an afternoon with my friend pain

Almost a week into CrossFit, and I'm...sore. So sore. Tomorrow is a rest day and I cannot tell you how excited I am for it. Big change from my past attitude towards rest days, eh? I'm also realizing that none of these workouts are easy. You may be thinking "duh", but okay, here is an example:

1. One arm hang - I used to do this as a kid all the time, so when I saw it on the WOD I was thinking there was no way I'd work up a sweat with something like that. Wrong. I managed MAYBE 1 second before I had to support with a second arm.

2. Double unders. Who didn't do these with a jump rope growing up? Guess who kept shamefully whipping her ankles trying to do more than 1 in a row this weekend at the gym?

3. Rope climb. Yeah. I used to rock at this. But I subbed towel pull-ups for it yesterday since I couldn't get to the gym at a decent time, and my body is still aching from the effort.

CF, I will never underestimate your WODs again.

I count it as a major win that I cooked Nolan a vegetarian meal this weekend, and he actually liked it. Twice! We had it twice. And it was tasty both times. So now that recipe for spicy black-bean and butternut squash burgers with peanut slaw (wrapped in lettuce instead of a roll) is going into my perma-files.

Sorry the picture makes it look crappy and dry - I swear it was the opposite!

So good!


So other than baking weird burgers and sucking it up at CrossFit, my excitement for the weekend was this:

 A pain study at Stanford that I signed up for. Yes - it means they inflicted pain on me for money. Hah! But guys...it was so worth it. That little picture above is the heat testing. They basically burned my hand over and over until I slid the rating scale to unbearable...and then inspected my hand to find there were no burns whatsoever. Technology is amazing! The purpose of the study is to find out how the brain processes and deals with pain. I did several rounds of different heat testing and rating, and a round of cold (that was the worst by far! I hate cold!), and lots of boring questionnaires. But now I have shopping money, and more to come next week when I go in for round 2: laying in an MRI for over an hour. Here's hoping I don't doze off.

Before you judge...think of how much fun shopping will be! I totally earned it!

For a random girls' night last night, I decided I wanted something light and lemony for dessert. So I found this delicious recipe for lemon pudding cake - considering my sweetener was my homemade sugar-free powdered sugar, the recipe ended up being really low cal too. Bonus! What came out of me pouring a gloppy mess into ramekins, was super-cute little treats, with an airy cake-like texture on bottom, and a layer of pudding on the top (after inverting). Hence the name.

I decided to dress up the final product a bit with some of the delicious blackberries I happened to have. So tasty!

Last week, while reading Moby Dick on the BART on my way home, a tender young chap asked if he could take my picture. He was a budding photographer, and apparently the lighting was good that day. Who knew I looked so angry while reading?