Waking Up Early, YAWN…
My latest project, waking up early. For most people, this is a normal part of life, a part I’ve chosen to ignore unless it was necessary. In my quest for greater productivity, I have decided it was time to make this a habit. For the next 30 days, weekends included, I decided to wake up no later than 7:30 am.

Day 1 – July 20, 2010
6:00 am:
I woke up, read Mashable on my phone, then got ready to drop my daughter off at school.

7:00 am:
I went back to the house, then texted my sister to let her know I needed to wait for my parents to return from church so I could take them to breakfast for my dad’s birthday. We had breakfast at IHOP and I have to say having crepes for breakfast was a great way to start the day, plus my dad was happy we got an early start to his birthday celebration. My sister gave my dad a heartfelt card that he later scanned and posted to his Facebook wall. Yes, my dad is on Facebook and he knows how to use it, he posts pictures, sometimes updates his status, and “likes” stuff. No, I didn’t get my dad a heartfelt card, instead I posted a coffee on his wall HOURS before my sister’s to wish him a happy birthday from his favorite daughter. My sister Czarina later posted her birthday greeting, then tried to say she was the favorite daughter, followed by my baby sister Michelle who claimed she was the MOST FAVORITE daughter. They clearly copied me because I’m the favorite.

Following breakfast, we had stopped by a local farmer’s market. We got there a little after 8:30 in the morning, I was surprised at how early it was and fortunately, the owner let us shop before they opened at 9 am. We got some Rainier cherries, peaches (my favorite), kettle corn, and watermelon, then went to Blockbuster to rent movies since my dad wanted a lazy day for his birthday. When we got to Blockbuster, my mom asked my dad to check to see if it was open, it didn’t even open until 10 am. I KNEW there was a reason I never got up early! Shortly, after 9 am, we are back at the house and I was at my desk getting some work done.

11:00 am
I went to the gym, did the 11 am yoga class, followed by a 35 minute run to complete week 2 of the 5k101 podcast. The 5k101 podcast gets a beginning runner to run a 5k (3.2 miles) in 8 weeks using interval training. The podcast has a music track and a guy that tells you warm up, then walk, or run depending on the interval. He also gives reminders when there is a minute left during a running interval help with motivation. Using this podcast has helped me get back into running and still feel good the next day.

11:30 pm
I passed out at about 11:30 pm, while I was texting.

Day 2 – July 21
11:30 am Woke up (#fail). My body decided to reset to its’ normal waking time. My alarm is set for 6:00 am everyday so stay tuned.

Every night, I look at the LA Fitness class schedule and plan my workouts for the following day. Last night, I decided I’m going to do the bodyworks & abs class, yoga, and run for 30 minutes. The bodyworks and abs class is a full body weight training workout for one hour which has tons of squats, lunges (front, stationary, and reverse), combined with upper body exercises. Tonight was the first time in four weeks, I didn’t feel like I was going to die when doing the endless squats and lunges. What was different was this class had really good bootie-shaking music so I started singing along with the songs to power through the tough parts and stay focused on keeping the right form. What I didn’t realize until the very end of the workout was I wasn’t singing the songs in my head, I was singing them out loud. I’m the first to admit I can’t sing, it’s even worse when I’m singing breathlessly, no wonder the lady next to me kept looking at me funny.

Weight training always wipes me out but I thought yoga afterwards would be really relaxing then I’ll run so I can burn some extra calories. Mental note: not all brilliant ideas should be executed when you are wiped out and hungry. Yoga started pretty great because the instructor gave us peppermint oil to put our hands and shoulders. During some of the tougher poses, I would get tired, then get a whiff of the peppermint and it helped to refocus my thoughts on the pose instead of thinking defeating thoughts like “I’m tired” or the soreness in my arms and shoulders left over from weight training. I’m thinking I might buy some peppermint oil and put it on my hands when I’m running, maybe it will help me remember the relaxed feeling I get from yoga.

It’s really cool to see the strength I’m gaining and the flexibility I’m maintaining from these workouts. Some days I love working out because I get to do Zumba which is an hour of salsa, merengue, bacchata, mambo, cumbia and a little bit of hip hop that burns TONS of calories (600-700 calories isn’t bad). Some days, I force myself into the gym. I spent a long time looking for a magic pill which will burn calories or melt fat and the only thing that’s really worked to reshape my body is diet and exercise. Once I changed the way I ate, the pounds started coming off and the workouts have gotten easier.

Anyone have any tips on keeping with the diet when going out to eat? What is the best way to sculpt your body? Is anyone doing the P90x workouts, what do you think of it?

Tuesday, December 15:  
One of my favorite soups is pozole, it’s a Mexican soup with pork and hominy which is a little bit spicy or maybe it was spicy because I wasn’t sure which chile to put in the soup. Either way, it started to get chilly here in the desert and I thought, perfect, I’ll make pozole! How hard can it be? Throw some pork and canned hominy in the pot and let it simmer for a few hours, come back and enjoy…come to find out, it’s a little bit more involved than that. It’s especially confusing because I had to use 3 different recipes to arrive at the final product. Initially, I asked my friend Angela if she had a recipe for pozole because if she made it, I know she would find a way to make sure it’s pretty healthy and tasty at the same time. I was feeling like I was coming down with the flu on Monday so I texted her my question and knocked out shortly after.

The next day I get her response and her fiance suggested I check out the Rick Bayless pozole recipe, so I took a look at it and it called for three different cuts of pork, I had 5 lbs of pork shoulder, didn’t know what “trotter” was or what that would taste like so I thought, skip that body part. The recipe also was made to feed an army, I only wanted to use 5 lbs of pork shoulder. Next, I read the rest of the recipe and I haven’t gone to the big Mexican grocery store my aunt recommended so I wasn’t going to be able to get  “3 pounds (about 7 cups) dried pozole corn, preferably red pozole corn, OR 4 pounds (about 10 cups) fresh or frozen nixtamal corn, well rinsed” I thought, I better find a recipe that lets me use canned hominy even though I read the real pozole corn tastes better.

Here are the links to the other two recipes I integrated together.
Pozole Recipe 2
Pozole Recipe 3 – Chef Michael Chiarello’s from Travigne Restaurant – I recommend using this recipe for a smaller batch and the Rick Bayless recipe to feed 25 – 30 people.

I ended up following most of Pozole Recipe 2, using the proportions from Pozole Recipe 3. Although, I might be using the third recipe in the future, I would have gone the Rick Bayless route but there were too many ingredients I was unfamiliar with. On Tuesday night after I made spanish rice, shrimp tacos, and fish tacos for dinner, I started the pozole making adventure. I chopped up the pork shoulder into pork chop slices, threw them into the pot, and covered with lightly salted water like the recipe asked. Then I put the 2 jalepenos into a pan and started browning it, it was kind of scaring me because it kept making these popping sounds, I was just hoping the jalepenos wouldn’t explode. I didn’t know if I should pierce them like a sausage to let whatever was popping escape.

Next, I did a rough chop of the onions dumped them into the pot, along with garlic, threw in the Mexican oregano (thankfully it was labeled on the package at the store), then in went some cumin which I measured because I don’t like the taste of overpowering cumin. That was supposed to boil, then simmer for at least 45 minutes. In the meantime, the hominy was soaking, not sure if it needed to or not. Then I asked my dad for rubber gloves so I can chop up the chiles and jalepenos the next day.

Wednesday, December 16:
The recipe said to skim off the foam that showed up on top of the soup, I apparently missed the foam and wasn’t able to skim that off. My dad said the foam shows up right before boiling and gives the soup the clearness, why doesn’t the recipe say, BEFORE the soup boils watch for this foam.

My mom helpd me skim the fat off the top of the stock, which to me was more important to get rid of excess fat than to get rid of foam. Since I had to cut the meat into 1 inch cubes, I also cut off any visible fat and threw that away to make it healthier. While cutting the onions, I had to leave the kitchen to rinse my eyes in the bathroom because they were tearing so much. I just watched Julie & Julia and Meryl Streep as Julia Child chopped a mountain of onions and didn’t tear at all! If only this was a movie, I could swap with the real chef for the next stage of the recipe. Janet commented on Facebook that she could see me in the kitchen with safety goggles and if I had thought of that I would have put on my snowboarding goggles to cut the onions. Here I thought I was prepared by getting the rubber gloves to chop the jalepenos. I know I’m a total wimp in the kitchen. At this point, I’m thinking, why didn’t I just want to make sopa de fideo??

Browning the meat and the onions went without further incident, then I realized I didn’t know which chiles to use. I already had these 2 jalepenos but I didn’t know if I should use the ancho or the arbol chile. I mean the arbol chile is so tiny, how many of these would I need for the recipe?? The Rick Bayless recipe calls for a cup of the arbol chile, recipe 2 calls for 2 jalepenos, and recipe 3 calls for 3 whole ancho chiles. I decided to throw in 1 tiny arbol chile, the 2 jalepenos, and 1 ancho chile. Ummmm….I probably should have left one of those off because my lips were tingling when I ate it, my dad and sister thought it was good though and it tasted the way I wanted it to taste, except for the part where it was a bit too spicy for my other daughter to eat.

I have to say, it was a lot of work, and it took a while for my eyes to stop burning. I think the end result was worth it, maybe next time I will be armed with snowboarding goggles, a big cleaver knife, gloves, and just the third recipe to simplify the process. Maybe no teeny arbol chile either…maybe I’m not meant to be a domestic goddess after all. The picture in this post is the end result of the two day pozole adventure.

December 2009:
When I started this life of leisure, I thought it would be full of fun and adventure. Little did I know that fun and adventure was heavily reliant on funds and friends. I’ve been in Arizona for about two months and my sister moved here only a few months prior, currently we don’t have an abundance of friends. I could honestly say, she is my ONLY friend and while my sister has friends in Arizona, she never sees them because she is working all the time. This is highlighted by something my sister said the other day. We were watching Julie & Julia with the kids and seeing all sorts of yummy French food with lots of butter being created. My sister says, “Do you remember Tasja’s cookie and white elephant exchange?” I said, “Yeah, that was a lot of fun!” She says, “WHEN we have friends, we’re going to have a cookie and white elephant exchange too!” My goal is to have one new local friend before the end of the year. I recently dropped my youngest daughter off at a birthday party and I told my sister, I think I will be friends with Kinzley’s mom, she seems nice and I’ve met her twice now! Now we have to find cool, new, local friends for my sister. While I love reading FB status and seeing pictures of my current friends, it would be nice to leave the house and meet up with friends who are not visiting from out of state.

When we were in California, we had our close friends and we always made friends with the people we worked with everyday. Since I’m currently a stay at home mom, this is not an option for me and might not be an option for my sister either. While her coworkers are mostly female, most of them have ummm…how shall we say, spent some time on a government sponsored vacation which I can only imagine provided a small room with bars for decoration. I met these women and they are actually very nice and normal, you would never guess they ever had a record. Cassie & Janet, if you are reading this, don’t worry, Czarina will not be replacing you any time soon.

More Time != More Travel
As I previously mentioned, some adventure is dependent on funds. If I had more funds I could go to Chicago to visit my BFF Stef, who I’m sure is freezing to death or dying because it’s too cold for him to get to the Diesel store to buy new jeans. While in Chicago, I could also visit my cousins. I could also fly to California to visit friends or Manhattan to visit my east coast cousins. Since I’ve burned through most of my frequent flyer miles, I’m just “chillaxing” at home and reading books from the library which involve adventure around the globe. I also wouldn’t want to go to the east coast until after spring because I wouldn’t have any coats warm enough, the cold there makes you cold in your bones even when you’re sitting in front of the radiator trying to thaw out.

Confessions of an Electronics Shopaholic
I recently became obsessed with getting the iPhone 3GS and ALMOST bought it the other day. I had it in the AT&T shopping basket and only had to  choose between the 16 GB or 32 GB, then while I was waiting for friends to get back to me on which one to get I took my kids to Michael’s (craft store) to buy a couple T-shirts for projects. On a side-note, I love Facebook status messages to get a quick answer on whether or not to do something…more on this later. When we arrived at Michaels, I saw the AT&T store so I thought I better go in there and see if I can even text message on this thing because I LOVE texting or IMing. It would be a total deal-breaker if texting on a virtual keyboard was as hard as it was on the first generation iphone where I wanted to throw the thing at someone’s head because I was so frustrated with having to backspace because I couldn’t get my fingers to type the right letters. Anyway, it was much more accurate than I remember but the only reason I didn’t get it right then and there is because the guy wouldn’t let me get the iphone 3GS with just the required $30.00 data plan and unlimited messages. He said I had to buy a voice plan with it, which doesn’t make any sense to me, what do people do who can’t hear? They would only text right?

Here is my logic, if the iphone is a crappy voice phone, then I don’t want the voice plan, I would rather have unlimited data and text which is what it is good at. The main reason I even wanted the new iphone is because it has a Kindle app and I have a list of electronic devices I wanted to get and a limited amount of funds, I don’t believe in credit card debt so everything needs to be paid out with cash.

Here are the other things I wanted to get:

HP Mini 311 (ION based netbook with an 11.6 inch screen) —obsessed with this even though I have the HP Mini 1000 with a cool tattoo inspired skin

November 12, 2009
Lately, I’ve been an insomniac. I hate it because I LOVE the feeling of getting drowsy or being able to fall asleep while reading a good book. So tonight, I’m on Facebook entertaining myself by playing Mafia Wars, Cafe World, and Farmville since no one appreciates phone calls after midnight.

I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye and I think, what IS that crawling across the tile? Is it a fly? Why would a fly be crawling on the floor, that’s just a thought which popped into my head, ironically, no flies in the house. Is it injured? What is that thing? Since I’m not naturally curious about creepy crawlies, I grab a magazine for cover, scoot over on the couch with my feet up so it can’t jump on me to take a closer look. If my brother-in-law hadn’t told me a story about hearing crickets in the house I would have thought it was a tan colored grasshopper. Either way, it was dead, more specifically it was a dead cricket. I leaned over and smashed it about 10 times to make sure it was dead before throwing the entire magazine out with the cricket.

More creepy crawlies…
A couple days before, I was at the post office and a woman a couple people ahead of me is talking about getting bitten or stung by a scorpion she found in her house. I’m thinking in my head, “ummmm….why are you trying to mail stuff, not really sure, but couldn’t that be dangerous and shouldn’t you be in the ER or something?” I’m new to living in the country and still not used to actually striking up conversations with total random people at the store. Everyone around is saying, you should put aloe vera on it, or giving her other home remedies. I’m frantically searching for signal so I can Google “scorpion stings and how to treat it” on my Blackberry. Then suddenly, she turns and walks out of the post office. I hope she got it taken care of.

Another woman is talking about how her housekeeper has found scorpions in her home. If I was her housekeeper, I would have left, I’m sure she wasn’t paying scorpion hazard insurance. Anyway, pest control is definitely going to find me to be a loyal customer, they can come every month and spray all the pests dead all around the house, the yard, the garage, the neighbors house, etc.

My mom didn’t mention scorpions getting inside the house when she was trying to get me to move out here. I wasn’t sold on the heat, which I don’t care for at all, still don’t. It’s unnatural to have 80+ degree weather in November. Fortunately, have not seen any scorpions in her house at all. Now I’m on the look out for insects and keep my sheepskin slippers close by in case I need to terminate another bug.