Green Lunch

Here's a secret: I'm trying to eat healthier, but I fail a lot.

I feel like I eat okay for the most part. I don't go through the drive-thru everyday for a cheeseburger and fries, but I do go through quite often for that 69 cent coke. I eat lots of different fruits and veggies in my green smoothies, but past that I find it difficult to incorporate them into the rest of my day. I'm an emotional eater, I've discovered. I like to snack when I'm working on projects, and my life is one big project right now. My favorite comfort food is canned chili, 600 calories a pop. I could go on, but now I'm getting depressed.

The point is, when I do spend some time making something healthy, I'm pretty proud of it. And I take pictures of it. (Okay, I'll take pictures of anything, regardless, but I do like to document my good food choices.) 

There's a sandwich recipe that I pinned a few weeks back that I've been eager to try, only four ingredients, but it seems I'm almost one short. Spinach, avocado, pesto, and mozarella. We never have mozarella, and I may be new to cooking, but I know enough now that you can't just substitute cheeses whenever you feel like it. So I adapted a little: I took the spinach, avocado, and pesto and made a sandwich with some leftover shredded chicken. 

That would have been the end of this little experimental meal, but while the bread was toasting, I was clearing out the fridge of older food and realized my day old mustard greens were already wilting. Day old! Sheesh. So I looked up a quick recipe for cooking those babies up, too.

Now, I've never been a big fan of cooked greens (neither has Chris), but I figure I need to learn to like it to continue my healthfulness and get my greens more often in the day than just smoothie time. I was surprised how easy the recipe was, and the greens really weren't that bad cooked. (We both agreed on this.) However, mustard greens are pretty distinct tasting, so I don't think I'll be cooking those ones again. They're fine in smoothies (as long as you really counteract the bitter taste with a lot of fruit), but it was a little too much as its own side dish. Looks pretty though, doesn't it? Such a lovely green lunch. :)

And of course Jack's there too, taking advantage of me not watching that side of the kitchen. My focus on the fridge clearing and bread toasting apparently gave him time to sneak up and camp out to watch the countertop happenings from his favorite vantage point. He most definitely got squirted in the face after this picture was snapped.

Where did my week off go?

I had such plans for this week off. This is our "summer break" right now, a week off over the Fourth of July week. Working at a year-round school ain't all it's cracked up to be sometimes.

What was I going to do this week? Well, I had a great list:

1. Organize our whole house

2. Organize the photos on my phone and laptop and update our backup drive

3. Scrapbook

4. Finish editing Melody and Chris Holz' baby gender reveal photos

5. Finish populating a book for Glen's company

6. Get my work pants hemmed.

7. Watch lots of NCIS. 

And somehow it's Friday, and I really can't say I could scratch more than watching NCIS off this list. And that's only because I finally found a great website to watch episodes for free (one that actually works consistently). I did a bang up job getting started on the house cleaning on Monday, but that fizzled out as soon as the house heated up. I did do an iphone dump of photos that hopefully I'll be sharing soon (and should have been sharing over the week). Did not scrapbook. Not even digitally. Though I've worked on both the Holz photos and Glen's book, neither is as far along as I'd hoped. 

I did drop off my pants at the tailor's. Score one for me, though I still haven't technically completed the task and picked them up yet.

So what did I do all week long? I have been asking myself this same question. With the exception of Wednesday, when we went up to Matt and Donna's party in Ramona, I've pretty much been home all day by myself. I even woke up and started my day when Chris got up for work a couple times (though more often I slept in for a couple more hours). I couldn't fathom where all my time has gone. Yes, I've run errands that took about half the day. Yes, I did start a massive filing cabinet re-organization project which took awhile. But seriously? What have I been doing with myself? 

Well, let me tell you. I've been researching up to wazoo all the things I need to know before starting my first year as a new teacher. Yep, it looks like I'll have my very own teaching position soon. Not at the school where I work currently, which is a big bummer for me (I hate leaving people!), but at the school where Chris Holz has taught for the past few years. It's not official yet, but it's in the works. I've been getting emails from the eighth grade lead, meaning I'll be working at the middle school-- very exciting because I love that age group. So that's where all my time has gone. Researching online gradebooks and management systems like Schoology and Edmodo, reading tips for new teachers, trying to figure out the school's curriculum, going through old lesson plans I've used before and seeing what can transfer over. I have almost no details to go off as to what I'll be teaching, so I'm trying to just learn as much general stuff as possible. It's fun and exciting and super duper scary.

So that's why I didn't get to organize the house or scrapbook or finish editing projects or even update my blog. Not a terrible reason, I suppose. :)

***

In other news, just before my break started, I also finished my final Master's course. The Capstone was hell. Let me tell you, I earned that A. I don't always put a lot of effort into earning those A's, but this one was deserved. So happy to be finished. For a yeah-you-finished-your-masters! present, Chris bought us tickets for Les Miserables in September. Good seats, too, not our normal back-of-the-theater $30 tickets. We're in the loge, baby!

Palm Springs

We are living it up in Palm Springs this weekend. Got to Redlands last night and stayed with Kris and Becky overnight since the T family had taken over all the rooms at Chris' parent's house and spilled over to a local hotel. Casa de Cowen was exceptional, the bed was perfect and cozy, and Kris even set up a room fan for us- highly recommend their accommodations, definitely a five star on yelp.

Kris convinced us to wake up at 5am to cheer on his morning triathlon, and Chris only let me take half an hour for a nap, so I am sleepy! Luckily we hada restful car ride on the way to pick up Emily and baby Savannah from the Ontario airport. One quick stop at a Jack in the Box in the middle of nowhere for Savannah to be fed and for us to get milkshakes, and now we are on our way to the resort to meet up with the rest if the fam! Sadly, we only get to stay till tomorrow night, then it's back to real life for us. :( But a day is enough to sit out in the lazy river on a tube and get some color, so no complaints here! :)

Random Wednesday... oops, Thursday

It's 12:46am, I'm laying in bed waiting for sleep to overcome me, and sadly, it just isn't. Darn that ten minute nap at 7pm!

I figure it's a good time to blog.

In lieu of a real post that actually has some thought behind it, we're going with randoms from the last three days on the iPhone tonight/this morning. And let's be honest, my posts are always a lot more amusing when I don't think them through first.

Up first, the Captain Holz. I'm finally getting around to editing these (so sorry, Melody!) and I'm having a ton of fun with them. Mel's concerned that people will get the wrong idea based on Holz' face here, but let me clarify that this face is the "Captain Holz" face, and not a "oh, no, I'm having a girl!" face.

Since we're gearing up to launch our new website in about three weeks, Chris has been researching all kinds of goodies we'll need for our new branding materials. He decided we needed a stamp. This one here though is our personal logo, not our business logo. (That's right, we've got a personal logo. We are just awesome like that.) He says we'll use this on all our correspondence. I'm going to use it on the only piece of mail I send anymore, our HOA bill at the beginning of the month. I think they'll be impressed.

Monday night we walked down to Outback Steakhouse for dinner and dessert while I talked Chris' ear off about my lesson demo from that morning. We split the Sidney Sinfully Sundae, but I think they shorted us, because I remember it being HUGE last time.

Yesterday I made us ultimate shrimp barley bacon salads for dinner. I have never had such a huge salad in my life. It's really hard to gauge the size of a salad when all the ingredients are in their own separate bowls. I still ate the whole thing.

The Tony's! I heart them! And Neil Patric Harris. Life should be a musical, Neil. I would have so much more fun if I could express myself with a heartfelt song every five minutes.

Pinterest fail: make ahead oatmeal smoothies. Blech. But mason jars for the win! I shall put my tried and proven green smoothies in them instead.

More business prep: sample business cards from moo. They let you print cards with a variety of backgrounds which is rad. Seeing them all scattered across the desk makes me miss the days of yore when we actually printed our photos...

There was a lizard on our screen when I came home yesterday. 

That's all.

I finally began playing around with the iPad. Chris gave me permission to fill the bookshelf (with free books), so I've been busy hunting down public domain books, especially ones my kids read in high school that I never read or haven't read in a long time. I'm a little in love with reading on the iPad now. I tried so hard not to get into digital books, because I feel like I'm personally shooting Borders and Walden's and Bookstar in the face, but I love me some digital stuff! It was inevitable.... :(

They have discovered drawers and how fun it is to pull everything out of drawers. It started with my pajama drawer. Then my sock drawer. Then my underwear drawer. Today it escalated to the kitchen drawer where we keep all the dish towels. You'll notice this picture is not our kitchen. That's because along with pulling things out of drawers, Sawyer also has a love of dragging things from one room to the other. I'm a little impressed that he kept up with his little project long enough to pull six towels across the house.

My new workstation! I realized I hadn't grabbed a picture of it yet, and it's been a couple weeks since my darling husband created me a workspace to match his. The giant monitor is my new favorite thing, next to free iPad books. He even went out and bought me a Mac keyboard to complete the look. I'm loving this new space, though I'm thinking of sprucing it up a bit with some flowers or an interesting picture frame. Maybe during my summer break (read: week of July 4th, darn year round school)....

Short and sweet

Busy weekend.
Capstone project in progress. (Two more weeks!)
Lesson plan demo is taking up my entire weekend. (Hard to make a perfect lesson plan when you've never seen the classroom, kids, or curriculum.)
Saw the Tony's finally. (Bright spot of my night.)
1:09 am: Should be asleep. Still thinking of lesson demo. (Taking over my entire weekend. Even sleep hours.)

Sigh. Next weekend will be better, yes?

Fun with apps

Did you know there's a gif app? So easy, too! Here's a gif of my lovely husband shooting at our LA County Museum of Art trip over Memorial weekend.

Wish I had more time to update about life and projects, and about the fact that my first group of students graduated today (I've had them since they were little tenth graders!), but too much is going on right now. I even had to send my husband to dinner with Kris and Becky without me. (Sad face.)

Weekend.

Yeah, it is.

What shall I do this weekend?

Work. Cook. Farmer's Market. Edit. Organize. Sleep.