keep going.

i saw this on instagram the other day. 

i haven't been the best with my program (a weekend of helping my parents move back into their house equaled a weekend of pizza and beer) and after eating poorly and missing a meeting or two, i sat in the Medifast waiting room, scrolling through various social media outlets, when i came across this. it so resonated with me that i reposted it. my name was called, i walked back, and didn't get the news that i was wanting to hear. i put a smile on my face, "next week is my week!" i said, and left, driving furiously to trader joe's. i should've put an APB out on myself, "crazy lady on a diet driving south on 169. didn't get good news from the scale. drivers beware." but alas, no humans were harmed that afternoon and i made it to my destination. per usual when you're in a bad mood, no one was navigating the parking lot efficiently and as i talked to kevan on the phone i broke down. "why is it so easy for everyone else? why were you born with such a fabulous metabolism? why is this such a struggle for me?" i parked my car, cried, and he assured me that everything will be ok. that we'll make a plan, he'll do whatever it takes to help me out, and i felt better. much better.

my point is, overcoming challenges is hard. really hard. but it's even harder when you just up and quit. they always say that the first steps are the hardest. losing weight is hard. you can't just stop eating, like addicts can stop using their vices, because you'll die (duh...), but reminding yourself how much closer you'll be to your goal tomorrow if you're good today... that's worth it. it's worth the hard work and sacrifices. 

you just have to keep going.

fall to-do list.

fall is my favorite. my absolute favorite.
it's the perfect combination of lingering summer warmth and the cool bite of the impending winter. the days start to get shorter, but seem to be packed full of time spent with family and friends... almost in a subconscious farewell before the cold snow begins to pile up. here's a list of things i hope to get to before the hibernation begins:

>>organize basement
>>have bonfire/outdoor movie night
>>master the apple pie
>>jump on it and stick with it
>>read more. tv less.
>>organize our office/lives.
>>have our halloween costumes ready... before the 31st
>>go pumpkin picking
>>bake breads... to bring to the office
>>have a scary-movie-thon

live for good.

i saw this commercial for the first time just now and it really resonates with me.

we tend to get so caught up with living these crazy, busy lives and forget that the true meaning is to literally stop and smell the roses. slow down and absorb what you're living, don't just run through it.

make time to live your life and make it good.

400 million, you say?

so i've always thought to myself, "what would i do... truly... if i won the lottery?" so i decided to make a list :)

*have Winnie's face put the dollar bill... not that ugly wiener dog. (jokes... all around)

*pay off my and my family's debts

*finish all of our house projects

*buy a new car

*buy a cabin

*quite my job and volunteer at Hammer

*go back to school

*have a personal trainer

*travel

*start a catering company

*help others 

really though, can you even put that much money to use over a lifetime? $400,000,000.00. that's a shit ton of zeros. you can really only spend so much on yourself before it becomes outrageous and i get more joy out of giving then receiving anyways. i would probably buy presents for family/friends everyday, just to make them love me more... i mean... to make them happy... yes... make them happy. 

well good luck to all of your lottery whores out there! i'll be joining you in the drawing tonight and am really hoping that you all lose. every.last.one of you.

(i'm sorry for saying "shit" and "whores", mom)

on finding balance.

i've never been particularly good with willpower, making myself do things that i don't really want do.

a glass + 12 of wine? sure! fettuccine alfredo followed by cheesecake?? YOLO! 

i'm just not good at it and always seem to find an excuse as to why i "deserve" this or that.

i think once i ballooned to my pre-medifast weight, i started to be a little more conscience, but that was probably because my overstuffed body had nowhere for that big mac or ice cream sundae to go. i couldn't shove another fried or creamy morsel in without the fear of having a heart attack on the spot. 

in all honesty, i really took a step back and looked at what i was doing to my body, my relationship, my life in general and didn't like what i saw. i tried several times to make a change and get healthy, to no avail. but this time, something clicked. i feel so much better about saying no to things that i once was never able to pass up. and i don't feel like i'm being deprived of anything either. like times before, i basically ate protein shakes and hummus with carrots for weeeeeks to the point where i can barely look at hummus anymore and i lost some weight, but it all came back the second that i went off the diet. there was so much that i wouldn't let myself have, that the moment i slipped it was more of a fall off of a cliff. now, i don't want those things. well... that's a lie. i'd still love to have some of my old crutches, but the difference is that i don't feel the need to. 

it's not easy though. 

there are times that i slip up, but instead of saying f-it and jumping off the cliff into a peanut butter shake or bottle of wine, i get back on track, go for a walk, and try not to do it again. i'm learning as i go and so far it's been a really great process. i'm realizing that willpower truly is mind over matter and once i find a balance that fits me, weight loss and healthy living wont even be a thought. it'll just be my life.

and i feel like i'm starting to find it.

dun na... dun na... dun na dun na dun na dun na shark week!

ok... before i get going on this post i just have to say that i'm currently watching 'Voodoo Sharks' and these researchers are so damn rough with these poor sharks! i know they're doing a good thing by gathering information that shows people that these misunderstood creatures aren't as harmful as once believed, but come on! a little hug and a sweet song never hurt no one. 

anyways!

i love sharks and i love that shark week really shines a light on these misunderstood creatures and shows that maybe they're not all man eating monsters and in honor of this fabulous week, i thought i'd put together a few little ideas to hosting a shark week party. how fun is that shark shrimp cocktail?? or the sweedish fish in the melon shark mouth? i would personally ditch the melon and just eat a bag of those damn fish. oh! and those cupcakes? yeah... they're filled with a jam so it looks like they're oozing blood when you bite into them. classic.

happy shark week!

shrimp shark cocktail
shark cupcakes
shark cocktail
shark melon

diamond in the rough.

my aunt and uncle sold their house about a month or so ago and while i'm sad that that means the end of pool parties, bonfires, and lots of open space for our big family to roam... i'm now the new owner of the dresser below! hootie hooo for free dressers with awesome lines and bad cell phone pics you send your cousin on your way to the office! really though, isn't she a beaut?? we got rid of my old ikea dresser in the guest room (which had traveled with me from my parents house, to rental house, back to my parents house, to another rental house, back to my parents house, etc.) a while ago and have been in desperate need of a replacement ever since. i had been looking on craigslist, overstock, higher end stores, etc. but never really found something that spoke to me... and was in our price range. AND THEN! oh that garage sale glorious day! we were helping out my aunt and uncle at their garage sale and my eyes fell on this dresser of perfection and my aunt said "take it! for free!"

"ok!" i cried!

exclamation point!

as you can see from the picture above... kind of... the dresser was in need of a little love. it had been my cousin Erin's... Beyonce Erin... and as most childhood furniture becomes, was a little beat up.

so Kevan and i tossed her in the back of my mom's car and brought her home. 

as i said before, she needed a little work and my initial plan was to sand it down then spray it with a new coat of white. 

we ended up spraying it with Zinsser Strip Fast and sanding it down after that. These are the tools we ended up using:

some sanding things

steel wool

Zinsser StripFast 

gloves... definitely need gloves

picking tools

i keep saying "we" as if i had some huge part in this whole thing. you can probably tell by my description of our tools that i didn't. in actuality, our day looked more like this:

i threw the ball for the girl, while the man sprayed that shiz down. i did help... he just did much more than i did. the Zinsser spray was really easy to use. it came in the tin pictured above with a spray bottle, as well. you just fill the bottle, spray down your furniture, then wait about 15 minutes. 

it'll all start to kind of bubble a little and turn neon green... at least ours did.

so you peel away the layers and layers and layers of paint and then surprise! it's not too bad underneath.

we sanded for hours, after taking most of the paint off... i can definitely say "we" on that one. ugh and it was so damn humid that day. fine dust + manual labor + minnesota humidity equals nasty. 

at the end of the day we were left with this:

 she's still a little homely, but once we started to strip her down we knew we had to go ahead with the stain. i'm pretty sure Kevan has stained the whole thing, but i'm not sure. after i put all of my blood, sweat, and tears into getting that paint off, he took the dresser into the garage and made me promise i wouldn't peek. and i haven't... too much. i haven't really looked, like up close and personal. 

so i guess for now this is a to be continued... for me too. can't wait to see the finished product! 

Queen Bey.

oh my god we saw Beyonce.
in the flesh.
and it was amazing.

i was at work last thursday when i got a text from my cousin Erin, asking if i wanted to go to the Liffey in downtown St. Paul to try to win tickets for the Beyonce concert.
"mehhhh... i don't like traffic," was my response. i don't like traffic?! who says that??
in my defense, we'd be going at 4:30 (yuck i hate traffic), i doubted we'd actually win, aaaand i changed my mind relatively quickly after realizing that the concert was that night. win or lose, i'd get to hang out with this lady for the night:

awww! cousin heart squeeze!

it almost felt like a lucky night from the get-go. it only took us 15 or 20 minutes to get there. we parked in a sweet lot a block from the Liffey and the X. I met Falen from the Dave Ryan in the Morning Show, which i listen to religiously. i got to catch up with my world traveling cousin. and then... they pulled her name out of the box! out of like 30 or 40 people, they picked Erin! floor seats none the less! 

i, of course, missed the whole thing. she had gone up to hear the names being called while i stayed at our table... doing this:

taking an embarrassing amount of selfies and creepy pics of Erin pre-win. do i even have lips in this picture? weird.

fast forward to amazingness:

she stomped, she belted, she smiled, she warmed my soul.
she was perfect.

life is but a dream, beyonce. life is but a dream.

hear ye, hear ye!

it's official.

my future son-in-law was born today and i must say that Kevan and i are quite excited.

we are more than thrilled that Katie and Wills loved our lineage enough to arrange the marriage between our... wha? huh? creepy? moi?? never... ok. always.

a girl can dream, right? if my 15+ year love affair with William (yes, my car in high school was even named after him...) amounted to a large pile of squat, at least i can hope for the best in my future offspring. 

but really... i mean really... perfection. am i right??

gah. i die. 

that baby has been born into one unreal gene pool. 

and i can't wait till he marries my daughter.

losing it.

ok, so i have a secret. it's a big secret. like a big, huge, monstrous, size of my waist line secret.

i'm fat. you could say pleasantly plump, big boned, or large and in charge to name a few, but in the end i'm just fat. i haven't been this way forever, but it's been a while. a long and unhealthy while. i'm not going to get into the nitty gritty past right now... who knows if ever... but what i will divulge to my adoring public is my present and hopefully my thinner, healthier future :)

after trying this, that, and the other thing, i've been given the amazing, generous, can-never-possibly-pay-you-back-for-this, opportunity to join Medifast, which is a medically supervised weight loss program for those who need to lose 10 or 15 pounds all the way to people that are looking to lose a person or two... like myself. as of this Thursday, i will have been in the program for a whopping 2 weeks and what i can say is... it's hard. not like "i'm a starving and need a big mac!" hard, more like old habits die hard... hard. see i had been living this lifestyle... this tasty, unhealthy lifestyle for years and it was easy and it had become such a comfortable blanket that i had put around myself. i think that being fat is kind of that way... although there are some aspects that are very hard, worrying if you're going to fit/break that chair, not being able to wear trendy clothes (mumus for the fatties!), or DYING... it becomes such a cozy, warm, comfortable blanket that you wrap around yourself, that taking it off is like trying to get out of bed on an icy Minnesota winter morning. you just don't wanna. so you press snooze... snooze... snooze... snooze... and soon you wake up and you don't even recognize the person staring you back in the mirror.

i finally accepted that it was time to stop pressing snooze and i woke up. it's a pretty exciting feeling when you open you're eyes and really see all of the possibilities out there and realize that mumu's and broken chairs don't need to be and WON'T be your present or your future. like i said, this transition has been hard and i haven't been perfect. i've slipped up here and there, but i think that the most important thing is that i'm awake. i'm no longer pressing snooze. i can feel myself getting mentally and physically stronger with every passing day and it feels pretty damn good.

the story of us.

this is us.

two lovers of cheeseburgers, technology, our animals, house projects, vacations, in depth tv shows (currently in the middle of Homeland and does mon amor not look just look Brody in this picture??), and mostly, each other. 

we have a long history. not a particularly close one at first, but a long one. i've known this kid since we were the wee old age of 11. we went to school together all through high school. parts of the same groups of friends, his friends dated mine, we hung out at parties, but we were never close. after high school, i went to the same college as a few of my close girlfriends. Kevan would come down and visit with a few of our guy friends... and that's where the story of us really begins.

maybe it was all of those crazy college weekends, maybe it was seeing a familiar face from home amongst all of the new, all that i know is that's when he really became my true friend. but alas, as most love stories go, those carefree days were numbered. Kevan joined the navy.

he had a million amazing experiences that (cross your fingers) i might get him to talk about here, but those are his stories to tell. my part of the story is that as the physical distance between us grew, something else did too. when he'd come home, i was his first phone call (after his mom hee hee). when we'd hang out, my heart started to get a little fluttery. something about him, about me, about us was changing. we were moving from the friend zone to the lovers zone ;) ew, sorry mom...

5 years later, we're homeowners on our way to the wedding of our dreams. we started as best friends who could make each other laugh with just a look and in just over a year, we'll be taking vows to officially continue our sleepovers forever.