buy my iPod!! I desperately needed one, as I've been rocking my 512MB 1st generation iPod Shuffle for the past 6 years! So I bought myself a 120GB iPod Classic, plus an armband for workouts! I'm in awe of it! I'll cringe when I get my credit card statement, but it's something I've really wanted for a long time, and it's a tax deduction for next year, seeing as I'm a full time, professional musician. How convenient. :) Here it is, in all its beauty!



It will also provide me and my boyfriend with way more exciting music to listen to on the way to NYC! :) By the way, I'm currently in love with the band Okkervil River and I'd highly recommend checking them out! They are a perfect blend of folk rock and a tiny bit of experimental! Great use of instrumentation, good lyrics, very catchy!

I have always been a Mac and Apple products user! I grew up with them, and will continue to use them exclusively! :) I love the layout, the usability, the reliability, and pretty much everything about their products. What about you? Are you a Mac or PC user?

I came home and wasn't too starving, so I pushed lunch back. I ate around 2pm when I had to get ready to teach. I had a simple lunch of 1/2 C ww pasta, LF feta cheese and some more sauteed veggies. Simple, fast, healthy. Yay. I also had an Oikos 0% Greek Yogurt with some cereal.


Then I taught and play for 4 hours and after the church service that I play they had free brownies and cookies for us. I grabbed these.


Honestly the cookie wasn't that good and I only ate two small bites of it. But I devoured the whole brownie, as it was DELICIOUS!

And I had some bar snacks (= pretzels, cheese puffs and Doritos snack mix) at the bar right next to my house, while drinking the beer. I am of the opinion that treating oneself, even multiple times every single day, is PERFECTLY acceptable and that you shouldn't spend ANY life energy on hating yourself over what you ate! I felt this way for long enough as a younger girl and now I appreciate food for its life giving qualities, and let's face it: it's delicious and pleasurable. There's NOTHING wrong with that.

Anyway, I had some healthy eats yesterday and some not so healthy eats. Here you go:

Peanut butter, carob and agave nectar sandwich.

With an apple.
A large half of a Cranberry Orange Zone Perfect bar. Not my favorite, but they had been discontinued when I bought them and they were cheap. And they're not bad, just not my favorite.



Some broccoli and other veggies that my roommate made and said I was welcome to have some of.

A pecan-raisin roll from Whole Foods. It had some whole grains in it, but the first ingredient was enriched flour. Oh well, not my first choice, but so delicious!

Some decadent chocolate cake! (Only ate half yesterday, and just polished off the remaining bit!)



I packed this bar yesterday, but didn't end up eating it until today, and even then I only ate half of it.

A couple giveaways going on in blogland:

Aimee at The Healthy Lawyer is giving away Stoneyfield Farms coupons and products!

AnAppleADay is giving away some of her favorite products.

Jaime at Fearless, Fabulous, Full of Life is giving away a yoga DVD.

Emily at Curly Top is giving away lots of Newman's Own products!

I'm giving away the most delicious bars I've ever eaten!

Ok, I'm heading off to bed for a lovely 4 hours of sleep. But NYC will be exciting and I'll let you know all about it when I'm home!

Show time!

I don't have much time to blog today. I baby-sat for two hours this morning (snacked on quite a few nuts and a couple bites of a PB sandwich) and now I'm off to the gym quickly before playing an out-of-state show tonight (only about a two hour drive each way). I am also running on 4 hours of sleep because I stayed up with the boyfriend until 3:30 and had to get up to baby-sit at 7:30am. Not so fun, but totally worth it to spend time with him! :) I promise that tomorrow's post will be less lame, including linking back to several giveaways going on. But a couple cute things my BF did: 1) Wrote me a (3 page!) letter structured after 10 Things I Hate About You (because that's one of my favorite movies!) and told me what he "hates" (AKA, loves!) about me. So cute, so sweet! 2) Said that there's something precious about watching me sleep. Like if I fell asleep while he's driving, he'd want to pull over and just watch me sleep. Girls, THIS is the kind of man YOU ALL deserve, and you DON'T have to settle for less! I dated several guys that would not have cared about me sleeping, much less found it beautiful! I'm telling you, you will be so much happier waiting for a guy that treats you with the respect and honor you deserve! :)

Anyway, onward. Here's my breakfast plus a few random eats from yesterday.

Oats, pumpkin, cottage cheese, strawberries, carob chips, PB:


I snacked on some fresh strawberries:


and a fig:


and THE BEST pretzels in the history of amazingly good pretzels. Seriously people, I can't quite describe how ridiculously incredible these pretzels are! Specifically THIS flavor (I've had the others and they're good, but not THIS good!)


Dipped in hummus = quite a perfect snack!


We shared a special Czech beer that I had purchased at an international foods market in Michigan over Christmas. This was very good, with some hop at the beginning, but not in the aftertaste. Sorry, I'm not very good at describing beer, but I did like it.





We went out to dinner yesterday and I was in the mood for a salad, so I got a chef salad with Swiss Cheese, Ham and Turkey, in addition to a bunch of veggies and blue cheese dressing on the side. Round out the meal with two pieces of white Italian bread and about 7 (small!) squares of this raspberry dark chocolate throughout the night. Picture courtesy of Google images. :)



I just enjoyed a "craving-buster" bowl of ff cottage cheese with agave nectar, cocoa powder, soy nuts and chocolate covered espresso beans with a chocolate rice cake.



Quick gym time, then playing a show tonight! We're starting to get some reviews in of our new CD (released less than a month ago!) plus a couple of blurbs in newspapers about various shows we're playing! Woohoo! So exciting! I'll see you all tomorrow!

Happy Thursday, everyone!