New Blog Home

Check me out at my new blog home: http://nextrightchoice.com/!

I'm still working on the decorations and such, but I have started posting. I will do my best to snazzy it up in short order for your viewing pleasure.

You're going to love it!

Happy 2011!

Well, folks, another new year is upon us. I feel like 2011 is going to be a great year. I'm not sure why, but I'll keep my hopes up for the time being.
The beginning of the year usually marks a time for me to set new goals for myself. Whether you call them resolutions, goals, promises, or whatever, I think it's a good idea to give yourself some ideas for adjusting things in your life that may be out of sync. If everything is in order in your life, why not use this time to challenge yourself to do something even better? With that being said, I'll share a few of my goals for this year:

1. Yoga Challenge: I'm going to do yoga at least 30 times in January. I'll write about this more as I get deeper into the challenge. I really love yoga for various reasons. Unlimited yoga isn't cheap at the studio where I practice. I hope this challenge helps me to take better advantage of my membership pass.
2. Dog walks: I want to walk my dog more often. I usually don't walk him as much in the winter since I hate cold weather. I'm going to take advantage of this warm winter and walk him more often.
3. Healthy Eats: I'm planning to try to eat healthier. My eating habits have not recovered from the many buffets I consumed during Thanksgiving. I continued bad eating patterns right on into the Christmas season. I want to get back to enjoying fruits & vegetables along with drinking more water.

I've spared you the details of how I plan to do these things. I hope that these behavior adjustments will prove to be helpful for me in 2011.

Happy New Year!

On the mend...

The last few weeks have been interesting at my house. Let's rewind to final exam week, shall we? I had 3 exams on Wednesday of that week. Yes, that's clearly unfair, but I played the hand I was dealt. Like all good MBA students, I was frantically trying to cram the last pieces of information about Finance into my brain that night. I was at a coffeeshop with a classmate preparing for the next day's exam. If you read my last post, you'll know that this is the day after my car got attacked by deer while I was driving to a Finance review session. I'm sensing a theme here. Anyway, I received a call from my dear husband around 10 pm. He was on his way home from playing basketball. He had rolled his ankle and couldn't walk on it. I packed up my study stuff and headed to one of our many local CVS stores. I bought pain medicine, an ankle wrap, and some crutches. When I got home, I was unprepared for the huge orange-sized knot on the side of my husband's ankle. Of course he wouldn't go to the doctor, so we did our best to treat the patient at home. For the next week, we had to ice his ankle round the clock and keep it elevated. This meant that he could not walk much. That, of course, meant that I got to play nurse. Thank God for Christmas break! It gave my husband a chance to rest and heal. Two weeks later, he can walk on his own without the crutches and we can leave the house a lot more frequently.
Looking back on it, I'm so glad that the damage was not worse. Let's hope that the Finance Curse of 2010 doesn't follow us into 2011.

Bambi Strikes Back!

I will forewarn you that this story seems too embellished to be true. As with almost every story I tell, there are some embellishments. For the most part, the story is true. We'll just say it is true from my point of view.

Last week was final exam week for me. I had 3 finals in one day (which should be outlawed in Bloomington, IN). I planned to be a good MBA student and attend the review session led by my Finance professor. The review session began at 6:30 p.m. I live about 15 minutes away from school and there were remnants of snow on the ground. Taking all of this into account, I decided to leave my house at 6:00 p.m. to make sure that I would be on time.

Everything went as planned until I pulled out of my subdivision. Between this turn and the stoplight, there is less than 1/4 mile of dark road (no lights, lots of trees). I have warned people to be careful because it seems like a place where deer would choose to cross the street. I took my own advice, of course. I drove slowly through there (mostly because I thought there would be ice, but that is beside the point).

Alas, my attempts at safety proved to be futile. Almost as soon as I turned onto this road, I saw a (huge) deer! I've always heard that I should expect more to follow, so I hit my brakes. My anti-lock brake kicked in as soon as I saw another deer right in front of  my car. I did what all good drivers do: closed my eyes and held onto the steering wheel for dear (deer?) life. I realized that I did not hit that particular deer. Once my car came to a full stop, I heard a loud bumping noise on the front left side of my car. That's right, folks...another deer ran into my car. Essentially, I was attacked by a deer. It ran away and two more ran across the road.

I was really shaken up by this! At the time, I thought that I had run over a deer. I drove on to school and went to the review session. I couldn't open the door on the driver's side of my car, so I had to crawl out of the passenger's side. I thought my car would be covered in deer carcass, so I refused to look at it. Once inside the classroom, I contacted my husband. He (being the super-husband that he is) came to school and looked at my car while I was in the classroom. He let me know that he did not find any deer guts on the car, but he did see some dents.

Whew! Hopefully no deer was killed in this terrible accident. My car door is a small price to pay to keep those sweet animals safe. As you'll see from the next post, however, this event was only the first in a string of unfortunate events last week...

Post-Thanksgiving Post

Happy December! We got our first few real inches of snow last night. I hate winter, but I loved watching my dog romp in the snow this morning.

Did you have a happy Thanksgiving? I surely did. My family and I traveled to lovely Las Vegas to celebrate the holiday. We ate so much that I could barely eat when I got back home. There were many buffets involved on that trip. We ate Thanksgiving dinner at my cousin's house with his family. His wife made an awesome spread! It was good to have some home-cooked food. Besides that, we went shopping and toured a lot of different casinos. We had a great time, but got very little rest.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was watching The Lion King (musical). I have only seen parts of the movie (Mufasa's death was more than I could bear). The musical was much better. It focused much more on the African setting than the movie did. The dancers were almost unreal. Their costumes were not blatant, but suggested the animals they portrayed. I loved the music! Mufasa was my favorite character. Overall, I give it a 10. This musical rivals Wicked, which is my all-time favorite so far. I've seen Wicked 3 times (once on Broadway), so maybe I'm getting tired of it. I highly suggest checking out The Lion King if you live near good theater. It's a great show for kids and adults (my 6-year-old niece loved it, too). I will definitely try to see it again.

If you're a Hoosier, enjoy the snow. Everyone else: I hope you get to enjoy sunshine and a beach today instead of cold weather.

Adventures in Babysitting

Last week, I had the opportunity to babysit for my friends. Their little girl came over to hang out for the day. We had a wonderful time! She stayed for about 6 hours and slept for 3 of them. During her wake time, we watched Sesame Street and SpongeBob Squarepants. While I was feeding her lunch, she laughed so hard that we had to take a break. All in all, it was a fun time for everyone (except my dog, who ignored us both all day).

This adventure made me think about the wonderful Babysitters Club books by Ann M. Martin. I loved those ladies so much! Dawn was my favorite. She ate weird food and refused to change. Plus, her spin-off series (California Diaries) was ever so hot. Her California crew had real problems.

I did some searching and found a Huffington Post article about the characters from the Club: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-frenemy/the-babysitters-club-wher_b_718510.html#s140756
Check it out to see what your favorite babysitters are up to now.

Who was your favorite member of the club?

Monumental Half-Marathon

Well, folks, I did it! I finished my first ever half-marathon! In case you're curious, here's the story:
The day before the race was as hectic as all get out (that's very hectic!). My husband, Pete, had been staying late at work every night that week. I had to pack our clothes and get us ready to check into our hotel Friday night. After I picked Pete up from work (after taking time to hang out with the kiddos), we drove up to Indianapolis. We quickly checked into our hotel in the heart of the city. We put our stuff away and headed to the Convention Center to pick up our race packets. My race bib was quite stylish, don't you think?

We shopped for a while at the race expo, then went to dinner. Luckily, our hotel was connected to the Circle Centre Mall. We went there to eat, then made our way back our hotel to rest up for the race. I also organized our race snacks:



Can you tell we like "Gu"?



The next morning, we got up early to eat, get dressed, and stretch before the race. We watched the local news and found out that it was super cold outside. That made me nervous because I am not a cold weather kind of girl. After I got over that, we bundled up and went to the starting line. We got there just in time to say hi to some other runners, then it was time to run!

I think it was 30-something degrees at the start of the race. I was so very cold and had a hard time breathing at first. Once my lungs warmed up, I was much more comfortable. The sun came up and the temperature rose a little. We chugged right along until mile 7. At that mile marker, we stopped to potty and stretch. The race organizers did a great job of having water and Gatorade available for us. We kept on keeping on until close to Mile 10. That's when my knee began to protest the race. It hurt before that, but I was able to keep running. At Mile 10, I thought maybe I should quit the whole race. At that point, I heard my dear friend, Melissa's voice. She reminded me that I had less than 5K left. I thought I could handle it, so we ran a little bit more. At Mile 11, my knee went on strike. We saw our other dear friend (and Melissa's husband), Rick who had finished the race. He provided some more encouragement, but I couldn't run anymore on my knee. We were forced to walk the last 2 miles. My dear husband was kind enough to stay with me and not run ahead.

The finish line was such a blessing! We were both so sore and so ready to be done running. We got our medals and scooped up lots of snacks for later. We had to walk back to our hotel, but we didn't mind because we had accomplished our goal and finished the race! Unfortunately, I had forgotten to pack pain medicine and muscle cream, so we were in pain for a while. We took a long nap, then hit the mall for some shopping therapy. I'm sure we looked hilarious as we tried to walk around. We were so sore that we had to walk very slowly and each step was painful. It was a small price to pay for my first race medal!

After the race, I said that I didn't want to ever do that again. It was physically painful and very time-consuming. Now that I've had time to recover, I'm still planning to run the Disney Princess half-marathon in February and I'm thinking of doing another one in May. The jury is still out on the May race, but I'm certainly thinking about it. In the end, I'm so happy that I did this. I can proudly say that I finished a half marathon and that feels great!