Rose Gold & Black

Posted by Crystal on Apr 29, 2012 in Fashion | 0 comments

I’m not usually a watch person, but I really like this Marc Jacobs black bracelet watch with Rose Gold…

Style Makeover – Look #1

Posted by Crystal on Apr 29, 2012 in Fashion | 0 comments

My cousin has been wanting to change her style for a long time, but never had the motivation or the vision to do so. Finally, after getting a new job she decided it was officially time to make the change. For the last year or two she has been asking my sister and I to shop for her, but I never felt stylishly qualified. After heavy amounts of pressure I decided to help her by starting off with Step 1 – Closet Detox: Dump the old and make room for the new. What was meant to take only a few hours became a full weekend of major purging. If you have never dealt with a borderline clothes hoarder, don’t start now!! After Closet Detox was over it was finally time to go shopping. We decided to seek professional advice and met up with a stylist to help with this transformation. Unfortunately, that was no help and we ended up with very little progress. My cousin’s biggest gripe was that she couldn’t just take a shirt she liked and envision what to wear it with, accessories and all. She wanted the stylist to come in with full on outfits to show her exactly what to wear each piece with because she couldn’t even envision what to wear with a white French Connection top that we felt was pretty flexible and easy to work with.

Inspired by this completely unproductive long day in SF, I decided to start a Polyvore account and take that one French Connection shirt and put together an outfit. I’ve never used the site before, but now that I have I’m officially hooked! Scope out my first look. I love the Tory Burch flats, it’s like walking on clouds and since the back is a little higher it doesn’t irritate the back of your foot like the classic one’s would.

Week 01 – Pre-Training

Posted by Crystal on Mar 27, 2012 in Runnning Log | 0 comments

My first week of “pre-training” was somewhat of a failure, but I made up for it today by running 3.5 miles on what should have been my rest day. Here’s how it went.

Monday – Rest

Tuesday – 2 miles; Ran 3

Wednesday – Rest

Thursday – 2.5 miles; Failed

Friday – Intended to make up for Thursday; Failed

Saturday – 3 miles; Ran 3 terrible miles on the treadmill in 34 min. (11 min. 33 sec. avg.)

Sunday - 2 easy miles; Failed

Monday – Rest; Ran 3.5 to make up for Thursday and Sunday

Grand Total: 9.5 miles

Lawn Furniture…Literally…

Posted by Crystal on Mar 23, 2012 in Scribbles | 0 comments

Earlier this month I made it a goal of ours to figure out what we wanted to do with our backyard by end of March. Now I have one week left in the month and I have nothing. Literally…NOTHING!

Home renovating is just too complicated when you have ZERO vision and lack of funds…

Faux Training Kick-off

Posted by Crystal on Mar 18, 2012 in Runnning Log | 4 comments

It’s been raining all week here in sunny California…a bad way to start my faux training since my boredom takes a toll on me when I run on a treadmill. In the beginning of the week I decided that due to the rain, I wouldn’t start running until Monday, making it an even 4 weeks before the “official” training begins. But then came Saturday afternoon and I thought, you know what? I’m going on a run today.

Avg Mi: 11 min. 13 sec.

The weather was that perfect kind of gloomy I love to run in. I don’t know if it’s weird, but there’s something about running when the weather gods are having a bad day that makes me feel like I’m going to have a good one. Since I was sadly disappointed by my embarrassingly slow speeds of last weekend’s runs (Pre Running Log), I wanted to kick off with a long run to use as a benchmark for what speed I want to improve upon and how long I can last before feeling the pain. I figured 6 mi. was a good start since that’s what I left off from at my last failed attempt of training for a halfy.

Running Thoughts:

Mile 1:  How the hell am I going to keep motivated for the next 16 weeks?!? My biggest issue is sticking to a routine. A friend of mine once gave me some beauty regimen before I went to bed and I told her that I couldn’t keep up with it for more than a week because there were too many steps. She told me in her most duh kind of voice, “It’s called a routine Crystal.” In that particular moment it dawned on me…I’m terrible at routines.

Mile 2: This run has been kind of easy so far…

Mile 3: If I got a reward for reaching certain milestones and accomplishing goals than I think I’ll be better at keeping this up. Hmmm…when should I be rewarded with something new from Lululemon?

Mile 4: I wonder when the next Florence and the Machine concert is and who is playing at Outside Lands this year.

Mile 5: (Pace beginning to slow down) Dear God, I still have another mile to go?!?!?

Mile 6: YAY! I made it…11 min. 13 sec. avg. Damn, I’m slow…

Who you callin’ chicken?!?

Posted by Crystal on Mar 14, 2012 in Scribbles | 0 comments

The one great thing about living out in middle of nowhere Livermore is that I can have backyard chickens. I got the “own my own chicken bug” (is that even a bug?) when I stayed at Glendeven, a charming B&B in Mendocino. On site they had llamas, roosters, and chickens and I fell in love when I saw all the cute little chicks running all over the chicken coop. At first I thought it was going to be one of my short lived fantasies I regularly have, but now that we are redoing our backyard, I can’t help but think how awesome it would be to have your own pet chickens and freshly laid eggs. I started to do some research on chicken coops and how to raise chickens and stumbled upon this great website called backyardchickens.com. I can’t wait to build a chicken coop now!

Modern Chicken Coops

Kippen House

Check out more backyard chicken coops here.

Intro. to Running

Posted by Crystal on Mar 14, 2012 in Runnning Log | 0 comments

My friend Katie from my Cal Poly SLO days had impossibly great legs I used to envy. She’s a cross country runner who on an easy day would run 6 mi. and still to go to the gym for a full workout. Since then I’ve always wanted to be like that. After college,  I made it a personal goal of mine to run a half marathon. This was six years ago. I’ve finally decided that 2012 is the year that I’m actually going to follow through. I originally wanted to run one this month and started to train towards the end of last year only to fail miserably due to the holidays and cold weather. Not to mention, I never actually signed up for a marathon so my motivation was slightly lacking.

This time around I’m on the wait list for the Napa to Sonoma Half Marathon on July 15th — there’s a wine festival at the end of the race! I find out April 2nd if I get a bib…otherwise, I’m running either the Jungle Run in Los Gatos or the Golden Gate Trail, which I’m actually scared of since it was described as hilly and challenging.

Inspired by Matt’s good friend Traci from yellowWishbone.com, I decided to start a running log so all of you can keep me in check. I also decided that I will follow the About: Running Half Marathon Training Schedule I found on fitSugar. It allows you to train moderately throughout the week, while working on your longer runs on Saturdays. Perfect for someone with a full time job. Since the marathons I want to run are not until July 15th and this is a 12 week training plan, I have 4 extra weeks of fake training before the big day. Good…because it’s been raining and I really hate running on the treadmill — look at me, already making excuses!!