blog salad

Time to round up some random crap!

1.) Still haven't decided anything on the tanning front, though I did buy some Tan Towels off of Amazon. (Thanks, B!) Perhaps this will end up being like most things in my life and I will procrastinate so long, it'll actually be summer and the question will become moot because I'll be able to just go to the damn beach.

2.) This may be the best tuna ever.

Since I have been being so very, very good at making and bringing my lunch to work for over two months, I am now at the point where I'm looking for different things to take.  Hence buying some tuna, which normally I am not a huge fan of.  (Well, I'm a fan of the tuna MELT but it's kinda hard to make one of those in the workplace microwave. Plus, y'know, what with the mayo, the cheese, and the buttered bread, not really helpful with the whole weight loss business.)  In my family growing up we always got the solid white tuna in water, which to me is kinda tasteless.  At my old place of employment where I'd occasionally buy tuna in the caf, they definitely used the chunk light tuna, which to me tastes like cat food.  I figured there had to be some happy medium between "tasteless" and "cat food."  In perusing the shelves at Trader Joe's, I decided solid white in oil might just be that happy medium. Oh, and it is.  I found it so tasty I was able to marry it with my *other* new lunch food experiment, which is training myself to like mustard.  (I've switched from mayo to mustard on my sandwiches in an effort to save calories.)  I tried just putting the drained can of tuna in a bowl, adding approximately 10g of mustard to it, and eating it like that, no bread or anything, and...it was good. I mean, I know it sounds vaguely disgusting, but it's actually tasty. Coming from someone who historically never liked mustard and wasn't big on tuna, this is a ringing endorsement.  So try it if you're bored with your lunch. Just make sure you get that TJ's tuna above.

3.) I have recently started foam rolling as part of my warm up, not just post workout or separate from it when something hurts.  I did this at a point when my lower back was spasming a bit on me and I was looking for a way to calm it down enough to get my workout in, and I've continued even though my back feels better. I think it actually helps. A friend was asking about it and I found a couple links for her, so I thought I'd share them with youse guys too.

4.) This is my new favorite shirt.

It's the Pacifica UPF shirt from Athleta, and that picture doesn't do justice to how cute it looks on with the ruching at the shoulders and the little sleeve pocket.  It's technically a rashguard but it makes a nice gym shirt or a just-wearing-around-over-a-tanktop shirt (if you inappropriately wear gym clothes err'where like me).  I would buy another one in a different color but it's Athleta and thus expensive.

5.) I wrote an impassioned defense of the humble bagel elsewhere when someone claimed they were nutritionally bankrupt.  A Dunkin' Donuts wheat bagel is 280 calories and 13g of protein.  I think that's a better ratio of protein to calories than a lot of "protein" bars, kids.  I was actually surprised myself when I first saw that nutritional information, but the reason for this is that bagels are very gluten-y. Gluten is what gives them that tasty chewy texture and gluten is the part of the wheat that contains the protein. So, basically, you people that have to avoid gluten are shit out of luck when it comes to getting protein from your baked goods. More tuna for you!

Anyone have any great new lunch discoveries, warm up suggestions, favorite new clothes, or rants about unfairly maligned foods? Tell me in the comments!

xoxo

i wanna do a very bad thing

To set this up, a few facts about Andrea which you may or may not already know.

1.) I hate winter. I hate winter with every fiber of my being.  I see no upside in white shit falling out of the sky, being cold, wearing 18 bulky layers of clothing and still being cold, falling on the ice, paying obscene heating bills and still being cold, having to get up five minutes earlier in the morning to have time to put on those 18 layers of clothing and still get out of the house on schedule, climbing over dirty frozen piles of no-longer white shit, having dry skin, dry hair, and dry mucus membranes, becoming a semi-hermit because leaving the house when you don't have to seems like too much trouble, and etc.  Winter sucks, okay?

2.) I am, like, the whitest white girl ever, and I am not just talking about my atrocious lack of dance skillz.  I am pale. By March, I am almost literally translucent.  Like," let's teach the circulatory system by looking at this woman's unclothed body" level.

3.) As evidenced in my last post, I want to take pictures of myself in which I look all lean, muscular, and ripped.  Ghostly pallor doesn't aid in this endeavor.

4.) I cannot afford to go to Hawaii, Cancun, or even Florida. At this point, I could probably afford to go to Rhode Island, but it's not really any warmer or sunnier there.

All these facts combined at the end of last week to lead me to a very shameful activity.  I was looking on groupon for bargain tanning.  Blush.

No, seriously, I have NEVER been tanning, not even in the '90s when all my co-workers went.  At most, I use a little self-tanner on my legs during the summer so they are only two shades lighter (and more orange) than my arms and shoulders, not five.  But tanning beds seem like just asking for cancer and a Bad Idea. Especially since one of those always tanning in the '90s (and at-the-beach-all-summer Gloucester townie) co-workers already had to have a shitload of suspicious growths removed before she turned 35.

Well, some of those groupons for tanning cover spray tans as well.

That's scary in its own right, nomsayin'?

So I'm kinda back to the idea of risking skin cancer--one time in a tanning bed won't kill me, right? RIGHT? plus the propaganda on the tanning salon websites all tell me how non-dangerous it is--or a little self-tanner at home. Which is all well and fine (and a little orange and possibly streaky) on my legs, but I cannot do my own back. At all. Anyone wanna volunteer to rub lotion on my back and save me from melanoma?

Yeah, I thought not.

xoxo