California Love

Missing California today. Enjoy the photos :)

Earth Day and Eyes

Happy Earth Day!

I suppose I'm celebrating by using reusable grocery bags today. Apparently, Park City is considering a law that would ban plastic bags. I'm all for it! That might possibly get me to remember to bring my reusable bags into the grocery store!

In other news, I've been wearing glasses for almost a month now. I normally wear contacts, but I've been going to LASIK consultations, and they require you to be out of your glasses for about two weeks before the appointment. My final consultation is tomorrow, so we'll see what they say. I got rejected at the first place. I always knew that was a very high possibility since my prescription is quite high, but I'm hoping the second place (Moran Eye Center, one of the best eye centers in the country!) gives me the go ahead. Otherwise, it's back to contacts for the foreseeable future.

The one fun part about wearing glasses, though, has been playing with fun lipstick colors! Normally, I'm more of an eye makeup kind of girl, but it's a pretty big pain to mess with eye makeup when you're practically blind without glasses. So, it's been a red and hot pink lipstick couple of weeks. Rimmel has a fantastic (and cheap!) matte lipstick collection right now - I highly recommend it!

Closing Day

Last Sunday marked the last day of ski season here in Park City. Julia and I went up to Park City Mountain Resort to get a few last runs in!

Julia was an awesome skiing (well, she was snowboarding while I skied) buddy over the course of the season! We were both super sad on the chairlift going up to our last couple of runs. It's been a really great season (maybe not snow-wise, but fun-wise!) and it was both of our first season in Park City.

Of course, I enjoy any excuse to bust out a costume, so I wore my bright yellow skinsuit. There were plenty of people on the mountain more dressed up that me! We saw guys in suits, full animal suits and LOTS of neon 80's apparel!

Sad to see ski season come to and end...but looking forward to some summer fun!

Running for Boston

By now, I'm sure just about everyone has heard about the terrible events that happened yesterday at the Boston Marathon. I'm completely and utterly heartbroken for everyone whose lives were shattered on an afternoon that should have been one of the happiest of their lives.

I was running yesterday when the attacks occurred. I hadn't run in months, but my dad just signed me up for a half-marathon in August so I figured I should get started on training. While I was whining about walk/running for a half hour on a treadmill while watching Game of Thrones, hell broke loose in Boston. When I got back up to my desk post-workout, I was totally shocked at the information coming my way on Twitter.

Although it's pure coincidence that I happened to start running again at the same time of a horrible tragedy, it's inspired me. I want to do something about it. I'm trying to think of some way to "run for Boston." So far, the best idea I've had is to ask people to donate a certain amount of money per mile for my August half marathon so that I can donate the total to an organization helping with the victims in Boston. It'll be a little while before you can discern between the opportunists and the legitimate organizations, but if anyone hears anything, let me know.

Juice Cleanse OVER

I lasted a day and a half.

As I said in my post yesterday, I was just so sick of juice! It took me over an hour to get through half of my first bottle of the day. Every sip made me nauseous. Finally, I took a look at the oyster crackers on my desk and decided to go for it.

So, the pros and the cons.

Pros
- I didn't feel hungry at all.
- My stomach felt much more settled than it has in awhile.
- Some of the juices were tasty.

Cons
- Six huge bottles of juice a day is too much juice.
- I had very little energy by the end of day one, falling asleep at 9 p.m.
- I had a headache the full duration of the cleanse.
- Some of the juices were pretty revolting.
- The juices are very expensive.
- I was dizzy and a bit of a crab most of the time.

My verdict? Don't do it. Or just do it for a day. I don't really care to repeat the juice cleanse experience anytime soon!

Of course, randomly browsing the internet tonight, I found this on Buzzfeed. Timely, eh?

Juice Cleanse Day 1

After 24 hours of consuming little more than juice, I've arrived at the following conclusions: whoever said day one was easy was lying and man is not meant to live on juice alone, regardless of how many cold-pressed fruits and vegetables are in them.

One thing I was NOT expecting was the fact that I was physically incapable of drinking all six bottles of juice throughout the day. It was just too much juice. By mid-afternoon, I just wanted something salty. I eventually satisfied that craving by having a chopped up avocado and tomato with salt for dinner (raw fruits and vegetables are recommended if you decide you need something more than juice, as is avocado specifically). But before I had my little avocado and tomato salt salad, I simply could not stomach any more juice. I only drank half of Fiji (mid-afternoon juice) and skipped Green Supreme altogether (dinner drink), then only had about a third of my "dessert" drink.

Man is not meant to live on juice alone.

Despite my issues above, there were definitely some positives that came out of day one. My stomach, which is frequently upset, has been totally fine. Surprisingly, I have not been hungry at all. My salt cravings have made me more or less forget my sugar cravings. I'm not sure that trading one craving for another is a good thing, but we'll see how this pans out.

So, after considering bailing on this juice cleanse after day one (for both the reasons above and the fact that it basically costs $50 a day even with the juices on sale this week at Whole Foods), I'm opting to do a hybrid juice/raw food/smoothie cleanse for the remaining two days. I'm going to keep drinking the Suja juices I still have left (sipping on Glow at the moment!), but after those run out, I'm going to switch to raw food and alternative juices.

Stay tuned.

We'll see if this juice cleanse thing really works...

If you follow Hollywood news at all, you've probably heard plenty about juice cleanses. I've had many friends try them out and preach about them, but I've always been a skeptic. Why? I have a science background and I know that your body is completely capable of detoxing itself without spending a couple of days limiting your diet to cayenne-maple syrup lemonade.

However, I've decided to give it a shot. After doing a bit of research, I have a few reasons:

1. I have a serious sugar addiction. From what I've read online, a three-day juice cleanse is fantastic for kicking sugar cravings.
2. I've been sick a LOT lately. At this point, I'm willing to try just about anything to improve my immune system health.
3. The juice cleanse I've chosen (Suja, primarily because it is readily available at Whole Foods and I don't have to pay crazy amount for shipping) is packed full of fruits and vegetables and who doesn't need more of those in their life?

So, I've decided to blog about this for accountability purposes. I'm told day one is easy but that it gets progressively more difficult from there.

I'm currently drinking my first juice, Glow. It smells like celery but has a nice apple taste to it. The juices are a pretty decent size, so you can enjoy sipping it for awhile (we'll see if that's a good thing when I get to the juice I'm dreading most - Green Supreme). 

Here's today's menu. Wish me luck!

Rain Boots and London

Today when I woke up, it was pouring. Naturally, I opted to wear my hot pink rain boots. I realized, though, that this is the first time I've worn them since London! So, I'm now missing London. Hope I can go back again sometime soon!

In honor of me missing London, I figured I would throw together a quick little list of the top things I miss about London.

Things I Miss About London

Draft Cider

Pubs

Beautiful afternoons along the Thames

The Tube (yes, even when it was crowded)

British Chocolate (and Stella Artois Cidre)

£1 Coins

Museums

And much, much more.