Life & Love

Chuck and I ended up turning a relatively quiet Thanksgiving weekend into an impromptu adventure in Atlanta, with our friends Janet and Terry. We started at the Atlanta History Center, where we toured the Swan House, the Smith Family Farm (I fed the chickens!), the American Civil War Exhibit, and the Centennial Olympic Games Museum.

Then, we toured the SweetWater Brewery (the boys’ vote), where I sampled six different beers and learned how it’s made (go me!) I also befriended an adorable mastiff puppy with a gimp, named Ellie.

We checked into our lovely room at the Ritz-Carlton (milso’s, take note: military rate is amazingly affordable!) and freshened up for dinner at South City Kitchen and a performance in Midtown by the Atlanta Symphony and Cirque du Soleil. We wrapped up the evening at the delightfully stereotypical Havana Club for some dancing. We even learned to salsa!

Sunday we hit up the World of Coca Cola, which was more of a brainwashing/marketing overload than a true museum experience. It was pretty neat, but I think all of us are happy to avoid Coke for a while…

We got home later on Sunday – exhausted, but happy. It’s nice to get a taste of city life when we can… I have missed it!

Happy #Thanksgiving from down in Georgia! We are #thankful for many things, to include each of you 🙂 Enjoy your feast today (and remember how #blessed we are to be able to do so!) (at Greystone Falls)

My ideas come to me with a vengeance… late at night when I’m already in bed. When I try to open up my writing project during the day, I stare at it like a zombie and then eventually give up.

How does that even happen? That late night inspiration? It’s so terribly inconvenient.

Just wrapped up the busiest part of our wedding season! Chuck was a groomsman for his good friend Paul’s wedding in downtown Washington, DC. I’m so impressed by all these weddings – everyone has done such a beautiful job making them uniquely their own! The ceremony was at a lovely historic synagogue, and the reception was at the swanky Sequoia Restaurant on the Georgetown Waterfront.

Even though we were in DC, we didn’t do much of anything except wedding stuff, which was kind of nice. We are usually stretched so thin. Since we flew into DC, we didn’t have a car to get around, so it was mostly impossible to meet up with friends with any free time. Overall, I think that made for a less stressful weekend. We still saw Chuck’s family, and my dad. Of course, we will be back for Christmas and have a little more time to work with.

In the meantime, I’m glad I don’t have to travel for the next 6 weeks! It’s been so much fun, but I am ready for a little break 🙂

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I work out!

I’ve never been the type to commit to working out, and have always relied on the fact that I’m skinny to avoid doing much about it. Of course, like many women, there are things about myself I’d like to change (and I certainly recognize the value in being healthy), but I never had weight issues as an incentive to get to the gym and actually do something about it.

Now that I’m not working and the gym is free and 2 minutes away, I really have no excuses left. I’m officially letting Chuck be my personal trainer for the remainder of our time here in Georgia. He studied fitness a good bit during his ample free time in Afghanistan this past deployment, and he’s convinced he can help me attain aspects of the body type I want, without turning me into some sort of muscle guru/gym rat…

Half my problem is I don’t even know what I’m capable of! I know I want to be toned, build some muscle, and feel healthy and strong, but it’s not like I am a heavy person who was once thin and has a mental image of what I need to work towards. I have no tangible realization of what I can or want to look like, within the limitations of my body type.  No target weight, no concept of what I’d look like with muscles, etc. So, this could be a very enlightening piece of work!

Yesterday Chuck started me with chest, shoulders, and back. I did dead lifts and baby bench presses, among other things. This morning, I am crazy sore in all of those places, and if there’s one thing I do love about “working out”, it’s being sore! It’s not so bad now that I have someone to guide me. I hate going to gyms alone – everyone watching everyone else, and here I am not having a clue on how to work the crazy looking machines…

Wish me luck!! We will see how this odyssey goes..