We Are....

I don't even know where to start with this, but I feel like I can't stay silent. I'm sad, heartbroken, and distraught over this entire Penn State scandal. I feel betrayed by a man I've never met, but have always respected. My world has been rocked by this.

If you had asked me Saturday morning if Joe Paterno should retire, I would have said "I hope he dies pacing that field, during a game, doing what he loves and all he has ever done"

Today, I think he should step down. This is the end of his career and what his legacy will now be known for, regardless of whether he is morally innocent or guilty.

I desperately want to hear his side of the story. I want to know what he's known for the past 9 1/2 years. I want to know that his conscience is clean. But I just don't think it is. I won't say that he met his legal obligations and could then sleep well at night. If he knew something illegal/immoral happened, he should have done the follow ups and he should have been asking if this had gone to the police. If he didn't know the full extent of the 2002 incident, his era at Penn State is still over and will be tarnished forever.

It is just awful that he is the main target being persecuted in this whole thing. I'm hearing more about Coach Paterno than I have about Jerry Sandusky, and he is the one that raped those boys!

There are now about 20 boys/men that have come forward as victims in the awful and horrific mess. 20 boys whose lives will never be the same because they were exposed to a predator who set up a foundation to supposedly help them. This man preyed on these helpless boys, giving them gifts and opportunities that they would never have gotten without him, but they paid the price of abuse and molestation for it. It is absolutely disgusting that this man put them in these situations. He should be the one persecuted for these crimes. He should be the one under the microscope in all of this.

Where was McQueary in the days/weeks/months/years after he saw what he saw in the locker room? Did he tell JoePa all the details? Why isn't he being called on for moral obligations?

People are calling for the cancellation of the rest of the Penn State season. This would punish players that had no idea and were in elementary school when this happened. This would hurt their chances of having a professional career. Boys that had never met Sandusky, boys that had no idea this man was lurking in their shadows. This would punish the other coaches that knew nothing of the situation, and I believe there were some.

Now is not the time for the Penn State community to turn their backs on their Alma Mater. Now is the time for us to come together and show that Penn State is so much bigger and so much better than this.

As posted on Facebook:

“We are…….sad. We are…….grieving with the families and the victims. We are……broken hearted. We are……trying to make sense of things. We are……confused. We are…..over 94,000 students strong. We are…..ranked among the top 15 public universities. We are…..the largest student-run philanthropy in the world. We are…..over... 8,500 top ranked faculty. We are…..hard working student athletes in many sporting events with NO connection to former events. We are….more than university officials and athletic department members. We are….more than this scandal. We are Penn State, and we have always been more than just a football team.”

 I will be wearing my Penn State Football shirt proudly for the rest of this season and as long as I can still scream out "WE ARE"

Bad News Bears

Just weighed myself.

IT WAS AWFUL.

I've gained. A lot. In a week. WHAT THE HECK

I'm only four pounds down from January 1st. I want to cry.

There are 60 days before 2012. And a goal without a deadline is nothing but a dream, right?

So here it goes.

I'm going to lose 27 pounds in 60 days. This gets me to a nice round number and a respectable 31 lbs in one year.

My race is about half way. So that's 14 lbs down by December 3rd.

And if this was twitter, I'd end with #letsdothis

training to finish, probably won't win

So I've been following my happy little schedule. Mostly. I get at least the run workouts in and maybe a couple others throughout the week. Training is going well, I'm very happy with my endurance progress. I never set out to be a speedy racer, but just wanted to set out to finish. In this first month of training I've gone from a 15 min pace (which is the minimum to not get kicked off the course on race day) to a comfortable 13:35 pace. This weekend is a 6 mile run, if I maintain my 2:1 run/walk splits, I'll be happy. If I finish at a 13:35 - 13:45 pace, I'll call it a roaring success.

Hubs and I joined the Y so I'd have access to a pool for the cross train days. When we signed up we got a complementary session with a trainer. The poor guy that had to put up with each of us for our free half hour kicked both of our respective butts. We both hurt so good after that first workout with him, we signed up for 12 joint sessions with him. WHAT?!?! So now we're paying someone to hurt us. That just doesn't seem right.

We do one 30 min session of strength training and one 30 min session of cardio. Tonight was our first cardio session. The Arc Trainers he wanted were taken, so to the treadmills we went. He set the incline at an uncomfortable height then set the speed at 6 mph. In case you aren't good at math, 6 mph is a hecka lot faster than my 13:35 pace. It's actually a dead sprint. So off we went, one minute sprint, one minute rest. I eventually whined my way down to 5.7 mph, still a dead sprint in case you were keeping track. It was awful and I hated him. Unfortunately he didn't get the memo that I don't plan on WINNING this race but just looking to finish, bonus points for not being last.

I'll be so happy this weekend when I can go at my slow and steady wins the race pace even though it'll be for 3 times as long as our workout today.

What do you do to prepare for a race?

What the WHAT?!?

Seriously folks, I've messed up big time. I signed up to run this 15K! That's 9.3 MILES for those non metric folks out there.

The most I've EVER gone (not run, just gone) is 5 miles. How am I going to practically double that?

I blame my sister. I was talking a big game and saying how I was going to run a half marathon next year, blah blah blah. And she sent me a link to this race and said "Why don't you sign up for this 15k?"

I googled "15k training programs" and the first one I saw was 10 weeks. I had 9 1/2 until the race, so kinda fit perfectly. Darn it, looks like I gotta sign up. This is the plan I'll be following: super amazing plan to get me across the finish line.

So I signed up and started running. It starts slow, just two miles at a time. I was already doing 3-4 a couple times a week. So 2? No problem. Now I'm at the end of week 2 of training and have to run three miles tomorrow morning. At race pace, we'll see how this goes. When I think about the race distance, I'm terrified, so I'm sticking to the schedule like it's my job.

We'll see how this goes. I didn't intend for this to become a running (I'm not a runner) or weight loss blog, but that's what's going on in my life right now, so you may be seeing a log about that coming up.

Sorry I've been MIA for so long, hopefully this is my big return!

Come on Irene....

If you're looking for an example of proper hurricane preparedness, you'll have to look elsewhere.

After watching the new for the past couple days, we made no plans for the weekend and planned to camp out. I think our area is under thunderstorm or tropical storm watch. We are out of the direct path of the hurricane. Apparently this hurricane is the size of Europe, so I am still a bit cautious as to what the weekend will bring. 

We hit the grocery store after work tonight just like every other person in town. It was amazing to see the items that are COMPLETELY wiped out. Bananas? Gone. Bottled water? Gone. Milk? Got the last jug. It really was crazy to see the lines and the panic about the impending storm. People had check lists a mile long. I just wanted to make sure we won't get bored or hungry.

We are west of I95, everyone east of us is in trouble, but I think we should be OK. We bought diet coke, some booze, eggs, and milk, along with some other essentials to make some fun new recipes. I started panicking that we were the only cart in the store without bottled water, so we threw one of the last on the emergency pallet at the front of the store.

We are completely fine food wise if we are stranded in the house for about 10-12 days (but how would that happen?). If we lose electricity? We're screwed. I have ice ready to go and a cooler to put some stuff in, but basically all the food we have requires electricity to cook. Pasta, frozen meats, microwave popcorn, all useless without electricity. At least we'll have cold beer and wine.

Once we got home, I started looking around to see if we'd be ok without power. Candles are ready to go. Flashlight out and ready. Back up batteries were purchased. Let's hope we don't need to use any of these.

As long as the lights stay on, we'll be good to go. We have movies from the list queued up on the DVR and ready to be watched with some delicious popcorn. Wii games we haven't played in a while and new recipes for days to try out. If the lights go out, I'll be reading my fully charged Kindle until it dies or cleaning out the stacks of magazines sitting in our house. I finally bought a binder to organize all of the tear sheets that have been collecting from each month's subscriptions.

If you're on the East Coast, are you ready? Do you have better prep plans than we scrapped together? If you're not in the path of the hurricane, do you have better weekend plans?

Quick and Dirty

Oh, hello there. Do you feel neglected? I'm just stopping in for a quick blog equivalent of a drive by. Here's what's been going on lately....

Look how my tomatoes are growing!!!! It's very exciting to water them every day and see them changing colors and growing bit by bit.

I've also made some progress on my paper goals....remember those? Here's where we started:

Here's where we are now (also compare between real camera and crappy iphone pics):

And here's how many have been torn off:

YAY! PROGRESS!!!!

Also, since January 1st I've lost one of these.....

No, he hasn't gone missing, but I've lost the equivalent of one wiener dog on the scale!!! I wasn't brave enough to weigh myself holding the heavier one, maybe I'll lose her by next week. I look at Wilbur and think, he's a little dog, but not that little. Where was I storing this dog sized mass? Gross. And to think I could stand to lose much bigger dogs than him.

I started the year on Weight Watchers. The program works, when you stick to it. I was good for about 6 weeks, lost about 10 lbs, then was bored. So I stopped counting points. I didn't gain it all back, just a couple of the pounds. I had been gaining and losing the same 5 lbs after that for a while when I was half assing the WW program. I decided something needed to change and I wanted to kick start the losses again.

I started the Paleo diet last week after seeing a couple other girls loving it, here and here. The gist of it is, if a caveman couldn't have picked it or killed it, can't eat it. This means fruits, veggies, nuts, and proteins. This also means no carbs (ouch), no dairy (ouch), and no sugar (boo). I was intimidated, but hit Trader Joes last week ready to do this. I was encouraged that every day the scale showed a loss, it makes it so much easier to stick to it when I can see quick results. I stuck to it Mon-Fri except for a few blips of wine. I'm only human. Saturday, was more of "diet? what diet?". But I woke up this morning, had my almond milk and fruit smoothie and was back on track. Hopefully yesterday didn't do too much damage, but even so, the break was enough to get me motivated again.

I've also been doing the Couch 2 5K running app on my phone. I've tried this 3-4 times before, but give up around week 4 or 5. I'm currently in week 7 where the intervals are over and it's just straight runs with no walk breaks. I'm not so into it anymore. I like my walk breaks, they make me feel like I can run harder/longer during those intervals. I may just keep repeating the week 5 intervals of five and eight minute run intervals. I felt strong doing those runs and felt like I could really push it the entire workout and leave it all on the run.

With vacation coming up next month, I have to stick to both diet and exercise to make sure I'm bathing suit ready.

In the meantime, I have been hopping into my suit for Friday Surreptitious Happy Hours at the Pool. What is better than sneaking out of work an hour early (shh don't tell) and coming home to relax with a book, some friends and wine by the pool? Coincidence that my water bottle holds exactly one bottle of wine? I think not.

Alrighty then, with that, I'm out. I just needed a break from the top to bottom cleaning of the condo that I've been doing today. Back to work for me. I hope everyone is having a fabulous weekend and is looking forward to a great week!!!!

Best Thing I've Ever Made

Holy moly. Last week I made Broiled Herb Marinated Shrimp from March's Cooking Light. These shrimp were AMAZING. I would have been impressed if I had gotten these in a restaurant. Best part is that the herbs I used were from my little patio garden project I'm trying out this year!!! I just went out side, snipped the needed herbs and was ready to go!!!!

Here is the amazing recipe:

Broiled Herb-Marinated Shrimp Skewers
Ingrdients:
3/4 cup fresh cilantro
3/4 cup fresh parsley
1/2 cup basil
3 tablespoons EVOO
3 tablespoons orange juice
1 tablespoon lime juice
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 garlic cloves
24 jumbo shrimp peeled and deveined

1. Combine first 10 ingredients in a food processor, process until smooth. Place in a bowl, add shrimp, toss to coat, and marinate in the refrigerator for 30 mins, stirring occasionally.

2. Preheat broiler to high

3. Remove shrimp from marinade, thread 6 shrimp on wooden skewers. Place skewers on a broiler pan coated with cooking spray. Broil 5 inches from heat for 2 minutes on each side.

We just had the shrimp by themselves with a vegetable. I think next time I would serve them over pasta with a light lemon garlic sauce.

AMAZING.