Being sore feels great!

I woke up nice and sore this morning but it feels great. In addition to the racquetball from yesterday, I also did a bunch of frog jumps (jumping squats) to warm up with and my legs definitely feel it today. Of course, I'm still going to the gym shortly here. :)

The sad news is that the Pens lost the hockey game in overtime, so the 7th game in the series will be played on Wednesday night. Talk about NERVE-WRACKING. Go Pens!

I ate a great bowl of blackberry cashew oats today:

-1/2 C oats
-1/3 C pumpkin
-noni juice (I'll put this in every day to use up the bottle, not because I think it's really as great at it claims to be!)
-ground flax
-cashews
-blackberries
-a tiny bit of granola to finish it

Yesterday I was hungry all afternoon. A couple pictures:


Tofu with sauteed cabbage, kale, fresh ginger, onion, tamari and hot sauce

Eaten with Ak-mak crackers and hummus

My dinner was this amazing bowl of veggies. Consisted of broccoli, the mixture above (the cabbage/kale/ginger stuff), tofu, and topped with low fat feta cheese! This was incredible and also a HUGE amount of food, which I love!


Fruit for dessert.

Unphotographed foods were 2 Clif Z bars, 2 Miller lite beers (at night with the boyfriend), some chocolate covered espresso beans, and 2 squares of Ghiradelli raspberry dark chocolate. :)

Sweet and Fit is having a giveaway for $10 off a purchase from MixMyGranola.

On my to do list today, before leaving the house to teach at 3:30 is:

-Bank
-Post office
-Look for housing options for next year!
-Gym
-Practice
-Shop, and try to convince myself to buy an iPod. I ONLY have EVER owned an iPod shuffle (*first generation* thank you very much!) It's ironic especially considering that I'm a full-time professional musician. Umm, yes, I might just need to shell out the money for the iPod. My cord on my shuffle pretty much dead and I'd have time today to run up to the Apple store and buy it/load it up with music! Woohoo! Yes, I need to do that. Full report later. :)

If you want to make God laugh tell Him your plans

Good morning! The show yesterday only went OK; it wasn't very well attended and it was our first show back after about three weeks so we had a few technical errors. But it makes me feel more confident about our show here in town tomorrow, so that's good! :) A few of you have asked about my new CD and I'll be e-mailing you privately about how you could get it. Again, I am just keeping relatively anonymous on this blog due to my work both in the classical music world and the non-classical world to which I am branching out. I think it would be weird for people to come across this food blog if they Google stalk us, which is starting to happen more and more as we play bigger shows and are starting to get a little press coverage with the release of our new CD. I will let you know that the CD (and my band's) genre is acoustic indie folk songwriter, and we perform all of our own original music. :)

I had an amazing HUGE sweet potato and black bean burrito at the show venue from a local Mexican food shop. I couldn't get a good picture unfortunately. I also had a few fun-size chocolates and I snacked on this in the car on the way home:


I got home around 1am and --ahem-- ended up hanging out with the boy just talking about everything until about 4am. Oops. The thing is, before I had a boyfriend I thought that whenever I was in a relationship that I'd still be more interested in my life (in an honestly pretty selfish way), but he's changing all that. In fact, I wasn't looking to be in a relationship for precisely that reason. (Neither was he, which I find ironic!) We were and are both super involved with our music and I didn't want anyone to get in the way of that. And he ISN'T, at all!! In fact, he's having a good effect on me as a musician, and as a person, which is always how I've heard it's supposed to work. We remind each other that we don't have to see each other everyday and we sort of bypassed the whole "awkward, going out on dates stage" altogether, which I don't mind at all. Anyway, quote of the day, since I wasn't planning on having a boyfriend:

"If you want to make God laugh tell Him your plans!"

So yesterday I stopped into Starbucks for a Venti unsweetened iced coffee, light ice, which is my summer coffee drink of choice! I thought this was funny:


For breakfast today I had a fairly un-colorful bowl of oats, but at least it tasted good! :)

1/2 C oats
(*out of pumpkin!*)
2 tsps ground flax
1 chopped fig
1 TB (?) soy nuts
1 TB (?) peak protein granola
strawberry yogurt


I wanted a little more protein, so I only ate half the yogurt and switched it up with cottage cheese and AB half way through. I feel like a half eaten picture of breakfast is weird, but that's (one reason) why I love the blog world so much. I don't think any of you will find this weird.

One more serving in this guy after today! I seriously have *4* opened jars of nut butter in my cupboard!

• PB from Trader Joes
• PB Loco, Jungle Banana flavored
• Sunflower Seed butter
• the jar of AB pictured above

Haha! It wouldn't hurt to finish one! :)

By the way, speaking of Sunflower Seed Butter, you can request a free sample of it here. Use authorization code 0428 on the form. :)

And while we're on the topic of free samples, you can also request ZingiberRx, topical joint and muscle cream with this form. I am SUPER excited for this free sample because I have some fairly bad overuse injuries with the violin and I have a fair amount of upper back/shoulder pain (in my right, bowing shoulder) that I'm always trying to be super careful with.

And apparently this is the day for free samples of overuse injury products because Curamin is offering a pill that they claim helps support the bodies' natural defense mechanism against overuse pain. I don't know if I believe them, but I'd like to try it, especially considering my work as a violinist, with chronically sore shoulders. You can also request it here.

Here are two giveaways happening in the blog world:

Lauren at Ginger is the New Pink is giving away some great raw foods.

AnAppleADay at Blue Sky World is having a gigantic giveaway in celebration of Mother's Day!

Lastly, the amazingly cool Jess at Have Faith gave me this blogger award:


The Renee Award is one of the most meaningful awards in blog world because it honors someone who is incredibly inspirational in her intelligent and witty writing. And by doing so, this award celebrates women’s smart, strong and inspirational spirit! It honors women who spread joy and love like an Acorn……a small package growing into a tall and sturdy oak tree which gives more acorns…………..

Thank you Jess!!

I'm passing it on to Emily, Mi, Emma, Mariposa and Sarah. You girls are so great and I also love reading your blogs! :)

BLAB: Relationships vs. friendships

Good morning! I'm sorry for not posting yesterday, but I've read all your comments and I really love getting them! Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a comment! :)

The title of this post will be explained. But just to remind you, I'll be posting "BLAB" entries occasionally which stands for "BLogging ABout" and they'll just be about things I want to talk about on here.

I woke up starving this morning, because I had a somewhat upsetting night yesterday and I ate dinner, but I was really hungry by 10pm, and didn't eat anything (BAD, I know!) and was up until 2am, plus I tossed and turned all night. I try to always sound happy on this blog, and I really am, I am still happy, even with this incident...but here goes. Sorry to even have to mention it, but I really want to blog about it and I'd love your feedback if you'd like to leave it.

I am INCREDIBLY blessed to have my boyfriend. But when we were at the bar yesterday, my up-to-this-point best friend, who is a single guy, was also there. We have barely been hanging out at all recently, especially considering that we've been super close for about 2 years, hanging out about 4 days a week together. This friend of mine is practically family and we've always been there for each other, as we both moved across the country from our families, (we met here) and were both music majors at the same school. He's been there for me when no one else was. He's stayed up all night with me to help me pull all-nighters to finish graduate class work. He can make me laugh more than anyone and knows me better than anyone else on this side of the country! We read each other's minds scarily accurately. We've been through a lot of the same things, with us both being music majors. My boyfriend is amazing, but I've known this other guy for a lot longer and I care about both of them on a very deep level. Trust me; NO part of me wants a relationship with any guy other than my boyfriend, and I know that this other friend would NOT be a good person to date. But it's been really hard for me especially yesterday because my "best friend" (til now) saw me spending time with my boyfriend and he is jealous and upset. And I DON'T WANT THIS. I don't want ANY of my friendships, especially not that close of one, to be harmed by my relationship. In some ways, I know our friendship would have to change, but it honestly hurts to see him just walk out of the bar and half-heartedly wave good-bye to me. It hurts to send him a "sorry we didn't get to hang out much" text which I know he got and have him not respond at all.

It just hurts.

I'm going to try and smooth things over with him, but I've been crying every time I think about it and I honestly don't cry that much. It's also undoubtedly why I tossed and turned all night. I never have problems sleeping, but I did tonight! :(

By the way, my boyfriend is the kind of AMAZING guy who saw that I was upset at the bar and just held me and comforted me in his car as I cried, reassuring me that it's OK to feel this way, and it's OK to cry, and he still trusts me and knows that I don't want a relationship with anyone else, but understands how much is hurts to lose, or almost lose, a close friendship. I am truly blessed, and I honestly feel selfish for being this upset over another guy. It's just hard right now.

So my large breakfast was this bowl of oatmeal:

1/2 C oats
1/3 C pumpkin
1 TB ground flax
1 chopped fig
sprinkling carob chips
sprinkling soy nuts
1/3 C cottage cheese
3 slices of peaches in water (finished the jar)

No PB or other nut butter. It just didn't sound good.


I had a great day spent with my boyfriend in the morning. First I went out for a 20 minute run/walk. Then we went to a photography exhibit here in town and then walked around downtown enjoying the outdoors and getting coffee and lunch! (We probably walked for a good hour or more!) We went to a hot dog shop for lunch and I enjoyed two regular hot dogs on white buns with absolutely no second thoughts whatsoever. They were so delicious! It was 80 degrees and sunny and I had a lovely time! I taught violin in the evening from 4:30-8:15 (plus an hour drive each way) and went out with friends afterwards, including my boyfriend, to a local bar where I had an Amstel light.

Tuesday's food recap:

I cut up and ate an entire mango:


And had a lovely bowl of breakfast cereal:


In the afternoon I snacked on 1/2 a PB and jelly sandwich, plus 1/2 a Clif Z brownie bar plus a banana. No pictures, because everyone was home. But I made a simple but yummy dinner of a whole PB and jelly sandwich plus a Superfood Odwalla bar.



Monday was a great, but interesting, day! After racquetball and lunch we had some excitement in the neighborhood. (This isn't the great part). Basically one of my neighbors got in a fight with his ex-girlfriend about whether he had cheated on her. It was almost violent (I typed violin!) and really sad, scary and awful. The cops ended up coming, with 4 police cars, and they had to handcuff the guy because after they ran his background check it turned out that he was an unregistered sex offender! Umm, makes me really comfortable about where I'm living. And it's weird, because I've talked to him (and his roommates) several times and they seemed really nice to me. But he won't be coming back to live with them, so I feel a little better. I ended up texting my boyfriend and telling him what a huge blessing he is to me, and how I was just reminded of that after hearing that couple's fight!

But my evening was great. I hung out with a single male friend (different from the one mentioned above). I had told my boyfriend and he said he appreciated me telling him, but I didn't always HAVE to tell him and either way he was perfectly OK with it. This is good because it would be a problem if he didn't want me hanging out with my male friends. He trusts me and I trust him; I had dinner with this guy and gave him three of my CDs that we finished recording. So really it was like a business dinner. :) We got Chinese food, and I took a picture of my leftovers to show you the basic idea. I picked out all the veggies though, so add a bunch of broccoli and carrots to my meal to see my Monday night dinner:


The entrees were Chicken with Veggies (on the left) and General Tso's (on the right):


We also ended up talking and walking for one and a half hours, so that was another great workout!

I also wanted to show you some pictures of the incredible desserts I consumed over the weekend at games night and on Sunday (and OK, Monday too! Yummers!)

Lemon bars: (just had one of these on Monday)


Chocolate mint brownie bites and coconut chocolate blondie bites:

One of about five I had on Monday:

This was in my camera so I must have snacked on it at some point:


These were growing in my backyard and I found them beautiful:


I'm off to the gym then to get lunch with a friend around 2pm and teach and play from 4-8pm tonight.

Happy Hump Day!

My first giveaway!

It's here! My first giveaway! But first you have to read about my hopefully not-too-boring food! Alternatively you could just scroll down to the giveaway, but why would you want to do that? That's no fun. I promise I'll make this post interesting! ;-)

I started my day with a lovely bowl of oatmeal:


1/2 C oats
2 tsp ground flax
1 TB carob chips
1 TB soy nuts
1/3 C 2% Greek yogurt
1 TB (?) Peanut butter
1 TB (?) Noni juice

Notice the clearance sticker. I saw that it was marked down to $5 from $20 at RiteAid, so I decided to try it. I figured it couldn't hurt, and I'm sure there are some good nutrients in it. It's honestly kind of gross to just mix with water and drink like juice (I tried this!), but with just a little mixed into oatmeal it's not too bad.

Bowl of oats with coffee. Sounds like a painting name. Like "Still life with oatmeal." Hah!


Yesterday I had a similar bowl of oatmeal for breakfast:



Add a fig and banana to today's breakfast and substitute the PB for Sunflower Seed butter and they would have been identical. Meh, sorry that was kind of boring I guess. ;-)

I baby-sat yesterday from 8:30-12:30 and had a large handful of mixed nuts and some of an apple (cut up 3 ways for snack time!). On the drive to the gym I had this bar:


I got a wussy workout in of 30 minutes on the Expresso bikes (my legs are/were sore--in a good way--to the point of failing so biking was sort of a joke!) plus some good ab work in. So now since I've worked out my legs on Sunday and Monday, my arms/upper body on Monday, and my abs yesterday EVERY muscle in my body is sore today! :) I don't actually mind it, I feel great really! I just have no clue what my workout at the gym is going to be today. I'm heading there right after this post, so I'll let you all know.

I came home and ate this bowl of the last of my barley and cabbage/tofu mix. Sorry for the poor picture quality. I also topped it with TJ roasted red pepper hummus. Yes, it was eaten at my computer. Surely I'm not the only one who read blogs/e-mails while eating?


On my drive to teach I had a Luna bar and an apple.



And now for the exciting part!! My first giveaway! I have a jar of P.B. Loco Premium All-natural Jungle Banana flavored Peanut Butter and several favorite bars of mine which are also frequently seen around the blogging world. P.B. Loco Peanut Butters contain no trans fat, are low in sugar, and are delicious! Full product and company information can be found here. The selection of bars is:

• LARABAR-Cherry Pie
• PURE-Cherry Cashew
• Luna-Chocolate Raspberry
• Luna-Chocolate Peppermint Stick
• NuGo-Chocolate Banana (a locally made all-natural bar that's delicious!)
• Raw Revolution-Chocolate & Coconut

P.B.Loco up close and personal:


There are two things you need to do to be entered.

First, leave me a comment on this post. Let me know your favorite nutrition bar, or your favorite genre of music or musical artist, or anything else I'd find interesting. :)

Secondly, you MUST also link back to this giveaway on your blog and tell me you did so in your comment, or let me know in your comment if you don't have a blog.

For an additional entry, because who doesn't love peanut butter, add me to your blog roll and follow me on Blogger, and make sure to mention that you did so in your comment.

I'm going to keep the giveaway open for a while, in order for people to have the chance to enter, because if I'm honest, I really want to generate some more readers to my blog! So you have three weeks from today to enter, the deadline being Wednesday, May 13th at 12 noon EST. I will select one random winner shortly after the deadline with a random integer generator. I hope you're as excited about my giveaway as I am!! :)

And in other blog news, there are a couple of giveaways happening.

Erin at Mrs. Cox's Slice of Heaven is giving away cupcakes! These look beyond amazing, especially for chocoholics like me! :)

Missy Maintains is giving away an Always Infinity gift bag. Chocolate is involved. Hence me linking back. ;-)

And you can request a sample of Barney Butter here!! I can't wait to receive mine! I've heard so much about it in the blog world and I adore ALL kinds of nut butters!

I will leave you with one more Carly Patterson beam routine. There is a sense of calmness about her routine that actually calms ME down just watching it. It surpasses beautiful and goes into the realm of the divine. I'm not even exaggerating. I have no words for how wonderful it is. I hope it moves you as much as it did me.

A whole weekend of posts!

Sorry I've been away all weekend. I detect a trend in my blog of mostly blogging during the week, both because no one around me knows about my blog, and also because I tend to have incredibly busy weekends due to my job as a violinist. Many gigs happen on Saturdays and Sundays and I also teach most Saturday mornings.

In fact, here is a picture of the venue of the bridal show gig that I played yesterday.



It was a fancy-schmancy "one stop wedding shop" event that I played with a string quartet, advertising live music. There was some fun free food but due to the "Meatless in March" challenge I'm doing with Jenna, I only had:

-2 tiny plates of salad, one with feta and raspberries over mixed greens, the other with honeydew melon over bibb lettuce
-1 mini vanilla cupcake with whipped cream icing (advertising wedding cake services!)

I'm proud of myself for sticking to no meat. If I were eating meat this month, I could have tried some apricot chicken, some sort of tilapia, some sort of beef, and some other chicken dish. Fancy people, I tell you, fancy! :) Oh and here's the outside of the building. It was a bed and breakfast, with the grand hall (where we were) connected in the back.



Now that it's the work week again, I promise to have (hopefully fun!) pictures!

TRIGGER WARNING! The following involves calorie counting and could be triggering so read carefully!

Starting with today's breakfast and working backwards.



1/2 C oats/bran (150)
1 tsp ground flax (10)
1 TB raisins (40?)
1/2 C ff cottage cheese (90)
2 TB peanut butter! Yum! (180)
1 medium banana (100)


= 570

And I think I need to count calories for a while, just to make sure I'm not eating way more than I think. Because I am maintaining, but I have been trying to lose weight for 2 weeks and working out EVERY DAY and I'm exactly the same weight!

Has anyone had a similar experience to me? I use to be anorexic and it was miserable. I rarely even speak about those few years of my life because it was one of the most terrible experiences of my life. I am thankfully recovered and I reached a healthy weight, but I kept gaining weight in grad school, due to stressful years and too little sleep and exercise. Now that I am at a healthy MINDSET and actually sort of have semi-regular periods, I feel like I can safely and reasonably lose about 15 pounds. But it's actually very difficult due to the fact that I am constantly hungry and get really sick/weak when I'm slightly low on calories for a day. Like it's REALLY hard for me to survive on less than 1800 calories. It's just frustrating because I am working out and I'm eating nutritious/voluminous foods and drinking enough fluids but I can't cut enough calories to lose weight. And let me assure you all that I am safely over my natural (pre-ED) body weight. And no, I won't let this consume my life, even if I can't lose the weight.

OK anyway, sorry for posting that. I'm just a little frustrated right now.

And I definitely have to add that I snacked on cottage cheese and PB plus a carrot not even 2 hours after breakfast. Go figure. I'll use it for fuel at the gym later today!

Anyway, food from the weekend: (BY THE WAY, I do not post photos of everything I eat. In fact, I am missing a lot of photos, when I don't remember or don't want to be obvious in taking it. So realize, that this is DEFINITELY not everything I eat!)



Breakfast yesterday was pretty similar to today's, but it also had the last of my can on pumpkin in it. I will definitely be making a WF shop today and getting more! Sorry about the picture quality.

On Saturday, I was out running around all day (teach, gym, teach, symphony--roughly 10am-10pm) so I took pictures of the stuff I packed.


-BBQ tofu sandwich


-spinach with a tiny bit of leftover brown rice (like seriously a couple of TBs) and a few bites of tofu
-Fiber bar (Quaker's Fiber One knock off.) I really don't like these, and they give me stomach cramps! Same thing with the Fiber One bars. I don't know why, because I eat a ton of fiber. I think it's the type of fiber maybe? Coming from chicory root? Anyone else have this problem? And I always THINK I'll like them "ooh, chocolate peanut butter!..." but I NEED to NOT buy them anymore!
-banana
-apple
-half an almond butter and sf jelly sandwich

All together:

WHEW, but yes, I ate it all, spread out throughout the day. And that was after my breakfast of:

-2 slices of ww Tuscan pane from TJ with a lot of almond butter and jam
-banana

And a random snack of cottage cheese with cocoa powder, PB, and splenda I honestly love this combo, and it's healthy. Anyone else with me?


In the blog world, Missy Maintains is giving away a bunch of Erin's Baker treats. I have wanted to try these for so long and never gotten around to buying them. So I would LOVE to win! :)

And Emily at the Health Nut is giving away this cute meal planner.

Ok, enjoy your Mondays!

Yummy oats!

I had a lovely bowl of oats for breakfast. While making it, I had a very ripe nectarine that needed to be eaten, especially since I'm going out of town for 10 days on Thursday and I'm trying to eat my perishables.


Such a pretty band-aid...haha! I cut my cuticle while trying to do my nails really fast yesterday before teaching.

1/2 C (? I don't measure) dry oats, mostly with water and a little extra FF milk
1 small scoop chocolate caramel protein powder (100 cals)
Ground golden flaxseed (1 T?)


1 fig (60)


2 dried apricots (60?)--I reconstituted these by microwaving them in water for about 45 seconds

1 small handful of trail mix


2 T (?) chocolate trail mix


It was FANTASTIC, but actually a bit TOO sweet so I remembered that I had some leftover steel cut oats and pumpkin (prepared) in my fridge, so I threw a couple spoonfuls of that in to cut the sweetness. No picture of that--sorry.



With my phone (always!), book (love the Twilight series! This is book 3 and I'm almost done with it. Trying to finish it before I go out of town, so that I can bring 2 or 3 new books to read), and coffee! It's the Organic Serena blend from Starbucks.

Oh and I had one carrot as well.


Alrighty, I need to run to the post office and bank then start packing for going out of town. I want to workout too, and then tonight I'm teaching at a music store from 4:30-8:30. I didn't have much time, but I rode the Expresso bike course "Stump Puller" yesterday. It's 6.9 miles, I did it in 29 minutes. Not too great or anything, but I'm working on improving. I want to do an arms workout today plus cardio of some sort.

I'm excited for my upcoming out of town trip, which is really three trips in one! I play with a folk songwriter trio (guitar and lead vocals, upright bass and vocal harmonies, and myself on violin) and we are going to be playing a showcase in Harrisburg, PA at the Millenium Music Conference this weekend: http://www.musicconference.net/ Following that, we're heading directly to Nashville, TN to finish recording our next CD. We were there in early January and got six songs recorded and we're planning to lay down the remaining six for the album. It'll be out April 9th! So excited!!! We'll have 4 days there, and then drive drectly to Memphis, TN for the Folk Alliance Conference, which is just about the largest folk music conference in the world! http://www.folkalliance.org/ There will be EXCELLENT networking involved and I'm really looking forward to the whole 10 days!

OK, see you all tonight!