Monthly Archives: May 2012

GOALS

June goals

May 26, 2012 – 1:17 pm

For the pre­vi­ous month see: May goals, May mid­month goals, and May goals: Final update

Career

Apply to jobs at least once a week – I’ve finally set­tled on what type of job I would like to have within the wide field of tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I have always wanted to write but now I know I want to write for the web – web­sites, blogs, and social media. I want to help com­pa­nies con­nect with their audi­ence online. I fell in love with con­tent strat­egy dur­ing my last semes­ter in grad school and I believe it’s the best way for me to explore my pas­sion of tech­nol­ogy and writing.

Start con­tent strat­egy for Ann Sin­gle­ton Tax Ser­vice, Inc. Face­book page – I cre­ated a con­tent strat­egy report for my mother’s com­pany last month for my final paper. In case you don’t know, con­tent strat­egy for the web involves eval­u­at­ing the con­tent on your web­site or social media assets (Face­book, Twit­ter, Pin­ter­est, etc.) and deter­min­ing if the con­tent is work­ing for your image and your audi­ence. There’s a lot more that goes into it but that’s the basic idea. Con­tent could be any­thing on the site from any words to your pic­tures and videos. Con­tent strate­gist could even sug­gest a change in the struc­ture of your site even though I con­sider that more the work of an infor­ma­tion architect.

Since things have slowed down for me, I can now focus on imple­ment­ing my plan. I’ve already started on some parts of the plan but the biggest will be the Face­book page.

Health

Reduce sugar intake – I still run­ning strong with this one from last month. I’m tak­ing it day by day. Last month I really didn’t bat­tle any strong crav­ings but I did have tons to cel­e­brate which always include some type of sug­ary dessert. Plus I had to indulge at ghi­rardelli in Miami.

Fin­ish Couch to 5K (for real this time) – It’s only three days a week. I only have three weeks to go.  I know I can do this. Instead of mak­ing myself run out­side after work, I’m using the tread­mill too. I rather run out­side on the week­ends when the tem­per­a­tures are still low.

Walk 30 min­utes a day – I’ve been read­ing pieces of Dr. Oz’s book “You on a Diet”. He talks about how walk­ing 30 min­utes a day is so ben­e­fi­cial to our health. I’ll only walk on the days I don’t run. I prob­a­bly won’t walk every­day but I would like to walk at least 2 or 3 days at a week.

Finances

June NO BUY chal­lenge – Every time I talk about doing this my boyfriend rolls his eyes. Maybe it’s because he knows I have a shop­ping prob­lem. I’m com­mit­ted this time though…I think. No I’m going to do it. It’s just 30 days. No shop­ping. No H&M, No Etsy, No Tar­get, No Ama­zon. I’ll even wait to use my gift cards from grad­u­a­tion until July.

Blog

20 posts – I want to write at least 20 posts this month which is this many more than last month.

Start Face­book page for this site after 25 posts – I’m start­ing a Face­book page but I wanted to get enough posts on here before I really launched it to the world. As I write this I have 9 post and hope to have 25 by the mid­dle of June.

 

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MUSINGS

My lesson in eating well: how counting calories opened my eyes

May 25, 2012 – 9:00 pm

My mother taught me bet­ter. She was the mom that packed grapes, plums, and apples at snack time when other moms packed Gush­ers and Fruit Roll Ups. At the time I hated it. My snack was bor­ing and dare I say it – healthy which is gross to an 8 year old. Fast food was a very last resort in our house. I prob­a­bly had a happy meal only 4 times in my entire child­hood. My mom would get us a cheese­burger and would split a large fry between the four of us. On a spe­cial occa­sion we would get pizza. And despite the fact that my mom is a true south­ern woman, she would only fry chicken occa­sion­ally. Our meals usu­ally con­sisted of plain baked chicken, green beans, and rice. Every. Sin­gle. Day.

Once I was in con­trol of what I ate, things went down­hill. It started in high school. I recall not eat­ing break­fast but if I did it was a Pop­tart or some­thing of that nature. Lunch was a bag of Dori­tos, a choco­late chip cookie, and a Fruitopia. For dinner…well I was work­ing at a fast food restau­rant so you can imag­ine what I would eat for dinner.

My eat­ing habits begin to improve as I got older. I started to eat break­fast a lit­tle more but I relied on frozen din­ners dur­ing col­lege and what­ever was in the cafe­te­ria. When I moved out on my own, I was able to start cook­ing for myself but I indulged in the fried chicken and mac­a­roni and cheese that every south­erner loves. My other love? Ital­ian food. Pasta drown­ing in a ton of cheese. Now this isn’t to say that every­thing I ate was “bad” after all I did love veg­eta­bles and tried to eat them often.

Once I decided to get seri­ous about my health, I real­ized how bad my eat­ing habits were. While I knew that I wasn’t con­sum­ing a healthy diet, I didn’t really real­ize how bad until I joined MyFit­ness­Pal. I decided to start count­ing calo­ries after I gained 20 pounds. It was then that I had a guide­line as far as what my body needed to oper­ate each day. It’s one thing to hear “you should eat healthy” but what really is healthy? What does healthy look like?

With MyFit­ness­Pal and count­ing calo­ries, I was able to clearly see how my cur­rent diet was pack­ing on the pounds. I also could see what my body really needed. I kept track of every­thing — calo­ries, sodium, sugar, pro­tein, fiber, and fat. Things started to click. It was easy to see that I needed a diet rich in veg­eta­bles and fruits (low calo­rie foods) with nuts and fibers. While I’m a meat eater, I don’t crave it as often as I did when I was younger.

By count­ing calo­ries, I learned why burg­ers and fries weren’t such a good idea for din­ner. A burger and fries that could equal 600 or more calo­ries is too much for one meal – almost half of my caloric intake for the day.
After I real­ized that, things fell into place and the higher calo­rie meals started to dis­ap­pear from my diet.  Now I still slip up from time to time case in point grilled cheese bacon burger but I know that I have exer­cise to burn off my indul­gences. Plus what would life be with­out a lit­tle fun?

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MUSINGS

A necklace for him

May 24, 2012 – 1:24 am

I think my wish­list is get­ting me in trou­ble. Out of the three weeks I’ve cre­ated a wish­list, I’ve brought two things. Admit­tedly, I’ve had the Curl­form­ers on my list for sev­eral months sooo.…. OK I really don’t feel that bad about it. Maybe a lit­tle but I love this neck­lace. I ordered it from edor on Etsy. It came in this cute lit­tle box and for some one who cus­tomizes all their pieces, it came pretty quick.

I got my and the boyfriend’s first ini­tial on the square and dot. He of course is the square (because he’s a dude and has board shoul­ders like a square) and I’m the dot. I thought the square and dot would be a lit­tle big­ger. That’s my only gripe but I still love it.

–Steph

 

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uncategorized

Wishlist Wednesday: Summer blockbusters

May 23, 2012 – 11:08 pm

This Wish­list Wednes­day will be a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the other two I’ve done. I think the best movies come out in the sum­mer. There may be some sprin­kled through­out the year but the sum­mer is when I spend tons of time at the the­ater. This year is no dif­fer­ent. Below are some of the movies I want to see but it doesn’t rep­re­sent all of them. The one I’m most excited about? Dark Knight Rises. I’m a HUGE bat­man fan. I blame my dad. I’ll be at the the­ater Thurs­day night with my bat­man t-shirt on.

BATMAN!

The trailer on this just looks good.

What girl doesn’t love a dark fairy tale?

Vam­pires — Duh

I just really want to see this movie. I have no idea why.

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GOALS

May goals: Final update

May 23, 2012 – 10:23 pm

Career

Grad­u­ate – Oh what a relief to have this done and over with.

Health

Fin­ish Couch to 5K – I started Couch to 5K sev­eral months ago on the tread­mill and got to the last weeks of the pro­gram. Because of school, I stopped. But since the weather has been so beau­ti­ful out, I decided to restart the pro­gram using Ease into 5K app. I’m on week 4 and only have 4 weeks to go. The plan is to set aside 3 days a week to run each week. By the end of the month, I want to be able to run a 5K.

Reduce sugar intake – I didn’t do as well as I wanted to with this in the begin­ning of the month.  With all the cel­e­brat­ing, cake and cook­ies, and brown­ies were every­where. Plus I had some left over peanut but­ter morsels in the house from the peanut but­ter choco­late cup­cakes we made for grad­u­a­tion. Who knew they were so deli­cious straight from your hand? And then mix them with some wal­nuts? #Heaven

I did stop eat­ing my beloved Chobani yogurt and started drink­ing plain green tea in the morn­ing. I’m also eat­ing more fruits and drink­ing 100% fruit juice. This helps to take some of the edge off the sweet cravings.

Finances

Pay off cur­rent credit card bill –Done…almost. I’m still wait­ing on one pay­ment to be com­pletely finished.

Stay on bud­get – I did pretty well here. Using EEBA has been a true learn­ing expe­ri­ence but I love that I can only focus on one enve­lope. Before I would see the money I had left after I paid all my bills and I would spend it. But with EEBA I only focused on the money I allot­ted for spend­ing. For next month I will sep­a­rate my “allowance” out from my food and pills. I only get 10 envelopes and refuse to pay for more, so I have to shuf­fle some things around. I think I’ll change my sav­ings enve­lope to my allowance money and then at the end of the month I’ll put my remain­ing bal­ance in my sav­ings account.

Orig­i­nally I would put money in my sav­ings account at the begin­ning of the month. Then by the end of the month, I would spend most of it. I’m hop­ing that this approach will work bet­ter. I’ll save what­ever is left­over at the end of the month and already have a new check in my account to spend. Now this doesn’t mean that I will spend out of con­trol. I want to stick to my spend­ing enve­lope as much as possible.

Love

Vaca­tion – Post on this com­ing soon. We went to Miami and it was awe­some of course.

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MUSINGS

By candlelight with Lewis Black

May 22, 2012 – 2:58 am

image

I’m prob­a­bly one of the few peo­ple that loves when the power goes out. Today, while the boyfriend was cook­ing din­ner, the lights started to flicker. They spent a cou­ple of min­utes try­ing to decide if they were going to stay on or off. I was qui­etly pray­ing that they stayed off. I got my wish and quickly searched around the house for matches.I’m smil­ing now think­ing about it.

In my mind, we were going to have this roman­tic din­ner of ham­burg­ers and baked pota­toes by can­dle­light. Well, I didn’t find the matches in time, and he decided to invite Lewis Black to din­ner. Now, I love Lewis Black — he reminds me of a dis­grun­tle uncle just com­plain­ing about any and every­thing. But I did not want him at my “roman­tic din­ner”. I let it go under­stand­ing that the boyfriend could not dis­con­nect him­self from tech­nol­ogy completely.

After we ate, we decided to play “I declare war”. It was an extremely lazy and bor­ing evening. I started to wish des­per­ately for the power to come back on. Nor­mally, I would have just gone to bed but I wanted to watch the series finale of House.…another wish come true.

 

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LIFE NUGGETS

Project Declutter: My closet

May 21, 2012 – 1:28 am

These pic­tures don’t even begin to rep­re­sent the mess that is my closet. When I moved into our child­hood home, I decided to turn my brother’s old room into my closet. I had my dad put up a shelv­ing unit against one wall and the other wall has a dresser and some plas­tic con­tain­ers. I guess because I have so much room, I’ve never had to throw out my old clothes. But I’m tired of look­ing at them and I’m tried of shuf­fling through them and I’m REALLY tired of feel­ing guilty about own­ing clothes that I know I will never wear.

So after read­ing  this post from Young House Love, I decided to get off my butt. OK, truth­fully, I was on my way back from a trip to H&M and I was feel­ing a tad guilty for buy­ing now clothes with­out get­ting rid of the old ones. So I went into my closet and real­ity checked myself.

                                              This use to be a nice, folded pile of sweaters

Now if you’re like me — a mild pack rat, this will be a hard task. I really had to dis­con­nect myself from the sit­u­a­tion and a few argu­ments might have been involved.

You haven’t worn this.

I know but I’m going to wear it.

With what?

Umm.….OK fine in the dona­tion pile. Gosh!

Ask your­self the fol­low­ing ques­tions if you have trou­ble giv­ing things away:

  • Would you buy it if you saw it in the store?
  • Why haven’t you worn/use this item before?
  • Do you have an item like this already?
  • Are you real­is­ti­cally going to wear/use it in the near future?

By ask­ing these ques­tions, you can hope­fully begin to emo­tion­ally detach your­self from the item and real­ize it’s time to let it go. Now there were a cou­ple of pieces that I real­ize just needed some alter­ing so I put them in a dif­fer­ent pile. Once you com­pletely let go of your for­got­ten and unused clothes, you will have a more func­tional closet.

                                                               See now I can find things

I’m not com­pletely done but I’m pretty happy about the three bags/boxes of stuff that I have for dona­tions. There’s a closet within my closet that scares me. I have no idea what I’ve thrown in there over the years. I’ll go in and tackle it later. I also have a cou­ple more things on my to-do list:

  • Clear out extra lotions and per­fumes I’m not using (I use to work at Victoria’s Secret so I got quite a few things)
  • Orga­nize and clean out boxes in the garage (I have a lot of old boxes from my mom’s house that I need to condense)
  • Clean the closet within my closet (This is like my junk drawer. It’s scary in there.)
  • Donate all books to make space on bookcase

One vic­tory down, sev­eral more to go. I’ll keep you up-to date on Project Declutter.

 

 

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LIFE NUGGETS

Wishlist Wednesday: dainty necklaces and tennis shoes

May 17, 2012 – 12:32 am

I’ve never fully appre­ci­ated the small dainty neck­laces that I see so many women wear. I’m a big fan of state­ment neck­laces long and short. How­ever I have been wear­ing smaller, sim­pler neck­laces more and more. I cur­rently have only two neck­laces but I would love to expand my col­lec­tion. Here are some of the neck­laces I have my eyes on.

My favorite pair of go to shoes has to be my black and white clas­sic Adi­das. It’s embar­rass­ing how long I’ve had the same pair. If I could wear them with every­thing I would. While I’ll prob­a­bly never throw this pair out, I real­ize it’s time for a new one.

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LIFE NUGGETS

Davio’s

May 17, 2012 – 12:06 am

Last night I got treated to Davio’s by the boyfriend. I lis­ten to the Bert Showevery morn­ing, and the host con­stantly gets teased for eat­ing at Davio’s on the regular.

Davio’s is a north­ern Ital­ian restau­rant spe­cial­iz­ing in steaks and hand­made pas­tas. They have loca­tions in Boston, Foxbor­ough, Philly, and the newest loca­tion here in Atlanta. I had to see what the hype was all about so I picked Davio’s to final­ize the cel­e­bra­tion of my graduation.

The ser­vice from the moment we walked into the restau­rant was impres­sive. It was only 7pm so it wasn’t busy. I would love to see if the ser­vice is the same dur­ing peak times. We started the meal off with spring rolls because every­one on the Bert Show says they are the best.  They have a choice of four spring rolls: philly cheese steak with spicy ketchup and mayo, chicken parm with mari­nara sauce, buf­falo chicken with bleu cheese, and shrimp cotija with a cit­rus aioli. Since we couldn’t decide on which on to get, we ordered the sam­pler. In the pic­ture there are a cou­ple spring rolls miss­ing because I was too excited to try them and totally for­got about tak­ing pic­tures. They were the best spring rolls I’ve ever had. The buf­falo chicken was the best one out of the four and the philly cheese came in a close second.

Later our waiter brought over some bread along with this beau­ti­ful choice of top­pings. I didn’t know what the top­ping were until I researched other reviews of Davio’s. They said the spread was gor­gonzola spread but it didn’t have a cheese taste to it. I haven’t had gor­gonzola but peo­ple say that it’s sim­i­lar to bleu cheese. To me it tasted like a but­tery lemon spread not my favorite but the boyfriend enjoyed it. The esca­role with white bean was so deli­cious with the taste of olive oil and basil.

For our entrées, I ordered the Tagli­atelle Bolog­nese that had Braised Veal, Beef, and Pork in a Tomato Sauce. The waiter told us that the sauce was sim­mered for 12 hours. Right now think­ing about it makes my mouth water. The sauce was so fla­vor­ful. Even though the sauce included three dif­fer­ent meats, you couldn’t tell the dif­fer­ence between the three because they came together into one deli­cious sauce. My dish was just perfect.


He ordered Roasted Maple Leaf Duck Breast with grape rasp­berry com­pote, creamer pota­toes all on top of a red wine jus. It was his first time try­ing duck and he loved it.

After din­ner we were offered dessert. They have a full array of choices from tiramisu to choco­late mousse. We decided to stay away from the dessert. Our ver­dict: Our waiter was atten­tive. In the begin­ning he was too atten­tive and I couldn’t get a chance to really read the menu. How­ever after we got our appe­tizer and bread, he only checked on us when it was nec­es­sary. There will be a return visit to Davio’s, even if it’s just for the spring rolls.

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GOALS

May goals: Midmonth update

May 15, 2012 – 4:38 pm

Career

Grad­u­ate – Done!

Health

Fin­ish Couch to 5K – I might not fin­ish this goal by the end of the month but I will still fin­ish it. Find­ing time has been hard and I’ve resorted to run­ning on the tread­mill to not fall behind. At first I wanted to power through the pro­gram,  but I real­ize that I should take my time so that I can avoid injury.

Reduce sugar intake – This has been quite a chal­lenge but since I have grad­u­a­tion behind me. I can stay more focused on reduc­ing sugar. My grad­u­a­tion cel­e­bra­tion has brought along brown­ies, cook­ies, cup­cakes, and cakes. Now I hope to set­tle into more of a rou­tine that is void of all the sug­ary snacks. I’ve done it before, I just need to find that focus again.

Finances

Pay off cur­rent credit card bill – This is going pretty well. I’m hop­ing to get some more over­time this week­end to put on my bill but I think I’ll have the major­ity paid off by the end of the month. I had to put my grad­u­a­tion party expenses on my credit card so that should be the only bal­ance left going into June.

Stay on bud­get – So far so good. I did just get paid on Fri­day so.…anything can hap­pen. I’ve been using my new app EEBA to help me bud­get. I really hate receipts but they have been quite help­ful in keep­ing track of my expenses. When I was run­ning around from store to store Fri­day, I couldn’t even think of record­ing every expenses. On Sun­day, when things cooled down, it was eas­ier to go through the receipts and record each trans­ac­tion.  I don’t rec­om­mend mak­ing large trans­ac­tions and going with­out record­ing them for a long time. You want to make sure you care­fully mon­i­tor the changes in your enve­lope. It will help you from over­spend­ing and hope­fully stay within budget.

Love

Vaca­tion – I’ll put together the plans for this next week.

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