It's snowing again.

I wonder why I am surprised every year when snow dumps on me in March. I guess in my mind, Spring means pretty flowers and grass and maybe some rain here or there. But, alas, as I stare out at the four inches of snow that fell on my porch yesterday, I realize that my perceptions of Spring were off. Luckily, the good weather Gods did appear at a very good time over the weekend. 

Had it started snowing on Saturday instead of Sunday, I would have been devastated. I would have missed out on the Festival of Colors! Every year, there is a festival to celebrate the coming of Spring. It is held at the Hindu Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork, Utah. To welcome the coming of the new season, the Hindu's celebrate with dancing, singing, music and colors. So we went and watched some awesome performances by Hindu dance groups, and then bought some bags of very fine colored chalk, and threw them at people. 

It was sooo much fun! They burned an effigy, then everyone chanted "Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna! Hare Hare! Hare Rama! Hare Rama! Krisha Krishna! Hare Hare!" Then everyone threw their bags of chalk up in the air and at their neighbors and everyone was dusted with very traditional Indian colors. You couldn't even recognize people, and what was more, you couldn't really tell the color of anyone's skin or clothes. That was part of the celebration apparently. 

The festival lasted a few hours but John, Jim, Candice and I had to leave a little early to get to a birthday dinner. Though, the birthday girl was at the celebration too so we couldn't really get there too much later than her for her own dinner. So we made the trek back to our car and started to drive home. To our surprise, there were people walking two and three MILES back to their cars from the Temple. We had no idea how popular this festival was. It was a pretty fun mix of people though. It was basically a mix of Hindus, hippies and Mormons. And us. 

So we drove back to Salt Lake, we hurried and showered and I soon found out that colored chalk sticks to highlights. Awesome. I didn't have time to observe the damage, I pulled my hair up in a hat and we were off. We went to dinner and then to get some drinks at the Bongo and then headed home. We were all tired from the sun and still digging chalk out of our ears so we called it a night. I woke up the next morning with mounds of snow on my patio and a small hole in my heart that was put there by the idea of said snow. We decided to call it a day in and had my sister come over to held address graduation announcements for John. 

I washed my hair three times in an attempt to get the glowing pink out of it but to no avail. So now I am sitting on my couch, ready to head to work and have to explain to every person that asks if I colored my hair that it was from chalk from a Festival of Colors. Maybe I will just make something else up to tell them. Something X-Men-ish. Yes. 

Icecream before bed is a bad idea.

So what leads me to blogging right now is the fact that I had icecream last night. I ate it while watching Biggest Loser Couples (which, on its own is just awesome that I ate half a pint of Ben and Jerry's Half Baked after watching overweight people reach milestone losses of 100+ lbs in 12 weeks). Well by the time I got home and watched it, it was about 10:30 and that about the time I polished off my tasty treat. So I went to bed almost immediately after..do you know what happens if you have sugar then immediately go to bed?

Well first you end up boring your fiance to tears while he is trying to sleep but you want to vent about work for an hour. After he finally falls asleep mid "uh-huh, that's nice", you eventually drift off to dream land yourself.

But dream land on sugar is filled with evil, evil things. Nightmare after nightmare of people breaking into your apartment and dreams of you crashing your car over and over. Luckily, John got to be the knight in shining armor by defeating the burglar, which was a plus. But it still caused me to wake up every hour or two, making for a very bad night of sleep. My tossing and turning kept John up all night too. Sorry about that, dear.

So when I did wake up this morning, I somehow made my way to Yoga, which woke me up for a minute. Figuratively. I got home, sat on the couch for a bit, browsed my favorite sites and went to work. Well all of my work for the day was done within 45 minutes of arriving. How's that for job security? So for the next few hours, my job was to try to stay awake. I was not alone in my quest. I managed to snap a picture of my co-worker asleep at his desk. It seems he tried to use my technique of closing your eyes and clicking randomly about on your screen so from behind it looks like you are working but really, you're "resting your eyelids". Well it worked for a moment but then he was out.

I soooo wanted a sugar-free Red Bull, that would have solved all my problems. But, alas, only sugar-full Red Bulls were available. I was desperate so I braved the unreasonably tart taste of the 8oz can and was wide awake within a few minutes. I was ready to be a functioning part of society but unfortunately, there was still no work today. I decided to try to communicate with the rest of the world by sending emails and text messages from my desk but it seemed as though the entire world had disappeared.

So now I was starved for work and any social interaction. My boss was asleep at his desk, my co-workers had left for the day and everyone was too busy to respond to my attempts at communication. Poor John sent me an IM and I was so excited to hear from someone and so amped up on Red Bull that I gave him the entire story of the foundation behind the concept of CSS in relation to HTML when all he asked was why a picture wasn't showing up on a website at work.

So that's what has lead up to this post. Icecream before bed time -> nightmares -> bad sleep -> drowsiness -> Red Bull -> extreme energy -> lack of social interaction -> blog.

I realize this is essentially a blog about absolutely nothing, just a timeline of my day here at work. But that's ok. Because I found some entertainment for a minute. Figuratively.

Dirty Word of the Day: DIET

So with the wedding less than five months away there are a lot of things to think about. I found the dress I've always dreamed of and ordered it. It fits perfectly...for now. I recently realized that it is a lot of pressure to stay the same size for 5 months, despite my dad's insistency that I haven't changed sizes since I was 12. But I think it will be tougher than that. Especially when there are so many things to stress over in the coming weeks. 

After reading my sister's blog (www.beingcarly.com), I realized that I didn't want to wait until the last minute to try to lose weight to fit into my dress. So I downloaded a new app on my handy dandy iPhone called 'Lose It!'.  Sounds like it will fit my needs. So I set it up with my information, height, weight, BMI, etc. Well the thing tells my I need to eat less than 1,300 calories a day. 

So I started documenting everything I ate and counting out my calories. Yeah 1,300 calories in a day is a LOT less than I thought it was. Day 1 I squeezed by by the skin of my teeth. I think I was 9 calories under goal. The next day, I was 200 calories under goal by 7 pm. I thought I was doing great..till I remembered it was girls night. Oops. 

So two GIANT pieces of The Pie pepperoni pizza and 3 cheesy pull-aparts later, I think I had reached my calorie intake for the entire week. The next few days, I did ok. Barely made it under goal. By the weekend I was pretty proud. Yeah about that....I went to Wendover. You can't diet on vacation. I'm pretty sure it's a law. So I let go of my diet and ate and drank what I wanted for two 

straight days. By Monday I was ready to go back to my diet. I was determined. I had some Kashi cereal with soy milk for breakfast, a Slim-Fast for a mid morning snack, Lean Cuisine for lunch, and John made salmon and steamed broccoli for dinner. I felt pretty good. 

Actually, let me reiterate. I felt pretty good about the diet. But I personally, felt like crap. All I could think about all day was food. 

"When am I gonna eat next? Shit. 4 hours. What did I bring for lunch? Bah. Lean Cuisine. I'm gonna walk away from that hungrier than I am now. Do I have any snacks? I think there's a dollar in change in my drawer and a vending machine in the break room. Hmm...maybe if i at least walk to the back break room, it will burn off the calories I'll accumulate by eating  Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Oh c'mon Stevie, you know that doesn't add up. Ah screw it, where're those quarters?"

Not only was I totally distracted by my lack of food intake, I was completely impossible to be around. John and I have noticed that when I don't eat, I turn into the meanest person in the world. Be it some sort of hypoglycemia or whatever, it's not a pretty picture. And I had been like this the last week. 

Poor Johnboy. 

So after snapping at my co-worker for the 6th time in an hour he finally asked "hey how's your diet going?" Apparently John is not the only one that notices that I get ornery when I don't eat. I apologized for snapping at him and decided there are more important things than dieting right now. It's not like I need to lose a ton of weight or anything, I just need to maintain my weight. Which I can focus on in a couple of months. I think being a little nicer to the people in my life is worth the money I may inevitably spend on alterations to let out my dress. 

So officially, my big 'Thumbs Up!' to dieting has turned into me sitting on this couch with my computer with a pack of Reese's from the freezer in one hand and a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table. Life is too short for diets. At least until June. Possibly July.  

Downward Dog?

So after my catastrophe with my class schedule this semester (I may post something about that later), I started my second session of classes. This session I started a yoga class. I go three times a week at 7:30 in the frickin' morning. Last session I took an aerobics class with a woman that I often wanted to punch in the face due to her over excitement about fitness and annoying habit of calling me "fatty". 

I dreaded getting out of bed in the mornings for six weeks because I knew I would have to deal with Aerobics-Instructor-Betty (whose actual name is Shannon) and I knew the next day I could honestly convince myself that someone used me as a punching bag. So I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into a dimly let room with soft music playing and a man named Sam (who I think also goes by Wind Spirit) telling me in the calmest voice possible to grab a mat and have a seat. 

I think I was one of maybe three people in the class that has never taken yoga before. Being the first day of the class, I thought he would maybe explain a few positions before we got into it. Things were looking good when all I had to do was sit on the ground and breathe... until he said that we needed to have our knees below our hips. Now I consider myself a pretty athletic person but when it comes to flexibility..uh-uh. I ended up having to sit on a rolled up blanket just to keep my ass above my knee caps. I knew I was in trouble. 

We then started doing some breathing exercises. I thought, "Ok, I've been doing this for 21 years, I think I got the breathing thing down." Just as I felt a little less remedial at this yoga thing, we moved on to the next part: the actual yoga part. We began doing some, apparently traditional, yoga poses. As I said, I have never done yoga before save for the time I was doing drunken yoga on the Wii, which I don't think counts. So when he is telling us to try to transition to these new poses, I'm still 10 minutes back on breathing. When I found myself a little behind, I would overcompensate by forcing myself into the pose as quick as possible, which just ended up making me hurt about every joint imaginable and sent my body flying across the room as I lost my balance each and every time. 

But Wind Spirit just kept on dictating. From child pose to downward dog, to warrior, to farting tree..he just kept on going. The whole time I'm in the back of the studio practically dancing back and forth across the room, watching the other girls to make sure I wasn't making an ass of myself (too late). Finally, it came time to lie down on the mat, arms and legs spread apart and sleep. Ok we weren't really supposed to sleep. We were supposed to lie on the floor and "become aware of our energy". I, instead, lay there reflecting on how many weeks I think it will take before I can do a farting tree with less than 67 one-legged hops. This could be a long semester..

I fake organization like a champ

Coming into this weekend, I knew I needed to get some cleaning done. After a slightly late night on Friday, I was in no condition to clean early on Saturday. I, instead, slept until 2 in the afternoon, finished season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, patroned a new health food restaurant, and found myself becoming part of "the problem" when I barely survived Walmart in search of a new vacuum.

This morning I woke up at 10, ready to clean. Not just pick up things here and there, fully CLEAN my apartment. After doing a light cleaning around the kitchen and living room, I began organizing the computer desk, only to find myself getting highly distracted by past homework assignments and magazines I purchased but never read. After I finished that, I made my way to the hall closet. Once known as a linen closet, over the past 7 months it transformed to the "closet where you put things that have no other place in the apartment". It was to the point that I avoided opening the door for fear of being permanently buried under board games, blankets and viking hats. I cleared everything out of the closet and sorted them into piles titled: need, might need, maybe could need someday, probably don't need, and lastly - why the hell is this in the closet? By the time I had put the closet back together, I was left with my piles. A wee bit tired at this point, I condensed all my piles aside from 'need' into one pile... in the dumpster. 

After a few hours of attempting to organize the corners of my house that have accumulated junk over the past few months, I now find myself hungry, tired, and sitting in the middle of several piles of junk circling my couch. Luckily, I now have several empty corners to fill. Oh yeah, and I have yet to use my shiny new vacuum.

I love organizing.