things i use and love: round two.

thank you for all the super sweet comments on my last post. i am blushing.

i sure hope a lot of you decide to purchase the blogger calendar and support lymphoma research.

i am buying six calendars myself! click HERE to purchase one for yourself or someone you love.

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well, i’m not going to pretend with you guys. today was pretty bland in the meals & moves department. fact.

don’t believe me? fine. i will prove it.

breakfast: cinnamon protein oats

in the bowl:

• 1/3 cup oats cooked in almond milk
• 1 serving vanilla protein powder
• ~ 1 T chia seeds
• ~ 1 T mighty maple peanut butter
• cinnamon. lots of it.

lunch: a leftover stuffed bell pepper & asparagus

lots of ketchup.

i like asparagus with nothing on it. plain. no salt, pepper or butter.

i love the way the stalks look. like trees.

wow, this is boring. am i really talking about why i like the way asparagus looks? i promise, this post gets better. don’t fall asleep yet.

snack: slice of toast with PB

sometimes i break my own rule of not eating fat immediately before a workout. this was one of those times. i think the dogs were happy about this, because they each got a smear of skippy on their noses

dinner: mexican casserole (using shredded chicken breasts instead of ground turkey)

topped with greek yogurt, salsa and avocado.

whole wheat tortilla on the side.

dessert: a couple handfuls of dark chocolate chips

i worked out between my snack and my dinner.

HIIT on stairmill:

minute #	level	intensity from 1-10 (RPE scale)
1	6	5
2	7	5
3	8	6
4	10	7
5	12	8
6	14	9
7	8	6
8	10	7
9	12	8
10	14	9
11	8	6
12	10	7
13	12	8
14	14	9
15	8	6
16	10	7
17	12	8
18	14	9
19	16	10
20	6	5

my max HR was 178. who says the stairmill isn’t a good cardio workout?! i went 2.38 miles.. that is actually .02 miles more than when i do my typical 20 minute HIIT on the treadmill.

i also walked on the treadmill @ 3.5 MPH on a 15% incline for 10 minutes. i had a magazine to read!

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see.. toldja. today was pretty “meh”.

i guess we can’t always be glamorous.

i’m kidding.

really.

since i have nothing of importance to share with the class, i decided now would be a good time for another round of things i use and love! you may recall my first installment that included cleaning supplies that i swear by. this time around i am going to talk about websites.

yep. websites.

we all use them. probably every day. if you are reading this right now then you are guilty of being a website user—i caught you!

there are a select number of bookmark tabs that i keep in my web browser. how about a screen shot?

i circled my tabs for your viewing pleasure. you’re welcome.

starting at the left!

gmail.

do you remember when gmail first came around? you had to have some sort of invitation or something to join. i didn’t understand all the hype. i put off starting a gmail account for quite awhile. i had my hotmail and was doing just fine. well, then hotmail changed a bunch of stuff and it bothered me.. so i perused gmail a bit. i started an account.

now i have three.

a blog gmail, a personal gmail and another personal gmail with my new name. geez, talk about greedy. good thing you don’t need invitations to get an account!

i am not going to go into detail about why i adore gmail (that would take hours!) but i will mention a few reasons:

• easy to search entire inbox OR specific folders
• single emails can appear in more than one folder—gmail calls these “labels”
• gchat.. a chat room within an email inbox
• instead of sending a new email each time you get an email from the same person.. it sends one email thread. this is so convenient because i get my comments emailed to me. when they used to come to hotmail, i would get a new email for each new comment. now, i get one big email that has all the individual comments listed and i can click on a specific one to reply to it. SO SIMPLE.
• compatible with my phone. i have a droid.

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the next tab is hotmail. i only have that tabbed because i like to check my hotmail daily—i still have lots of emails that come to the account! but really, i hate hotmail, so it is not on the list of websites i love.

the tab after that is my online banking tab. i am not going to rave about the website but i will say i LOVE online banking! i pay 90% of my bills online and i even transfer money between different banks online. highly recommend you go paperless and do as much banking and bill paying online as you can. it’s convenient and it saves trees!

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whiskey militia.

i am slightly addicted to this one-deal-at-a-time website. it is based locally but anyone can use it! whiskey militia pulls items from its parent company, dogfunk.com, and features a ridiculously good deal on that one item until the set amount being sold is gone.  right now there are a pair of snowboard goggles up for sale.. but it changes so often, so i check back all the time.

i recently made a purchase. a pair of skullcandy ear buds for 65% off. lovely.

i love whiskey militia because it has a lot of items that i would buy even if they weren’t on sale. whiskey militia is mainly snowboarding, skateboarding and surfing clothing, shoes, outerwear and gear. there are a few similar sister sites that you guys may be interested in:

• steepandcheap.com: more geared towards outdoor activities (hiking, camping, running, etc) also has ski stuff from time to time
• tramdock.com: ski clothing, gear & equipment
• chainlove.com & bonktown.com: cycling deals

and the parent sites are actually sites i ALWAYS buy stuff from, dogfunk.com and backcountry.com. they have theeee cutest clothes and shoes.

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the next tab is the salt lake city groupon. i only recently added this tab and have purchased one groupon so far. check out http://www.groupon.com/ to get the low down on the groupons in your own town.

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google reader.

i am not sure how i read blogs before google reader. it makes checking my favorite blogs SO simple and streamlined.

what makes google reader even more convenient is categories. i break the blogs i read up into different categories.. so if i want to read a specific type i can go straight there or if i want to mark a category as read, the others remain unread.

for example.. i have a category called “no commenting”—this includes a bunch of blogs that, while i might comment on them once in awhile, i usually just read the blog without a comment. i this category includes blogs like failblog, the pioneer woman, fitsugar and the like. almost all blogs that are JUST recipes are in this category. i never want to miss a recipe, but i also don’t really have anything to say about the post. some other categories include “foodie friends”, “IRL” (in real life blog friends), “exercise blogs” and “family & friends”. it is so nice to be able to read based on the category.

i highly recommend you utilize this feature!!

also, you can “star” items. i star things left and right. any time i see a recipe that i want to try.. yep, it gets a star. then when i need some inspiration in the kitchen, i simply check out my starred items. i went to my starred item trying to figure out dinner the other night. oddly, i discovered that 80% of my starred items were DESSERT recipes. hmmm. strange. ;)

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the next two tabs are all about socializing.. facebook and twitter. i love both of these sites but i don’t think i need to explain them!

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the daily plate.

it does have a feature where you can plug in your allotted calories for the day and it will count down how many calories you have left for the day as well as calories burned during exercise.. i don’t use that feature. i can see how it would be helpful to calorie counters, though.

i don’t count calories, but i used to be really curious about my macros when i was doing body for life. the daily plate lets you plug whatever you ate in for a specific meal and it gives you a pie chart ratio breakdown of that meal or your whole entire day. SO cool.

say i ate protein oats for breakfast. i plug in all the ingredients and it spits out all the nutritional info along with a pie chart telling me what percentage of eat macro (protein, carbs, fat) the calories came from. handy.

i also use this website to calculate my nutritional info when i create recipes.

for example, my turkey goulash. i plug in all ingredients, the number of servings in the recipe and voila—instant calculations! complete with macro pie chart.

awesome, right?

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well, that brings me to the end of telling you about the websites i use and love. there are many more where that came from, but i feel like i’ve already said too much. hope you enjoyed hearing me ramble about websites i love!

Q~

what is one of your favorite websites you use and love?

xo. janetha g.