Our last day in 2016, December 31st!

2016 is coming to an end. It was a good year in all. I went back over the year in photos to put together our yearly calendar for 2017. I'm still trying to figure out how I can get the photos from my phone uploaded and printed with out the use of my laptop. I'm sure in 2017 I'll have figured this all out. It's funny how much you forget about the year that passed by. What we did the last 12 months.
We went on trips to Grand Marais, Duluth, Brainerd, and Sauk Centre. They might have been all in state but it was nice to have a bunch of mini getaways.

My workout goals were a lot different this past year. As a result of my less running, I gained more weight. My eating habits were something I wanted to work on, but never did. I am still pretty happy with my totals for the year. Here's the scratch pad, I totaled up the miles.

Total Miles in 2016
Running = 514.9 miles
Biking = 757.4 miles
Cross country skiing miles = 183

I wanted to do more of biking and skiing then running this past year. I was kind of burnt out of all the miles I put in running.

My running goal for this morning, on the last day of the year, was to run more then my 3 easy miles. I pushed myself to want to run one more loop around our neighborhood for a total miles of 4.39 in 47.42 minutes. It felt good to run that extra distance. I miss the days I could easily run six miles every single day. My feet just hurt too much while running to continue doing that day after day. I do like the mix of biking and skiing when weather permits. I plan to do pretty much the same next year. What I do need to change is my addiction to sugar. I need to work on my weight and get back to eating less to lose some pounds. I have January - June to get some weight off and start toning up more with lifting more weights. My other goal is to do a 5 minute plank by the end of the year.

I didn't total up the days I did my daily exercises. I missed a few days a week here and there but I've been keeping that up just fine. Now, I need to add to that and work towards toning up more and building time to increase my plank times to reach the 5 minute goal .

 How am I spending my last day of 2016?

I did my daily yoga hour, daily planks/weights and painted the trim white around the doors and window.

We will finish painting our front room and entry in 2017. I'm hoping over the weekend. I'll be moving on to the trim in our kitchen and family room. There is only the trim around the doors and a little base trim.  We are keeping the same cranberry color in that area so we'll be re-painting to freshen it up after all the trim is done.

The house projects are slow going but now we are seeing progress. It really brightens up the house with the white trim.

A wonderful Three Day Weekend!

Okay, yet another work schedule change that worked in my favor to have Friday off. I would love more money but its also nice to have a day to get stuff done around the house. Mainly, my painting projects.

 

Instead of finishing up what I already started, I instead began a new paint project. I was tired of looking at our French doors going into our office. So I did some taping around the glass edges and then put on the first coat of primer. It's super ugly right now but after 4 coats of paint, it should look nice. I'm leaving the middle grids natural wood. All our trim in the house will eventually be white. I need to get more trim painting done today! This is all I accomplished on Thursday after working. I ended up napping and watching tv the rest of the day. So much for getting much done!

 

I'm still struggling with my daily planks at two minutes times 2 sets for each bent arms and straight arms. Plus back to 1 minute side planks, 2x's two sets. I might not be making time progress, but I'm keeping up on my daily exercise so I suppose that's not a total fail. 99% of the time, I don't feel like doing my daily exercises because lets face it, its never going to be easy! Its work and work is hard to do most of the time. I do feel better after for just sticking with it and I suppose that's why I don't give up!

Celina joined me running outside this morning. I waited till she was ready to run. We did 1.5 miles around the neighborhood together and then I ran another loop by myself to finish up 3 miles or 32 minutes of cardio for the day. Good enough! Some day I'll get back to wanting to run six easy miles. Right now, I just want to run 30 minutes and be done.

We did get a little light dusting of snow on Thursday but not enough to make a difference in the ski conditions. I really miss cross country skiing and being in the woods. If I could do it year round, that would be great! Some one needs to invent a way to ski year round without snow. Similar to Buckhills fake turf for down hill skiing.

Your probably wondering what conclusion I came to while running yesterday about finding closure with my mom. Pretty much nothing at all. I think no action other then to blog about it for anyone to see is my way of dealing with it. She has 365 days of the year to reach out to me. She needs to apologize for the hurt she has caused and take responsibility for her actions. Simple as that but it won't change the last 10 years. It really hasn't been 10 years. It's been my whole life with my mom and sister. I'm much better off without them in my life and have been for 10 years. That's what running has taught me! I might think I need an apology, which I'm sure will never happen. So like Michelle Obama said, "when they go low, you go HIGH!" and I'm adding " and say Goodbye!"

Thursday Random thoughts and things to do!

 

I need to finish up a few home projects before the year ends. I might not get them all done, but its a start in the right direction.

#1. Finish up my bedroom painting and installing the new wide white base trim.

You  can see that I don't have much more green paint to cover up. We do have all the trim just waiting to be installed in the master bedroom. I need to put back my room before the year ends and have it all 100% finished! I'm positive I can finish the painting up, since its on my todo list for the day. Steve has to do the trim cutting and installing so it's just a matter if he has time to do this project.

#2. Daily planks. I tried and failed to keep doing a 4 minute plank. I'm back down to 2 minutes and am struggling with that. I tried to do too much at once going from 2 minutes to 4 minutes, then backing down to 3 minutes and now my arms are shot. It is so true, increase little by little to make big changes, going all in, you'll just crash and burn. I'm feeling the burn! Once my arms get back to normal, I plan to just increase my planks by 15 seconds each set. It will be a year long process of working up to 3 or 4 minutes total. My actual goal is to hold a plank for 5 minutes. Back when I was getting my Personal training certificate a woman my age, competed against a young 20 year old guy and was able to out last him in a plank for 5 minutes! That's impressive. At the time, I could only hold a 30 second plank and I really struggled with that.

In 32 days we will have had Zoey in our house for one year. It's her Got-ya day. It was the best decision of 2016!

 The holiday continues, Last night we went to dinner with Steve's parents last night. It was a thank you for hosting Tim's birthday. I decorated, planned games and Steve cooked the food. They wanted to take us out for a nice meal. since we did all the work at.
 This is the 2nd year in a row we've all gone to watch a Star Wars Movie together.

 

I'm really wanting a fresh six inches of new snow. We had rain, so all the snow is ice. That is not good for cross country skiing. I'm back to running. Well, I ran a quick 1.5 miles on Wednesday after working 3 hours and then having lunch. My stomach needed food but probably not that much before a run. I was happy I just got out and ran. I'll take the 1.5 miles because it's better then skipping it.

 I always assume that its going to be super cold and I'll freeze. Guess by the looks of me running in a tank top, that freezing part when out the window!

I had to sit outside after my run for a few minutes to cool off. It was that nice, in the 20's with a cool breeze.

My plan was to work for a few hours today and have off on Friday. That's not going to happen. I had a schedule change. So now I'm working around 10am today and will work tomorrow for an hour too. Oh well, that's fine because now it give me plenty of time to stall before running and then going to work. I use to wake up, and go workout asap. I was always worried about not doing my workout if it didn't happen right away. Well, I was kind of right on that. I'm still doing my workouts but just not as much. I'm fighting being tired all the time. I've been trying to sleep in more, go to bed around 10 and that's with afternoon naps. I just never feel rested. Something I need to work on in 2017

Where do I start with this picture? I have not spoken, emailed or texted my mom in 10 years. She wrote a email to me back in 2007 asking me to "Let her go". 

To explain my part, because every side there is my side, her side and the truth. Some where in there is the real reason we have not spoken in years. I'm not sure why she felt the need to take such drastic action and not want me or her grand kids in her life any more. I'm not sure what kind of mother would do that to her child? That would be my mom. I just remember that I wanted answers. I wanted her to tell me she was capable of making things fair and equal between myself and my sister. Instead my message got lost. She thought I was out for all her money. I'm not sure how that even transpired. Because that was never my intention. I just wanted a honest relationship with my mom. I needed her to be fair to me. What I got instead was her giving up on our relationship. I probably pushed too hard. As you can see the result was for her to have enough of me forever. I honored her wishes. I never contacted her again over the last 10 years. Not sure why now, she would "Love to see us all."? I haven't been welcome in her life since that email to let her go. Why now? I don't know who she is. I don't trust her. That's an awful thing to say about your own mom. I was so hurt and remain very hurt over her actions. What I do know is that I need closure. I'm not sure what that looks like. I'm not sure I'm ready for contact. I won't feel guilty for not reaching out either. I have to decide whats best for me. I'm afraid, that nothing good would ever come out of speaking with her. I don't want a superficial relationship where we don't discuss the issue. I have no need for that in my life. I'm happy, I love my own family and I have grown from this experience. I suppose, I will always be looking for a apology. I have yet to receive that. Nor would it make a difference at this point. My best advice for me.. go run, clear my mind and think. I come up with my best solutions when I run. That's exactly what I'm going to do.. run it out! It sure has helped me cope with my mom's rejection of me. I always feel better after I think on it while running. I might be sad, mad during the process but I can run and that makes those feeling go away. I come up with a good solution and that's aways to do what's best for me. Keep running forward and don't look back!

More moving and less couch time.

I'm not saying it was a total fail but a work in progress. I just assumed since I could hold a 4 minute plank on Christmas that I could continue doing that every day. It seemed to make a lot more sense to just do it all at once then take my sweet time and do two minutes then rest for a long time and do another two minutes. My morning exercises were taking longer and longer to just get them done. I kept telling myself, at least I'm still doing them most days of the week. With next years plank challenge in mind, I really want to try working my way up to doing a daily 4 minute plank both straight arms and bent arms, then doing 2 minutes each side, right and left planks, instead of a minute each with a rest in between. I just need to let my arms catch up with my plank goals. As I found this out this morning. I could only hold my bent arm plank for 3 minutes and I was back to 2 minutes for my straight arm planks. I still did the total minutes of planks but just not how I wanted. Yesterday, I was able to do it all quick with my goal times. I'll just have to keep trying every day and see what I can accomplish this next year.

I'm also being super lazy about my morning cardio. I'm making far too many excuses to not run in the cold mornings. If I can ski in the afternoon, I make up for it but days where I can't ski, I really need to run and not skip out. Other bloggers are doing a 30 day running streak. You have to run at least one mile a day. You can start anytime so you don't have to wait for a Monday, beginning of the month or the new year to get started.  I am thinking that this would be a good running challenge just to get out every day with Zoey for one mile. She need to run or walk and I haven't been taking her lately.

She has her stink eye look  mastered when I go out for a run with out her.

Last night we all got together for the 3rd night in a row to celebrate Tim's birthday. He ordered a cheesecake from New York just for his birthday cake. The cake light and fluffy, but still very rich tasting.

He opened gifts. We went in on getting him a "Alexia". Now I want one too for our house! He liked the gift so that was good.

Tim requested prime rib for dinner. I made my stuffed pasta shells too for dinner and made some popovers with honey butter.

We had some games to play after dinner, the Bamboozled jelly bean game, Games for humanity and the white elephant gifts I wrapped up  for the dice game. I think we all had fun with the games.

 

All that celebrating the holidays has come to an end. It's back to work for me today. I have a short three day work week so it's really not too bad. I'm just looking forward to Thursday when I'm done working at noon for the week!

Our Christmas 2016

Here's a little Christmas 2016 recap!

For starters, I might need my eyes check since I have a lot of blurry photos.

 I'm going to jump around all over to recap our Christmas. We kicked off the holiday with going out to dinner with friends on Friday night. We met up at the MOA, Firelake Grill for a few happy hour drinks.

It was off to dinner at another restaurant, The Twin City Grill in the MOA. We had to wait a few minutes while the restaurant got our table ready for our party of eight. Mollie and I went into Bed Bath and Beyond to test out all the body spray including the ones with glitter. We were laughing and straying each other with every single tester bottle. We were quite strong smelling when we walked out of that place.

After bowling we went up to the 4th floor at the mall and check out the new Virtual Reality game place that just opened. Since we all were not into any of the games or the go-carts, we decided on just regular bowling. Lets just say, I took last place. I am not a bowler!

 I did my usual Christmas baking the day before. I made some chocolate bread, caramel rolls and raspberry -cream cheese coffee cake. I had plans to make a quiche the morning of Christmas. Since we were up past 1am the Christmas Eve, and were up late the night before, I went back to sleep from 8am to 10:30am. I woke up just before we had to leave to Steve's parents house for brunch on Christmas morning.

 

I forgot all about Christmas Eve! We all met up at Tim's house. We've been going there for years now and it's nice to spend time at everyone house.

The kids opened their gifts from Tim. We all ate and played that money dollar game, which was a huge success!

 Logan won the dollar game and came away with $33 dollars!

The dollar game winner!

Christmas morning we ate brunch at Steve's parents house. The kids once again opened their gifts.

Christmas Day Dinner was at our house. Every took a short break between brunch and dinner before coming over to our house.

Celina and Logan opened their stockings early in the morning on Christmas day.

Evan opening his stocking before dinner.

Our Christmas cream puff dessert. Kendra and Logan did the fancy sugar that was spun into a nest in the middle.

 The gift exchange for all

The one exercise I did over the holiday was a 4 minute plank. Celina, Logan, Paul and I all competed to see who could hold the longest plank. Celina was the winner with a 4 minute and 10 seconds. I gave up after 4 minutes and Logan and Paul both quit around 1 minute and 30 seconds.

Tim and Logan kicked off the superman challenge by holding it for a minute.

I've now decided this should be an every year challenge. I have some work to do for next years challenge. I started off this morning by doing a 4 minute plank bent arms, followed by 3 minute straight arm plank. I just decided to combine the plank times all together instead of splitting it up. Side planks I held for two minutes each side. I just skipped out on one minute when doing my straight arm plank. I'll get there over the year.