Funny story Friday

So two funny stories for you guys this Friday afternoon….

Yesterday despite my sore throat I decided to head down to the gym to work out anyways. As long as I wasn’t hacking up a lung I figured that I could do something- anything- and maybe I would feel a bit better. The three treadmills were taken, but about 5 minutes into my lackluster workout on the elliptical, one opened up and I decided that I should probably run. I ran for a bit, stretched, and went into the locker room to take my shower. When I got out of the shower, I realized that I had forgotten to put an extra pair of underwear in my workout bag that morning. What else could I do but go commando for the rest of the workday? It felt so naughty. At least I wasn’t wearing a skirt! To add to that, I had a waxing appointment right after work so once my waxer was done ripping off the top layer of my skin (and some hair), I had to walk out of my appointment in work pants with nothing underneath. To add to that, I was supposed to go shopping for a dress to wear to a wedding later this morning so I quickly ducked into Victoria’s Secret (semi-annual sale going on right now!) and grabbed a pair with a gift card before trying on any clothes. Whew. I hope to not make THAT mistake again.

Last night I took Tylenol Cold Nighttime so that I could pass out and not feel my sore throat. Well, pass out I did around 10pm. I guess CP came into our bedroom around 11:30pm to me completely stretched out across the bed (something I am not usually apt to doing). He picked up my arm to move it to my side and realized that it was totally limp…..and then decided to start shaking it, realizing that I was stone cold asleep. Despite him making wave motions with my arm and loudly talking to me, I had no idea this even went on. This morning I asked why he didn’t check to see if I was dead if I was that non-responsive. “Ehhh I was sleepy.” Hmmmm, maybe I shouldn’t count on him too much…. ;-)

I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend! CP and I are trying out a new seafood restaurant tonight. Hopefully it’s good. Oh, and think good thoughts starting around 8pm tomorrow night- I’m hoping the Eagles can play a little better this week against the Cowgirls!

No fun

Ugh. When everyone in the blogosphere was complaining about getting sick, I sympathized, but felt fine myself.

That is, until yesterday. I woke up with a scratchy and sore throat and an achy body. I took some Airborne, hoping to catch it quickly, but to no avail. Despite going to bed at a reasonable hour after taking Tylenol Cold, I woke up this morning with an even scratchier sore throat, a bit of coughing and a really achy body. Booooo.

CP and I were thinking about going skiing this weekend, but if I feel like this I won’t want to go (especially because the high is not even supposed to hit 15 on Saturday). It’s tempting to stay home from work, but I am slammed right now and can’t really afford to do that.

I hate feeling like poop at work!

Isn't it funny

I find it fascinating that yesterday, as I talk about J as my go-to person and how I thought it was “cute” that CP told my sister that we could be her go-to people, I failed to even think in the reverse. If I sat down and thought about other people that I could count on, there are a few others that come to mind. But not my sister. Maybe because our friendship and trust in each other is fairly new? Maybe because she is my younger sister and asking her for help would seem weak as I am the older and wiser sister?

Whatever it is, I shouldn’t expect her to think that she could count on me if I don’t feel the same way.

From fairly early on in our relationship, CP has impressed upon me that having a good relationship with my sister is important. He didn’t have a great relationship with his sister until their parent’s divorce, but that was now over 10 years ago. While they don’t talk every week on the phone, they are close and once we move to CO, they will hopefully get even closer. His rationale is that my parents are not always going to be around and after that, all I have left is my sister (in my immediate family). And he is correct.

My sister and I haven’t been close for a while because of competition and jealousy. Those are immature reasons for us not to be friends. And if I’m being honest with myself, then it was probably more my fault than my sister’s fault.

So, it’s a good thing that we are working on our relationship. Hopefully I can get to the point soon where I can consider her one of my go-to people too.

Go-to person

Do you have a go-to person? Someone that you could call up in the middle of the night and no matter what, they would be there for you? Significant others and parents don’t count.

I know that in the blink of an eye, my best friend and maid of honor J, would be there for me. No matter that she lives in DC and I’m up in MA. She is a true and loyal friend that I know that I can count on. And I would do the same for her.

While drunkenly talking to my sister on New Years Eve, she indicated that she doesn’t have that. Barring her current boyfriend, she said that the first person that she would call would be our mom. We are a close family so I would agree that I would also call my mom. But my sister thought that she would have no one else to call. CP was drunk at this point so he was super cute in telling my sister that she “now has a brother too” and that she could always call us. He was a bit embarrassed the next day to hear that he said this probably four times throughout the conversation, but I thought it was adorable (and true).

Regardless, as my sister and I continue to work on our relationship, I find out more about her. She has over 2000 friends on Facebook (some are not friends but followers of her work, but still), but doesn’t think that she has a single friend that she could call in a moment of crisis? That makes me sad that she doesn’t think that she has a great friend that would be there for her. She did live in LA for a while…..and the stereotype is that people there are flaky and are only friends with you if they think that you could help them further their career…. So my sister is a loyal friend to people that probably don’t deserve it.

On a similar topic, would you consider someone that is married and/or has kids as your go-to person? Or are you more likely to think of a single person as your go-to person because you know that they don’t have any competing interests?

I am already a failure

Well, it is four days into the New Year. How was your last night of 2009? CP and I had a good time with my sister and her boyfriend in Boston. The Guns N Roses cover band was not very good- partly because they kept chugging Jack Daniels throughout the show. Oh well. After heading back to the hotel, we all ended up staying up until 4am talking and eating pizza. My sister’s boyfriend had to work the Winter Classic at 8am the next morning- poor guy!

The rest of our weekend was mainly spent indoors because it snowed for 3 days straight! We probably have about 8-10 inches at our house, which meant a lot of shoveling and slow driving!

I have to confess….I haven’t quite gotten started on the “30 days of exercising” I promised in my last post. In order to save some money, we cancelled my home gym membership because I am able to work out for free at work. No classes and not as much variety in the equipment, but free is free. So….I don’t have an excuse because I could have popped in “No More Trouble Zones” or one of my other workout DVDs, but I didn’t. However, I do plan on heading to the gym in a few minutes during my lunch hour. FAIL.

HOWEVER, I did think of another 30 day challenge to myself. I will eat a healthy salad for 30 days straight. Losing weight is 80% about what food you put into your mouth anyway….so eating salad at least once a day for 30 days is definitely do-able. I am happy to say that I have already gone 4 days of having a side salad with dinner. And CP is on board too! I’ll keep you posted on this one….

30 Days to Success

A friend of mine shared the following article with me (originally found here) and I thought that I would post it to maybe inspire someone in the New Year. It's similar to the challenges Nilsa did for most of this year. I am thinking 30 days of exercising- no excuses- even when I am traveling!

30 Days to Success By Steve Pavlina

A powerful personal growth tool is the 30-day trial. This is a concept I borrowed from the shareware industry, where you can download a trial version of a piece of software and try it out risk-free for 30 days before you’re required to buy the full version. It’s also a great way to develop new habits, and best of all, it’s brain-dead simple.

Let’s say you want to start a new habit like an exercise program or quit a bad habit like sucking on cancer sticks. We all know that getting started and sticking with the new habit for a few weeks is the hard part. Once you’ve overcome inertia, it’s much easier to keep going.

Yet we often psyche ourselves out of getting started by mentally thinking about the change as something permanent — before we’ve even begun. It seems too overwhelming to think about making a big change and sticking with it every day for the rest of your life when you’re still habituated to doing the opposite. The more you think about the change as something permanent, the more you stay put.

But what if you thought about making the change only temporarily — say for 30 days — and then you’re free to go back to your old habits? That doesn’t seem so hard anymore. Exercise daily for just 30 days, then quit. Maintain a neatly organized desk for 30 days, then slack off. Read for an hour a day for 30 days, then go back to watching TV.

Could you do it? It still requires a bit of discipline and commitment, but not nearly so much as making a permanent change. Any perceived deprivation is only temporary. You can count down the days to freedom. And for at least 30 days, you’ll gain some benefit. It’s not so bad. You can handle it. It’s only one month out of your life.

Now if you actually complete a 30-day trial, what’s going to happen? First, you’ll go far enough to establish it as a habit, and it will be easier to maintain than it was to begin it. Secondly, you’ll break the addiction of your old habit during this time. Thirdly, you’ll have 30 days of success behind you, which will give you greater confidence that you can continue. And fourthly, you’ll gain 30 days worth of results, which will give you practical feedback on what you can expect if you continue, putting you in a better place to make informed long-term decisions.

Therefore, once you hit the end of the 30-day trial, your ability to make the habit permanent is vastly increased. But even if you aren’t ready to make it permanent, you can opt to extend your trial period to 60 or 90 days. The longer you go with the trial period, the easier it will be to lock in the new habit for life.

Another benefit of this approach is that you can use it to test new habits where you really aren’t sure if you’d even want to continue for life. Maybe you’d like to try a new diet, but you don’t know if you’d find it too restrictive. In that case, do a 30-day trial and then re-evaluate. There’s no shame in stopping if you know the new habit doesn’t suit you. It’s like trying a piece of shareware for 30 days and then uninstalling it if it doesn’t suit your needs. No harm, no foul.
Here are some examples from my own life where I used 30-day trials to establish new habits:

1) In the Summer of 1993, I wanted to try being vegetarian. I had no interest in making this a lifelong change, but I’d read a lot about the health benefits of vegetarianism, so I committed to it for 30 days just for the experience. I was already exercising regularly, seemed in decent health, and was not overweight (6′0″, 155 lbs), but my typical college diet included a lot of In-N-Out burgers. Going lacto-ovo vegetarian for 30 days was a lot easier than I expected — I can’t say it was hard at all, and I never felt deprived. Within a week I noticed an increase in my energy and concentration, and I felt more clear-headed. At the end of the 30 days, it was a no-brainer to stick with it. This change looked a lot harder than it really was.

2) In January 1997, I decided to try going from vegetarian to vegan. While lacto-ovo vegetarians can eat eggs and dairy, vegans don’t eat anything that comes from an animal. I was developing an interest in going vegan for life, but I didn’t think I could do it. How could I give up veggie-cheese omelettes? The diet seemed too restrictive to me — even fanatically so. But I was intensely curious to know what it was actually like. So once again I did a 30-day trial. At the time I figured I’d make it through the trial, but I honestly didn’t expect to continue beyond that. Well, I lost seven pounds in the first week, mostly from going to the bathroom as all the accumulated dairy mucus was cleansed from my bowels (now I know why cows need four stomachs to properly digest this stuff). I felt lousy the first couple days but then my energy surged. I also felt more clear-headed than ever, as if a “fog of brain” had been lifted; it felt like my brain had gotten a CPU and a RAM upgrade. However, the biggest change I noticed was in my endurance. I was living in Marina del Rey at the time and used to run along the beach near the Santa Monica Pier, and I noticed I wasn’t as tired after my usual 3-mile runs, so I started increasing them to 5 miles, 10 miles, and then eventually a marathon a few years later. In Tae Kwon Do, the extra endurance really gave a boost to my sparring skills as well. The accumulated benefits were so great that the foods I was giving up just didn’t seem so appealing anymore. So once again it was a no-brainer to continue after the first 30 days, and I’m still vegan today. What I didn’t expect was that after so long on this diet, the old animal product foods I used to eat just don’t seem like food anymore, so there’s no feeling of deprivation.

3) Also in 1997, I decided I wanted to exercise every single day for a year. That was my 1997 New Year’s resolution. My criteria was that I would exercise aerobically at least 25 minutes every day, and I wouldn’t count Tae Kwon Do classes which I was taking 2-3 days per week. Coupled with my dietary changes, I wanted to push my fitness to a new level. I didn’t want to miss a single day, not even for sick days. But thinking about exercising 365 days in a row was daunting, so I mentally began with a 30-day trial. That wasn’t so bad. After a while every day that passed set a new record: 8 days in a row… 10 days… 15 days…. It became harder to quit. After 30 days in a row, how could I not do 31 and set a new personal record? And can you imagine giving up after 250 days? No way. After the initial month to establish the habit, the rest of the year took care of itself. I remember going to a seminar that year and getting home well after midnight. I had a cold and was really tired, yet I still went out running at 2am in the rain. Some people might call that foolish, but I was so determined to reach my goal that I wasn’t going to let fatigue or illness stop me. I succeeded and kept it up for the whole year without ever missing a day. In fact, I kept going for a few more weeks into 1998 before I finally opted to stop, which was a tough decision. I wanted to do this for one year, knowing it would become a powerful reference experience, and it certainly became such.

4) More diet stuff…. After being vegan for a number of years, I opted to try other variations of the vegan diet. I did 30-day trials both with the macrobiotic diet and with the raw foods diet. Those were interesting and gave me new insights, but I decided not to continue with either of them. I felt no different eating macrobiotically than I did otherwise. And in the case of the raw diet, while I did notice a significant energy boost, I found the diet too labor intensive — I was spending a lot of time preparing meals and shopping frequently. Sure you can just eat raw fruits and veggies, but to make interesting raw meals, there can be a lot of labor involved. If I had my own chef, I’d probably follow the raw diet though because I think the benefits would be worth it. I did a second trial of the raw diet for 45 days, but again my conclusion was the same. If I was ever diagnosed with a serious disease like cancer, I’d immediately switch to an all raw, living foods diet, since I believe it to be the absolute best diet for optimal health. I’ve never felt more energetic in my life than when I ate a raw diet. But I had a hard time making it practical for me. Even so, I managed to integrate some new macrobiotic foods and raw foods into my diet after these trials. There are two all-raw restaurants here in Vegas, and I’ve enjoyed eating at them because then someone else does all the labor. So these 30-day trials were still successful in that they produced new insights, although in both cases I intentionally declined to continue with the new habit. One of the reasons a full 30-day trial is so important with new diets is that the first week or two will often be spent detoxing and overcoming cravings, so it isn’t until the third or fourth week that you begin to get a clear picture. I feel that if you haven’t tried a diet for at least 30 days, you simply don’t understand it. Every diet feels different on the inside than it appears from the outside.

This 30-day method seems to work best for daily habits. I’ve had no luck using it when trying to start a habit that only occurs 3-4 days per week. However, it can work well if you apply it daily for the first 30 days and then cut back thereafter. This is what I’d do when starting a new exercise program, for example. Daily habits are much easier to establish.
Here are some other ideas for applying 30-day trials:

Give up TV. Tape all your favorite shows and save them until the end of the trial. My whole family did this once, and it was very enlightening.

Give up online forums, especially if you feel you’re becoming forum addicted. This will help break the addiction and give you a clearer sense of how participation actually benefits you (if at all). You can always catch up at the end of 30 days.

Shower/bathe/shave every day. I know YOU don’t need this one, so please pass it along to someone who does.

Meet someone new every day. Start up a conversation with a stranger.

Go out every evening. Go somewhere different each time, and do something fun — this will be a memorable month.

Spend 30 minutes cleaning up and organizing your home or office every day. That’s 15 hours total.

List something new to sell on ebay every day. Purge some of that clutter.

Ask someone new out on a date every day. Unless your success rate is below 3%, you’ll get at least one new date, maybe even meet your future spouse.

If you’re already in a relationship, give your partner a massage every day. Or offer to alternate who gives the massage each day, so that’s 15 massages each.

Give up cigarettes, soda, junk food, coffee, or other unhealthy addictions.

Become an early riser.

Write in your journal every day.

Call a different family member, friend, or business contact every day.

Make 25 sales calls every day to solicit new business. Professional speaker Mike Ferry did this five days a week for two years, even on days when he was giving seminars. He credits this habit with helping build his business to over $10 million in annual sales. If you make 1300 sales calls a year, you’re going to get some decent business no matter how bad your sales skills are. You can generalize this habit to any kind of marketing work, like building new links to your web site.

Write a new blog entry every day.

Read for an hour a day on a subject that interests you.

Meditate every day.

Learn a new vocabulary word every day.

Go for a long walk every day.

Again, don’t think that you need to continue any of these habits beyond 30 days. Think of the benefits you’ll gain from those 30 days alone. You can re-assess after the trial period. You’re certain to grow just from the experience, even if it’s temporary.

The power of this approach lies in its simplicity. Even though doing a certain activity every single day may be less efficient than following a more complicated schedule — weight training is a good example because adequate rest is a key component — you’ll often be more likely to stick with the daily habit. When you commit to doing something every single day without exception, you can’t rationalize or justify missing a day, nor can you promise to make it up later by reshuffling your schedule.


Did this article inspire YOU to do something for 30 days? If so, what?

What will 2010 bring?

Looking back on the year that was 2009, CP and I had a pretty busy year.

*We survived a year in the most boring town imaginable for people our age. Hopefully we will remedy this soon and move to Denver!

*We survived planning a wedding hours away from our house and without much help from family and the wedding party. Luckily, now we just can look forward to other people’s weddings….including one later this month in New Orleans!

*We survived spending three months away from each other because of my work rotation. Hopefully CP’s job doesn’t have him traveling a lot this year, but one never knows.

*We survived working with a trainer and going to the gym together. I managed to lose 20 pounds, gain back 10 while living in DC, and lose 15 more before the wedding. I am up 5 pounds and need to get back on the losing-weight train. CP lost about 25 pounds himself, but has put on more than 10 of it. He is currently back in the gym, trying to run it off.

*We survived trips to Cancun and South Africa/ Mozambique. This year we have only two trips planned so far- New Orleans for a wedding and Denver for a week of skiing (but hopefully we will have moved by then!). Not as exotic, but just as fun!

*We survived our money troubles and will hopefully continue to move in a positive direction. We have a strict budget in place that we monitor weekly and hope to get a renter into our condo out west soon. Paying for a mortgage and rent at the same time and only living in one of the places? Pretty much sucks.

Today is the first day of 2010. What will the year ahead look like for me and CP?