Spring Scrapbook

[nachogirl82]

Spring Came And Went













A few highlights from the past season and a 1/2

• Tina
  , all the way over in Germany, talked me into resurrecting my blog via Twitter. "It's so sad every time I check to see if you've updated and I still see the same old post from January!" I know, Tina, I know. I found myself checking my own blog to see if I had updated, only to be discouraged and depressed by that nasty little date January 18, 2010. Ironically it was an entry about dreams and goals and motivation in the New Year. Embarrassing!
• I ran my first 10K! Me, Little Erin, actually ran 6.2 miles! And I did it in 30 degree weather after waking up before the sun! Let me tell you, I was nervous as hell signing myself up for something like this. I tossed and turned the night before, having these extremely vivid visions of getting trampled to death by professional athletes at the start line as soon as the gun went off... or getting so far behind the other 36,000 runners that somebody would yell through a bullhorn for me to get out of the road because I wasn't qualified for this type of event. Was I ever in for the surprise of a lifetime. I was actually too fast for my group! Of course I signed up with some of the slowest runners... and did these people ever put a new definition to the word slow. When the gun went off for good ol' Wave PB, it was like a pack of tortoises had been unleashed onto Broad St. I was running so slow I felt like I was running backwards, which might have had something to do with the fact that the soccer moms in front of me weren't even running. They were "power walking" and jabbing away, seemingly oblivious to the thousands of people racing for a cure for cancer around them. Once I managed to weave my way around this type of nonsense for the first two miles, I actually had a blast. Crossing the finish line was an amazing feeling, even though the pictures suggest I was another half mile shy of cardiac arrest. I can't wait for the next one!

   

• I lost ten pounds. I really, really did. On purpose and successfully. All thanks to my girl Gwyneth Paltrow and the most God-awful, agonizing, disgusting detox that lasted an unbearable seven days. Losing ten pounds does not look fun and healthy and delicious. It looks like this...

Needless to say, nobody was begging me for bites. Except for this guy:

• I doubt even he would have enjoyed the smoothies mixed with whey protein, the raw crudite covered in ginger and carrot dressing, the broccoli and arugula soup that was one step away from baby food, or the spoonfuls of olive oil I had to swallow every night. Not only that, I sustained from any caffeine, alcohol, or medicine of any kind. By the end of the first day, I was begging for mercy. The only, and I mean THE ONLY, thing that kept me going was the jungle of fresh, organic produce taking up an entire shelf in the fridge and threatening to go bad at any moment. I had to eat it all or it would have been the first time I've ever flushed $200 down the toilet. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. I spent $200 on a detox I got off of a celebrity newsletter called Goop. In the end it was all worth it. Even that moment when my mother sat down next to me with a juicy hamburger, as I slurped on my baby food- I mean cucumber and avocado soup- and I had the strangest vision of leaning over, snatching the burger out of her hand, and stuffing it down the garbage disposal, laughing manically. It was worth it, because at the end of those seven days, I stood on a scale and saw numbers I never thought I would see again. That was worth two Victoria Secret bikinis.

Of course I've let myself go since then. With the Monument 10K and my first successful diet out of the way, I've been enjoying the fruits (and nachos and hamburgers and steaks) of life again. But my next week-long, rabbit food experiment is just around the corner. 115 pounds, I'll see you soon. 

• I went on a horror movie kick. Randomly, in the middle of May. Brandon and I went to see A Nightmare on Elm Street and I was hooked. Not that that particular experience was spooky in the slightest. Brandon had an onslaught of allergies as soon as the credits were rolling and blew his nose loudly and constantly for the next two hours. When I leaned over and asked him to blow his nose during the noisy parts instead of the quiet parts, he gave me the look of "Oh, you just said the wrong thing," raised his soggy papertowel to his face, and honked his noise louder than a ship's foghorn on the foggiest of nights during the most silent, suspencful scene in the movie. Which was followed by a tickle in my throat that wouldn't go away no matter how many coughs I tried to stifle into my sweatshirt. Ahhh, dream date.

Still, Freddie Krueger was enough to spark my interest in guts and gore. One dark and stormy night, I made a trip to Blockbuster, in the mood for anything remotely Halloweeny. I was well aware of the irony in the situation. Trying to see the slick road through the sheets of rain thundering against my windshield was a scene straight out of some cheesy slasher movie, which is exactly what I left Blockbuster with. Four of them, actually. And so began my (coincidentally  rainy) week of lighting autumn scented Yankee candles (Moonlight Harvest being my favorite) and scaring the crap out of myself with movies like Friday the 13th, Children of the Corn, Halloween, and Carrie.  Hopefully, I've gotten that out of my system for a while. Summer can stick around as long as it wants, but I won't be sorry when it's once again time for this:

• I spent $50 on a bag of tea. No, tea isn't code for another kind of herbal refreshment people of the hippie genre might expect to spend $50 on. It's just a bag of loose-leaf tea, that only I could get tricked into buying. I was bored and wandering around Short Pump, waiting for Brandon to get off work, about to leave actually, when I spotted a Teavana. I passed Teavana every day on my walk to work in Charleston and popped in a few times for a little $10 baggy of tea, which was pushing my budget as it was. Don't ask me how, on this particular day, a tiny girl, covered in tattoos and piercings, with maroon hair that matched her lipstick, managed to sell me a  $50, 1/2 pound bag of tea. I honestly felt like I was at a carnival and she was some sort of gypsy, scooping various herbs and powders into my bag, then waving the bag in my face with a bewitching smile as I was hit with two hundred different aromas at once. I could concentrate on little else besides the silver ring gleaming from her septum, the brilliantly colored eastern fish on her arms, and the scents of raspberries, flowers, and cloves swirling from the bag.The exotic music jangling in the background did little to help my enchantment, nor did the promise of "fully caffeinated." But the moment I heard the words "fifty dollars for half a pound" an icy chill gripped my heart. It was too late. The bag was sealed, the green numbers were flashing on the register, and the gypsy was grinning like the cat that caught the canary. I spent the next fews hours agonizing over what I was going to do with a $50 bag of tea! Brandon was most certainly ready to throttle me as we sat in the parking lot of Auto Parts in the blistering heat. He attempted to change my brake light while I whimpered to him about being conned into that $50 bag of tea. T(ea) for Total Idiot. Moral of story: Never trust a girl with tattoos who makes you believe in the healing powers of a bag of herbs.                                                                        

Remember kids: Just Say No!