4 Things

I’m pretty sure you’ve all seen this survey floating around the blog world, but given it’s probably been over a year since I’ve done a survey, let’s go for it! Thanks to Elsie for tagging me!

Four Names That People Call Me (Other Than My Real Name):

1. Ror

2. Astott

3. Blonde-daughter-thingy (shout out to my dad who can’t keep his kids straight for that one)

4. A-rawr-a

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our Jobs I’ve Had:

1. Indoor cycling instructor

2. Worked in a lab

3. Cat sitting

4. Analyst for USDA

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Four Movies I Have Watched More Than Once:

1. Fed Up (Love this!)

2. Any Christmas movie-my favorite is The Year Without a Santa Claus

3. Twilight (yes, I am embarrassed about this)

4. I clearly don’t like to rematch movies-I can’t think of any others!

Four Books I’d Recommend: 

1. Gone Girl-I feel like everyone has been recommending this! I FINALLY saw the movie! It was good but I thought the book was better and overall more intense. Way more details! It was also weird because I listened to the audiobook while running around DC, so certain scenes brought back memories of specific trails where I was when certain things happened! This is where I was when the book ended:

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2. The Price of Inheritance by Karin Tanabe. <-shameless plug for my DC friend!

3. Murder on the Orient Express-Agatha Christie (I love mysteries!)

4. The Good Girl-Mary Kubica (This is my current audiobook, so not sure how it ends but it seems pretty good so far!)

Four Places I’ve Lived:

1. Belmont, CA

2. Washington DC

3. Stanford, CA

4. Yeahhh, I’m super lame and that’s it!

Four Places I Have Been:

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1. Hawaii

2. Belgium

3. Florida

4. Las Vegas (Only for softball though-go figure)

Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now

1. DC! I miss it so much!

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2. Napa-going there later this week after all!

3. Somewhere with snow (Although I probably wouldn’t last long there…)

4. Somewhere with a really legit fall!

Four Things I Don’t Eat:

1. Red meat

2. Weird fish (It scares me!)

3. Nuts (Although I accidentally had an almond in a salad the other day and now I have hives….oops)

4. Sweet coffee (I’m weird, I know, but I can’t stand it!)

Four Of My Favorite Foods:

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1. Avocados

2. Ice cream (but only super high quality)

3. Quickbreads (think pumpkin and banana bread)

4. Roasted carrots

Four TV Shows That I Watch (or have watched):

1. Scandal

2. Suits

3. Friends (I watched all 10 seasons in 3 weeks when I was really sick)

4. Elementary

Four Things I Am Looking Forward To This Year:

1. Figuring my life out and starting new things

2. Teaching spin

3. Being an upperclassman/senior (CRAZY)

4. Some type of cool summer internship somewhere interesting (which has definitely not been looked into yet)

Four Things I’m Saying: 

1. That makes no sense. //in class, complaining about something in general, or sympathizing

2. Literally //I swear I always use it correctly!

3. Meh //usually when texting

4. Ugh //Wow, these all sound so positive don’t they? I’m clearly a bucket of sunshine. //”Clearly” would be #5

Four People I’m Tagging To Do This Next:

1. Skylar

2. Sean

3. Ashley

4. Cailee

 

 

This Weekend

Happy Monday! Who is ready for Thanksgiving? I know I am! I’m going to pick up my Turkey Trot race packet today! Woo!

How about a little weekend recap?

My Friday started off with a track workout and a free cappuccino.

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Not a bad start!

After a full day of classes, I packed up and headed home for the week. From there, I threw on my school colors and headed to our rival school for the night. I have a ton of friends that go to Cal, and this was Big Game week-our rival football game! As you can imagine, I was pretty popular rocking my red on the streets of Berkeley the night before Big Game.

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Our night began with a pizza dinner from Sliver, one of the many gourmet pizza places in the area. We then went and saw Mockingjay. I actually liked it a lot more than I was expecting. I don’t remember liking the book much but the movie was good! And I thought they split it off at a good point.

After the movie, we chatted and then watched Pitch Perfect, which I had never seen.

Luckily, we managed to sleep through all the rain expected and wake up the next morning to a partly sunny day. First stop was brunch, where I got a chicken and avocado omelet.

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From there, we went to a restaurant to watch the football game from. Let’s just say I was definitely the happiest person there. WE WON!

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At halftime, we stepped out to grab froyo from my friend’s favorite place. It was super thick and delicious. I got pumpkin and chocolate, with cookie dough!

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After the game, I headed home to hang out with these guys:

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Sunday morning began with a 6 miler along one of my favorite trails.

(Recycled pic)

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Followed by lunch at the Whole Foods hot bar.

My lunch of choice was macaroni and cheese with butternut squash, plus some assorted salads.

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For dinner, I shockingly met up with my sister. This is shocking because she is so busy and I never see her! We went to a Russian restaurant, and I got some delicious mushroom dumplings. They were served with onions and a sour cream type of sauce! So good!

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This weekend was such a fun way to kick off Thanksgiving break! There was one casualty though.

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My shoes had a small rip in them before I left for Berkeley, and I figured it wouldn’t be an issue. It quickly became worse  (than the picture) and let’s just say I was lucky my toes weren’t sticking out, given about half the shoe is disconnected to the soul. Oops…

What did you do this weekend?

SO CLOSE

Happy week before Thanksgiving! I officially have 1.5 days of classes before I get to return home! So what’s new?

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The view around campus. Who says California doesn’t have fall?

Yesterday morning began with the typical Wednesday 6 mile run. My feet felt surprisingly good-no clue why!

Post run was my typical dining hall breakfast of a yogurt bowl, but also some veggies. I love when they have them at breakfast!

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After classes, I stopped by a cafe and grabbed a salad.

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It ended up being pretty wimpy. No match for my runger! I went back for a blueberry bran muffin-perfect!

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And dinner was a dining hall salad with hummus and chicken, rice, and carrots.

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For dessert-the return of pumpkin froyo! I’ve been waiting all year for this! On top of some bread pudding. A great end to the day!

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And now I’m back to programming! I have one assignment between me and these guys:

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How excited are you for Thanksgiving?

Throwback-This Day Last Year

Guess what guys? My blogiversary is coming up!I’m not sure how many of you were around here a year ago, but I did a little “12 Days of Christmas” thing to kick it off. I’m going to do the same thing this year, with the same themes for each day! So if you’ve seen the “12 Days of Christmas” tab on my blog, this is why! That means a lot of prep for me over Thanksgiving…oh the struggle of having my blogiversary be during finals week…yeahh I was definitely not procrastinating or anything! In honor of this, I thought I’d do a little throwback post. This date, a year ago. Seriously though, the parallels are insane between this date last year and today. I went for a “longish” run this morning and it was supposed to be my first rainy run….but it held off. It’s supposed to rain today but so far it has held off-I’m even wearing the same jacket! Crazy. Plus, I’m doing a practice spin class tonight after classes. Go figure. 

Happy Wednesday! It’s WIAW-which means you guys get to see a ton of food! Thanks Jenn!

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I just got back from an a cappella concert-it’s Big Game week, which means we are playing our rival school. Tonight was “Big Sing,” so there were groups from both my school and our rival singing and basically bashing each other the whole time. It was all in good fun, but a mention of a certain loss to USC…too soon. That one hurt. I also couldn’t help but laugh when they sang about grade inflation at my school-in science majors, grade inflation most definitely doesn’t exist.

But back to food! Here are a few things from yesterday.

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A snack plate-I finally tried cinnamon laughing cow, and I’m in love! It’s not super sweet, which was a nice surprise! Super delicious on apple chips, just saying.

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A leftover cheese souffle (amazing) and a salad with goat cheese and fig balsamic dressing, also amazing.

This morning, my soggy run turned into sunshine when I awake to 0% chance of rain (it had been 80% for the morning). I did my long run for the week-8 miles. Of course, “long run” is kind of an interesting description, given I did 16 a few weeks ago…

I don’t normally eat much before workouts, but this time since it was a longer run, I chowed down on this bar.

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The run went pretty well-I didn’t bring my Garmin. And of course, a cappuccino was necessary afterwards.

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This was ah-mazing. It probably helped that I’ve had sub-par cappuccinos as of late-Starbucks is just no where near the same.

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The obsession continues.

So…I was concerned I wasn’t eating enough vegetables. Which is true. So I packed an insane amount of asparagus for lunch. I threw every seasoning I had on there-garlic (from a jar), nutritional yeast, veggie seasoning, salt and pepper-it was wonderful. The only thing was I could smell the garlic in my backpack through like three bags…

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And since it’s WIAW, I even packed a plate. And eating asparagus out of a bag? That’s weird even for me.

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Some dates from my 2 lb container. <3

My conclusion from today was that I clearly have not been eating enough veggies. I felt AMAZING all afternoon-I just had so much energy! I’m glad I still have some asparagus leftover for tomorrow! I think veggies at lunch are a lot more appealing for me when they’re cooked.

As I was eating lunch, the skies finally started falling. So grateful I packed a raincoat!

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And in case you’re wondering, yes it is really hard to see with this on.

The best part about eating tons of veggies was I didn’t crave everything under the sun when I returned after class. I grabbed a quick snack before heading to the gym.

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I did 3×8 minutes on the rowing machine (trying to gain back that extra fitness!) before heading to a spin class. During class, I was thinking-when you get in better shape, it’s not that your muscles burn less when you workout. Partly you can just breathe better, but partly I think it’s an increased pain tolerance. That was my experience with rowing at least, and I’m starting to feel that way again now with spin. If I can get into super awesome shape, it would really benefit me as a spin teacher because I would have some hope of talking to my class without gasping for air. On that note-I am officially certified! I passed the online test, so now I just have to get hired! (Although I want to get CPR certified as well.)

I decided to go to the dining hall after spin.

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Grilled chicken, salad, a stuffed tomato, and beets. I pretended the beets were french fried and dipped them in ketchup. It didn’t exactly work-I’m not a beet person.

They had a cooking demonstration going on with little samplers as well.

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The cup has ginger carrot soup. It was AMAZING. Super creamy and smooth, with maybe a hint of coconut? SO good. I also tried pop rock chocolate.

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It was interesting. The pops were super strong!

I also had this little concoction:

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Dark chocolate cocoa powder. Banana. Heat. Mash. Amazing. I topped it with coconut cream. To be honest, I’m not a fan of coconut cream. It’s a little too rich for me!

And also, I have to share with you guys this toy we played with in my Physics lab today. I want one so. badly.

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(Source)

And now I’m off to do homework and decide if I should do a short but soggy track workout tomorrow before lifting…I love the rain…when I’m inside.

Have a great day!

Favorite Thanksgiving food?

The place we normally go has incredible butternut squash soup, served with creme fraiche. I’m sad we’re not going there this year just for that reason!

Skipping Burpees

Do you ever have one of those days when you just feel like you killed your workouts?

That was yesterday for me. I’m loving these afternoon treadmill runs!

I did my heavy squats, and then I knocked out a treadmill speedy run. I started with 2 miles at an 8:00 pace. This is big for me, since I haven’t run fast much lately! I’m hoping to slowly increase this distance-honestly it’s harder mentally than physically!  So maybe if I do that I’ll have some hope of being prepared for the turkey trot? I followed those 2 miles with 5 intervals-2:00 @ 7:30, 2 min walking. I covered 4 miles total. It felt amazing. After all that running though, I made sure to come back and ice my foot right away! I’m pretty sure my feet like the extra cushion of the treadmill.

In terms of food, yesterday was pretty clean cut.

Breakfast part 1: cranberry orange bread (so good!!).

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Breakfast part 2:

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Lunch: Leftover Goat Cheese Souffle+ roasted carrots and a persimmon.

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Snack immediately post run: coconut covered date roll.

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After my workout, I was pretty ravenous for dinner. I had a salad with BBQ chicken, more veggies, and then I went back for a roll on the side.

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I also snacked on a protein bar plus some cheese and crackers later on!

So…last night I managed to be really dumb and somehow totally wiped out…in my room…Our beds are sort of raised, so I either have to jump up and down or use a chair. I tend to only use a chair when I’m lazy, which apparently I was. Somehow while I was stepping off the chair I lost my balance, and my other leg got caught on the back of the chair, so I had no where to go but down-I ended up falling pretty hard on my knee. Luckily I was wearing pants, but I still have pretty bad carpet burn plus a bruise. The only upside? It meant there was no way I was doing burpees during this morning’s Crossfit workout. I subbed 1 squat+1push up for each burpee….which was definitely much preferred!

When was the last time you wiped out?