"expensive" is relative

So I dropped off the face of the virtual world for awhile (at least on this site), but I am back. And changed some things. Take a look around.

Really I just wanted to share one thing that I realized. A few weeks ago after I met with Barbara from Building New Hope, I stopped by Whole Foods, that oh-so-tantalizing haven of foods I can't seem to afford, and bought a pound of BNH's organic, fair trade, shade grown Nicaraguan coffee. It was about $12-13 if I remember right (on their website it's $11--Whole Foods obviously marks it up), and I couldn't help cringing as I held my debit card over. I buy fair trade coffee, but it's from TJ's and is usually about $8 a pound. When I told my dad the price of this coffee, the first thing he said was, of course, "Wow, that's expensive."

ra(i)n

Did it anyways. Ran in the rain like a crazy person. Am soaked.

And it was glorious. First time running outside since mid-November. I hadn't been through the neighborhood since people put Christmas lights up. That was a nice little perk.

oh nevermind.

Ix-nay the unning-ray. It's raining. Alllllll day.

In a week the weather has gone from snow and temps in the teens, to near 50 degrees and cloudy, to rain and temps in the 30s.

Mother nature, she's hilarious.

freak weather makes for good running

It got up to 48 degrees today. I knew as soon as I woke up this morning ("morning") that it had to be warm because I had kicked off my comforter sometime in the night. (My apartment's heat, uncontrolled by me, rises with the temperature outside. It's sorta weird, and the opposite of what I'd like, but hey, I only pay 20 bucks a month for it so I'm not complaining.) Got up and found a package on my doorstep, my running shoes that I had left at my mom's over winter break. Thought, okay, God is telling me to go running. But then I remembered I had a hair appointment in a half hour, and every girl knows that you can't mess up that fresh-cut hair do by getting sweaty. (It's not everyday my hair smells like a $30 grapefruit.) So I didn't go.

stir-fry, the ol' dinner fall-back

Bittman over at Bitten- A Good Stir-Fry Hides a Lot of Faults. He talks about how he chopped up leftover veggies in his fridge, some of which were not totally "fresh" by whatever standards, tossed 'em in a pan with some tofu and ended up with a tasty meal.

snowrunners in shadyside!

I would just like to note the abundance of ballsy wintertime runners in the Shadyside/Squirrel Hill area (and how much their ballsiness makes me intensely aware of my lack thereof. Really, how does one decide that it is a splendid and appealing idea to go into the icy wilderness and put unskinned knees and perfectly intact ankles in peril, all in the good name of health and exercise? Power to them I guess, but I'm still going to be bitter and jealous while I do my yoga and Jillian Michaels workouts inside.)

if i only had an MD

Ah! This is what I've been saying! Today on Well, Tara Parker Pope posted about a new book called Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health and the doctor who wrote it:

Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that failing to live by the various health rules is a major source of stress and guilt, particularly for women. For most of us, “pretty healthy” is healthy enough.

“Is the goal to live forever?” she said in a recent interview. “I would contend it’s not. It’s really to live as long as you can with the best quality of life you can. The problem was all of these women I kept meeting who were scared to death if they didn’t eat a cup of blueberries a day they would drop dead.”