Daisy Do No Coffee

Hi guys! When I got my I-don’t-know-how-manyth cup of coffee from the machine at work this week, I knew what my next focus of the month should be. I really have to cut back on coffee intake on work days. First of all, because too much coffee is just not good for you and second because that coffee is just plain groce. It’s only doable because I drink it with milk powder and artificial sweeter (I know, that’s even worse for me).

My problem is that I just seem to need the caffeine kick it gives me, because I just find myself in a dip somewhere during the morning and again in the afternoon. Another problem is that once I start on the coffee I don’t switch back to tea or water. This easily results in over 5 cups a day..and in an upset stomach.

Now, I do not want to cut coffee out of my life entirely, but it should be reduced. But I would be happy if I manage to drink only 2 cups a day and maybe even reduce to 1.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you the new focus of the month:

Daisy Do No Coffee!

 

Image edited from the original found here

The rule is: max 2 cups of coffee a day, but preferably only 1.

Here is how I am trying to make this work:

- Go to bed in time. No being sleep deprived should help a lot. Try to get 7.5 hours a night and take powernaps after work if needed.
- Have good alternatives available: put a bottle of water on my desk, have my favorite tea flavors available
- Tell my roommates of the challenge
- If I stick to the rule, I can buy one of those delicious coffees from the coffee bar downstairs on Friday afternoon.

In other news, I went partying with a bunch of girls Friday night and am still very tired. I am really getting old…not because I am still tired because I have always had that since I started going out to bars, but because everyone in those bars is so young!
Anyway, to start of the focus of the month well…and not fail the first day already…I am going to bed now!

Good night everybody!

How much coffee do you drink each day? Do you consider that too much?

Daisy Do Zen: Evaluation

Somewhere in December I made up the Daisy Do focus of the month series. Let’s review the first focus: Daisy Do Zen. I know it has been a long month, but with the holidays and me being all lazy and all (and busy, but I don’t consider that an excuse: you have to make time for stuff), it just took me a little longer to evaluate how it went.

In short, I liked yoga but was not so much into meditation. When I tried to meditate I either got distracted and ended up daydreaming or I fell asleep. So, unless meditation is the same as daydreaming it did not really work. But… there is a variant that does work and that is when I practice yoga or sometimes when I am stretching after working out. My mind does go kind of blank at those times and I am just focusing on how my body feels and being in the present. So, I guess that meditation and yoga are sort of the same thing for me.

I enjoyed doing yoga. It relaxes me and I like what it does for my flexibility. I still think it is pretty hard to do and I am really bad at it, as you can judge by my version of the downward dog here:

 

I do have a spectator though hahaha!

I really do no like that pose at all! It comes back way too often during yoga sessions and it hurts my arms. However, I think that the injury in my shoulders that I was developing didn’t really help with that either. During my last sessions I exchanged the downward dogs for child’s pose but with my arms next to my legs. I really like that position! I also like sun salutations and warrior pose.

In conclusion, I am going to keep practicing yoga. I think it is a great addition to my overall work out schedule. Some days I don’t feel like an intense cardio class or lifting weights. Or I shouldn’t do any of those to prevent overtraining. But getting a nice relaxing stretch is something I can do those days…as you can see I am not really into the poweryoga stuff yet.

I am currently not doing yoga, to protect my shoulders until I now what is wrong exactly and what helps curing it and what does not. But as soon as it gets better I will pick it up again. I hope to show you a better downward facing dog in the future!

Stay tuned to see what my new Focus of the month will be…

Exercise stats

I love having overviews of things: making tables, calculating averages etc. Yes, I know…I am a nerd…as most bloggers, lol!

I used to track my workout on Breaking the Tape, but I changed to a Google spreadsheet this year, because Breaking the Tape is mainly convenient for running, biking and other sports that have a mileage.  But you can’t do much with it when you do other sports. I am still working on showing my workouts on this blog again.

But anyway, here are some stats of my workouts from the end of July until December 31th 2009:

• I cycled 50k – that could me a lot more…
• I walked 25k – … let’s not compare that to 2008 when I trained for an event and walked about 500k plus 200k for the event itself.
• I ran 130k – Go me! I am so proud of that! I ran 32 times, which is amazing because I have never run in my entire life!

In total, I did 90 workouts in 5 months, which is about 1 workout every other day! I spent quite some time in the gym:

• 4 hours of swimming – I picked up swimming with a friend from college. We’re not swimming fast, but it is fun.
• 3 spinning classes – fell off the spinning wagon, I guess I got a bit bored with that class, and there were so many other fun things:
• 12 hours of Zumba – I love it!
• 17 hours of Body Combat – my new addiction
• 13 hours of Body Pump – I like being a girl with some strength.

I am looking forward to see how I do in the next months. I have to be a bit careful, because I think my new addiction has screwed up my shoulders a bit. I will have to take it easy a bit for a couple of weeks to see if they heal by themselves.

I’ll be back soon with a full recap of my focus of the month!

Ten for 2010

 

It’s that time of the year again: the last days of a year where people come op with resolutions they intend but for the most part won’t keep. Now, I am certainly not against resolutions, even New Year’s resolutions. I am even one of those persons who will admit that she likes them haha! However, I don’t like goals that are not very specific and do not have a realistic plan on how to accomplish them. 

Foto found here 

So let’s review this year. Last year I wrote down some goals for 2009. How did I do?

• Take time for myself : Check. There is still a lot of room for improvement but I am getting better at it and feeling less guilty if I do nothing for a day. I also started to work out a lot more which is great me-time and excellent for stress release.
• Work on relationship with the Boyfriend : Check. You can not have a relationship if you don’t work for it. Even though we are crazy about each other, our personalities sometimes clash a lot, haha! But on the other side, we can have a lot of fun together too. The Boyfriend works regular day shifts now, which is a major improvement because boy, did I hate those night shifts, we hardly saw each other! We only had to get used to him having weekend on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, because those are working days for me. But we introduced date night again: every week we go and spend some quality time and do stuff that dating couples do. And I also have half a day off, so I planned it on a Wednesday.
• Win lottery because we have tickets: We didn’t…of course. But the Boyfriend always wants to play the End-of-the-year- lottery, so this year we have tickets again. The grand prize is 27.5 million euro, that is a lot of money!

Now let’s have a look at my list for next year. Since it is 2010 I wrote down 10 things that I want to do, start or improve in the next year.

1. Finish my thesis, while keeping my sanity that is. This will be my main goal throughout the year. It’s nice to have 10 things on your list, but you can only have 1 major goal, or nothing will come of anything. My contract ends on Dec 31th 2010, and if I don’t have it finished by then I am looking at some lovely volunteer work if I want my PhD degree. I already found a source of support to show me that I am not the only one here: www.phdcomics.com . But I am happy that my situation is far better than in some other countries. At least it is a paid job and it is more like you have 4 years to focus completely on your own project with some things on the side, instead of being your Professor’s slave.
2. Take it easy. Since I am going to be working hard, I want to take it easy in the rest of my life. This means making sure to get enough sleep and not trying to fit too many things in one day. Avoid stress (meditation, yoga?) and have fun! (hobbies, anyone?)
3. Move to a new house: we put the apartment up for sale about a month ago. We want to move to a nice house, with a garden in a quiet neighborhood. Because of point 1 and 2 we will carefully pick the house once we have sold our apartment. For example, we don’t want a house that needs major renovations right away.
4. Become a blood donor: Well, actually I already did this! Last week I signed up because I wanted to do this in the new year, but they called me really soon after, so yesterday was my first donation! I was really scared that I was going to faint. I am not scared of needles or blood, I just tend to get lightheaded they take blood, even if it’s just a few tubes. I was a donor 7 years ago and almost fainted during my first donation (after about 100 ml) and it took me quite a while before i felt well enough to leave the place. But yesterday everything went just fine! The nurse was really nice and chatted with me to distract me a bit. I felt kind of weak for the first couple of hours, but that was it!
5. The spiritual part of my life deserves some attention. I am going to spend some time meditation and musing, and getting more in touch with my chi. Don’t laugh.
6. Race. I want to run several races next year. There are a couple in May and September which I really want to do. But I hope to run more. I will focus on 5k’s, but I might, just might, do a 10k before the end of the year.
7. Read: I love to read, but do not spend enough time doing so. I intend to read for 15-30 min each night in bed before going to sleep to get into the habit of reading again.
8. Be social. Especially when I am busy and stressed I tend to hide in my home. This year I want to be better at maintaining contact with family and friends. I already wrote about this more specifically in this post.
9. Cut back on coffee. I made a lot of improvements in my health this year. But one thing I would like to change is to drink less coffee at work. I intend to take some herbal tea with me to work. What if I get sleepy? See point 2.
10. Nothing, nada. The neurotic obsessive compulsive person inside my head LOVES 10 for 2010. To teach that person a lesson I will leave this spot open. Another reason is that these are more than enough goals for me for now. I wanted to take it easy, remember? I can fill it up later this year if I feel it’s needed.
    But frankly, I am just out of ideas right now.

Tell me all about your resolutions!

Have a great New Year’s eve! I will be back next year.

Snow fever

Why, hello there!

Last sunday we had a lot of snow! It had been snowing the whole day and by the end of the afternoon it finally stopped. So we went outside to the park, just before dark.

Look, how beautiful:

 

We were all excited and played like kids, lol.

 

 

Monday I had to get through all of that snow to get to work, it was a little less fun then. I got stuck in the parking lot when I wanted to leave work. The whole country was affected: those who could, stayed at home, a gazillion accidents happened, there were hardly any trains and no buses. We Dutch people are so not used to this! A few days before there was some snow too, but in the afternoon so everybody did get out but then had to get back: HUGE traffic jams!

 

 

Christmas eve and First Christmas Day

Good afternoon! How is everybody doing? Still feeling stuffed and with a hangover or not so bad?

We had a great time so far. I spent the day of Christmas even veggin’ out on the couch with the cats, it was wonderful! After I submitted my paper for work I was officially free! I really didn’t feel like doing anything so I just stayed on the couch with my laptop, reading e-mails, blogs and did some random surfing, drinking loads of hot tea. At the same time I watched tv: Two guys and a girl, the Oprah. Oprah was really cool, she asked people of different countries (Denmark, Japan, Brazil, etc) why they are so happy. I liked Denmark most because they do not seem very career-oriented and focus on living a simple life enjoying the people around you. It was a real feel good show, because Oprah only showed the positive side of each country. She didn’t explain that the reason why everybody is riding a bike in Denmark, is because cars are not affordable. And even though important things like education and health care are free, other things are really expensive. Still, it seamed a really nice country I would like to visit. After that I watched a x-mas movie with Whoopie Goldberg and then the Boyfriend came home. He then went to get take out, because in all my laziness I forgot to get the meat from the freezer so I couldn’t make meatballs, lol. We spent the rest of the night watching more cheesy x-mas movies.

I also go my present from the Boyfriend’s boss! It was a huge bottle of perfume, like last year! I immediately put some on my hand to smell it. After the first alcohol-smell evaporated I smelled…..nothing!! several trial later we both still smelled nothing. It turned out that the bottle was a dummy: stores use it for display and it does not contain the perfume, lol. I think the Boyfriend’s boss got a ‘deal’ somewhere haha. The Boyfriend is going to ask his colleagues if they had the same thing. We still don’t know what to do yet. It’s not like I want it replaced because it’s pretty much a useless gift, but I also think that if he was scammed, he should know. What would you do?

Christmas morning we started off with a nice HUGE breakfast and….a white Christmas! It seriously started snowing when we woke up. Everything was still white from the snow we had this week, so it didn’t really matter that soon that snow turned into rain. After breakfast we went to the cemetery to visit the grave of the Boyfriend’s grandma. Even though most of the snow is gone already, the cemetery was still covered in 20cm of snow. Because of that, and because we hadn’t been there for a while, we had trouble locating the grave and spent over half an hour searching and getting soaked in rain and snow. But it was very beautiful there:

 

Do you agree, or just think I am crazy now, for posting a picture of a graveyard?

Then we headed back home, very cold and soaked. So we decided to make the hot chocolate from the box of goodies I got from my employer ( I don’t know about you, but here in Holland it is normal that every employee gets something for Christmas, traditionally it is a box with different food items, but it can also be a themed box, like last year we got towels and slippers or a breakfast theme including cups and plates etc. This year I had a box filled with things for hot chocolate 2 cups and a serving-thing, a bottle of chocolate, whipped cream, and cookies and chocolate to go with the hot coco):

We also skyped with my in-laws in Florida for a while. They were just having breakfast, so we toasted with juice (for them) and wine (for us, lol). Then we made some snacks and watched Pride and Prejudice. I have had that movie forever, and today the Boyfriend finally agreed to watch it with me.

Then we turned on some new random x-mas movie and started dinner in the mean time. Our entree was tomato-soup with mascarpone…from a bag haha. We really did not want to make things harder than necessary this year. The soup was really good and also had no artificial flavors etc, yummie! We had the soup while watching tv on the couch, how bad is that?
After that we went on to prepare the main course: roast beef with potatoes, my fav stir fry vegetable mix and italian salad.

Wow, my face looks weird in this picture! The Boyfriend was in charge of cutting the meat….of course hahaha.

The roast beef was real easy too. As you can see, it came marinated and ready in an aluminum case, so all we had to do was pop it into the oven and wait until the little thingy popped up out of the meat when it was done. The potatoes were pre-boiled so baking the was easy. The salad came with all the ingredient and dressing in a package and the stir fry was pre-cut too. Talking about an effortless dinner ha!

Desert was Viennetta ice-cake, yum! We had some tea while watching Home Alone (I know…) and digesting a bit. Wow, I felt pretty full, but it could have been worse. Then we went on to watch the rest of Home Alone in bed.

All together, it was a fun, relaxed First Christmas Day. No stress, just enjoy some time together. In case you are wondering: no we did not have any presents, because we already exchanged gifts at ‘Sinterklaas’, another Holiday on the 5th of December. I got my very own heart rate monitor then!

Today is Second Christmas Day. The Boyfriend is working right now and I am not really doing much today. The sun is shining so I might go out for a walk/run this afternoon. Tomorrow I have run planned a few other girls, at leas if the weather is ok. In the evening we will go over to my parents to celebrate Christmas.

Zen in progress and the Christmas spirit

Hey guys/girls! How is everything going? Are you busy preparing for Christmas, or already celebrating Christmas eve? We don’t have very special plans this year. In Holland we don’t really celebrate Christmas eve. When I still lived at home, my mom used to take us to the late night Church mass, but that was about it. The Boyfriend is having some drinks at work with his co-workers and will be coming home soon. I can’t wait, because his boss not only got him a gift, but me too! :D Last year I got a huge bottle of perfume, so let’s see…. Tomorrow the Boyfriend has a day off and we are going to spend the day being cozy and romantic together: watch a movie, go on a walk, play a game and have some good food. Boxing day, which is a real holiday here too, he will be off to work and I will be all by my lonesome self haha. To be honest, I really don’t care. First of all, because I don’t understand why there have to be 2 Christmas days. Really, we call it First Christmas day and Second Christmas day. We do the same with Easter and Pentecost, hilarious! Buy you won’t hear me complain because it means more days off! Second, because on Third Christmas day (made that up, but most people don’t even look surprised if I say it) we will get together with my family for dinner. So a day of rest and normal eating in between will be good.

I am excited about the Holidays. Last year we prepared a 6-course dinner for my family. It was fun, but I really don’t feel like doing that again. We are having a gourmet dinner (cook your own food while chatting away) so the main work is in doing the dishes. Also, my family is not demanding at all when it comes to Christmas. We don’t even get together until after Christmas because that way my sister does not have to race around like a crazy person between her in-laws and us. My in-laws live in Florida, that makes things easier too. But I would really like spending Christmas with my grandma’s too. Hmm, maybe I will visit them on Boxing day, if they don’t have other plans.

*

On another note: I thought it would be nice to report on my progress in the Daisy Do Zen project. The meditation part is not going so well yet. I only did one grounding session for a few minutes. Well, maybe it will be better during my vacation.

With yoga I am doing much better. Because I have very little experience with yoga I thought it would be best to search for videos to start with instead of pose guides. I did some power yoga in college, but I never really learned the poses well. So after some searching I did my first video, a beginner video from www.yogajournal.com

My experience? Oh. My. God. I. Am. So. Stiff! Really, I am so not agile and flexible and my muscles had a hard time doing the stretching. Downward dog? I am sure what I did, didn’t even look close to something like that! I really should do this more often,. I guess the fun will come when you know what you are doing.

So I did another yoga session a few days later. I really wanted to go running, but I couldn’t with all the snow and frozen roads outside. So I did another video and I must admit that I liked it better the second time, even though I still really suck at it.
But I am just going to keep up with this, at least for the whole month.

*

I am off to watch a Christmas movie with the Boyfriend now.

Have a great Christmas!!!