Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Valley Fever

Have you heard of Valley Fever? I just learned about this a few days ago. Check out that link. I heard about it at the vet clinic when I was picking up Tory's diet food. A lady was telling a story how her dog has Valley Fever and she was talking like it wasn't a big deal. I would think it would be a big deal especially with pets. I just hope I don't acquire this fever!

After work I stopped at Fry's and bought a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs for a total of $1.88! Fry's has some really good sales, not to mention that is my grocery store of choice.

The Yoga classes have been going well. I'm surprised how sore I get the next day. I've been going every Tuesday and Wednesday and the class lasts an hour. I have definitely lost weight as my pants have been a clear indication. That make me a couple pounds away from my goal weight!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Countdown to Cali!

It is countdown for our trip to California. This will be my first time visiting California and the first stop is San Diego! In Arizona, San Diego is a must go-to every summer for Arizonians. It's a place to go to cool off from the high temperatures. I have Monday off due to a Canadian holiday-Civic Day, so we'll be able to have a full 2 and half days of beach. We don't really have any plans at the time, except to visit the Gaslamp area and Coronado Island, a couple of restaurants to check out and then some beach time. The next time we go we'll probably do more of the San Diego stuff like the famous zoo. You bet I'll be taking a ton of pictures for this trip!

Has anyone been watching Bravo's Miami Social? I discovered this show today, more reality shows, but this one is a little different than your Real Housewives. I always get addicted to these reality shows because I think I'm fascinated with their life styles. It seems like they have loads of money, but never work or when they do work its nothing but fun. Where do these people get their money?!

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Carefree Lifestyle

Have I said how much I'm digging the Yoga class? Back when I was going to hair school and when I worked in a spa, I was a little bit hippie. Although I didn't dress hippie, I was totally into incense, astrology, zen, reiki, massage, Chinese symbols, drinking tons of water and eating very healthy, taking vitamins, low maintenance, Wild Oats stores, herbs and remedies. Now that I've gotten out of that business and into the corporate world, I've changed my lifestyle and have gained weight, stress, inpatient, less focus on myself, loss memory, bad drinking and eating habits etc. Damn this corporate world! I crave my tranquility back, along with the body. A lot of my changes had to do with growing up and adapting to this technical world. J never knew me back then and how different of a person I was back then and I'm not sure he'd understand. I lived the free-style life and try to keep some of that alive in me now. I'm more of the carefree- see what happens-last minute, laid back, sorta plan type of person. J is the opposite. I over think certain things, but I hate thinking. Work has been stressful for me for the past month, finding the Yoga class has taught me to stop stressing, over thinking and to ground myself again. If you find yourself in these situations, remember to ground yourself. There will always be a tomorrow.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

I'm Back!

We made it back from Nebraska on Sunday. Our flight left Omaha at 3:00 pm, 30 minutes late. We touched down in Arizona at 4:00 pm. This was our first time flying US Airways and not sure we'll be doing that again anytime soon. Which is too bad because I'd like to support the Tempe based airline. Oh well, moving on...

We arrived in Omaha at 3:00 pm on Friday. J made his favorite stop at QT and our eyes bulged at how "cheap" gas was, $2.14, while it was $2.49 here! At one time Arizona had the inexpensive gas prices in the states, now it's flipped. We headed on down south to Plattsmouth to stay at my parents house for the night. They were already down in Kansas so we had the place to ourselves. We rested a little bit, washed up and headed out to pick up Sonny to go eat at Zios Pizza. We headed downtown and found out Zios moved down the street into a bigger, waaay nicer place. Afterwards, we made our way to 72nd and 370 to Farrens Irish Pub, across from my first apartment. I had to take a quick drive through the old apartment complex to see if anything had changed and let the memories flow back. Jim, Brian and Natalie met us at Farrens where we stayed there the rest of the night.

Saturday morning J and I left for Kansas at 9:00. We made it there by noon and got checked into our hotel, Embassey Suites in Overland Park. We dumped off our luggage and then headed to Paola to check out my brothers first house. Paola was 30 minutes from the hotel, so we didn't get to spend much time at the house since we had to be back to change and be to the church before 4:00 for the wedding.

The wedding went good then it was onto the reception. The reception went well and I was the cake cutter. I passed out in a coma that night by midnight. The trip was catching up with me. It wasn't until Monday that I realized I hadn't drank any water that whole trip. I drank nothing but coffee, pop and alcohol! I guess I hadn't realized how all that caffeine was keeping me going. We had a great breakfast at the hotel Sunday morning, then we left at 10:30 straight back to the Omaha airport.

Back in sunny Arizona was a change from the 7o's Midwest temps. We only brought shorts back for the trip and we were actually cold on Friday night, since the low was in the 50's. At least there wasn't any humidity. It's defiantly monsoon season as we've had quite a bit of rain this past week.

My Yoga classes have been going great! I love it! The Bodypump class has been going well also as I have been increasing my weight lately. I guess I'm getting some strong muscles now!

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Here We Come!

Thursday night 10:45, finally done packing for our trip to Nebraska and Kansas. We'll need to leave the house no later than 4:20ish to make our 6:00 flight. We've not parked at the Phoenix airport before so it may take some extra time to figure it out and grab the shuttle. We will arrive in Omaha at 3:30ish with a layover in Denver. This is going to be one big travel day for such a quick trip. Thank goodness our trip back home is non-stop. I'm not looking forward to the weather back there. Highs of 60's-80's with lots of humidity-yuck!

Until next time...

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Big Weekend

Tonight I visited my second Yoga class and I'm really enjoying it. I haven't been in the gym part for a month now. I've decided to stick to classes 3 times a week to mix things up. Two Yogas a week and then Body Pump once a week. I'm surprised that I actually felt sore the next day after my first Yoga class. Having the relaxation and calming from the class has made me miss working in a spa. I've actually taken the measures to start to reactivate my Cosmetology and Esthetics license and obtain my AZ license. The are many spas here including med-spas. Since most spas have decided to jump on the band wagon by offering benefits, the industry becomes more appealing.

J and I will be heading back to the Midwest for my brothers wedding this weekend. This was the most stressful ticket purchase I've ever had to do. Ticket prices are outrages this time of year. At least J is patient in ticket searching and purchasing, unlike me. It feels good to check one stressful item off my list! Now what to do for a gift?...

One thing we'll be doing when we go back is heading to our favorite pizza place- Zios!

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Yoga Time

Since I haven't been going to the gym except for the Body Pump class on Thursday's, I decided to try out the Body Flow class tonight. The only time I tried Yoga was when I bought myself a DVD and tried to do it at home, but I didn't make it through the DVD because it made me tired. Well, that was probably 5 years or more ago. I enjoyed the class tonight and we had a "nap" time towards the end for about 10 minutes. I think I'll be doing it more often since it was a relaxing class. I could use some relaxing-stressfree time in my day.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Our 4th

Many of you probably wonder what we did for the 4th of July. We've been enjoying spending time at home lately and trying to save money. Friday night we went to Payton's Place in Gilbert to check it out. I was craving wings and I knew a bar would be able to satisfy that craving. I ordered the medium wings and they were awesome! They come in the size of a dozen, so the medium was plenty hot for me and it took me a while to finish all those wings. When we arrived it was our surprise there was a couple of guitar strumming guys setting up to play. Bill and Sam were their names and they were hilarious! We were pretty much the only people left in the bar so it was like our own personal show.

Would you believe it actually rained on Friday night!?! It rained for more than 10 minutes and the wind was mighty powerful. This is really the first storm we've seen since living here and it's the beginning of monsoon season. We'll finally get to see what this monsoon season is all about. It is a major thing down here I guess. I'm sure the one thing that doesn't help when it rains is that they don't have gutters here, so there's no where for the rain to go.

Saturday we slept in and laid around until about 1 then decided to head out to the grocery store, Lowes and the Tropical Smoothie Cafe. I made us a late lunch then we laid around some more until we decided to head to go to Red White and Brew for 4th of July supper. They had a guy there singing with his guitar and they were offering a free shuttle to and from the Tumbleweed fireworks. We were all pumped to do that and see the fireworks, but we realized that we didn't want to have to wait for the shuttle to pick us up the show. It was really hot out and I didn't feel like waiting for a ride and deal with traffic. So we headed back home and watched Neil Diamond's fireworks in Boston.

Sunday J installed the new outdoor fan. The one that came with the house was all warped and was probably not made to be outdoors. We were given a brand new fan from some friends of Uncle B, which worked out perfectly since we were about to buy one. J is becoming quite the fan installer! Now that he has the curtains down pat. haha

Monday, July 6, 2009

Movies

J is not a big movie person, so he surprised me last week saying he wanted to rent some movies. I'm always up for movies so it was easy to pick out rentals. We headed to the trusty $1 rental 3 times! Here's what we rented:

Revolutionary Road-Kate Winslet and Leonardo Dicaprio. I'm a fan of both actors, but wasn't sure what to expect from this movie. I'd say its rental worthy and you have to watch it with an open mind. It didn't end like I was expecting though.

Paul Blart, Mall Cop-Kevin James. I have always liked Kevin James as a comedian, King of Queens is a great T.V. show and he is hilarious in his stand up routine. Rental worthy, I thought it was funny and light hearted.

Bride Wars-Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway. I'm a big Kate Hudson fan, all of her movies make me laugh and they are fun-free spirited. Needless to say, J didn't watch this movie. I thought they left it open for a sequel. It was only an hour and half long, so it went by quick.

Gran Torino-Clint Eastwood. I haven't heard anything bad about this movie. By the looks of the previews I actually thought it might be violent, but it was only violent in one place. It had a really good story mixed in with comedy and sadness. Defiantly rental worthy.

The movie we saw in the theater 3 weeks ago was The Hangover. This one is theater worthy and will also be rental worthy so I can catch the things I missed the first time. I like Bradley Cooper, he was in that TV show that was cancelled (can't remember the name, Bachelors or something like that).

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Strawberry Pie


I think I mentioned previously that I was going to make a strawberry pie for the first time. Well, I did and it turned out fabulous! I bought a graham cracker crust from Wal Mart, the non-label inexpensive kind, a container of the glaze, which was sitting next to the strawberries from Fry's and used a container of strawberries. I actually bought strawberries from Fry's when they were on sale for $1.99, washed them and took out the stem, then put them in a freezer bag into the freezer until I was ready to make the pie. I wanted to have it for when J's mom came to visit so I didn't want to make it too in advance. The day she was scheduled to come, I whipped it up. Took maybe 15 minutes and into the refrigerator it went. Here is a picture of my first, delicious strawberry pie.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Oh Canada

Something that I've been noticing is that our blue lounge chairs are lightening from the sun. Generally I lay my swimsuit out in the sun to dry, but my green and white polka-dot swim top is fading. I guess I won't be laying them out anymore and we'll see how long it takes for the blue to fade to white from all of this sun.

Now, it's been a long time since I've been on here and there has been a lot going on to tell about. J's family was here for a week and a half. J's niece, husband and kids drove down his mom. While they stayed with the husbands father in Mesa, J's mom stayed with us. We took her to the top of South Mountain, over to Wickenburg, up to Payson and then to Canyon Lake in which we rode the Dolly Steamboat which was her first time on a boat. We ate at various restaurants and she saw other sights around our neighborhood, Uncle B's house, Saguaro Lake, Fountain Hills and all of the Arizona scenery. We had a pool party and BBQ one Saturday with his niece and family. A week later J's sister and her husband drove down to pick up mom and take her up to Las Vegas. They stayed for a couple of days and joined us on the steamboat ride. They took her up to see the Grand Canyon, The Hoover Dam and into Las Vegas where they will stay for 3 days. To be 75 years old and to experience all that she has in this past week and a half has been exciting. She battled a cold through it all too. We hope she can make it back down again someday.

The drive to Payson last Saturday was awesome! It's about 2 hours away from our house. It was such a beautiful drive up to Payson with mountains galore. Since the weather has been hot here in Chandler, over 100 degrees, Payson's elevation was high enough to cool us down for a day, a perfect 90 degrees. We cruised through town a bit, then ate lunch at the Bee Line Cafe. J and I shared a slice of apple pie for dessert. So far, that was the best apple pie I've ever had in a restaurant.

The Dolly steamboat ride at Canyon Lake was really cool. It was pretty educational since the lake has a lot of history. We even saw some wildlife there. It was a HOT 108 degrees which made it the hottest day we've experienced since living here.

One of my favorite things about summer is eating watermelon. My mom always used watermelon as a way to cool down coming in from the hot outdoors. J's mom bought us a watermelon from a lady who sells them on the side of the road. She's always in the same spot selling oranges or watermelons and there's nothing like getting fresh fruit. I've been munching on awesome tasting watermelon for a while now.

That about sums it up for our week with our company. I had today off from work since it's Canada Day and it was a very fulfilled, relaxing day. Too bad I have to go back to work for two more days.