What's Your Name?

This happened the other day. I was showing my boss/professor what I was working on and he was really impressed. So impressed that he wanted to show it to another professor who is interested in what I was doing. Together we walked over to another building where the professor was in a meeting with maybe 15 undergraduate and graduate students. All eyes were on us since we just interrupted their meeting. My boss started showing the professor what I was working on and when he was done the professor looked up at me and asked, "What was your name again?" I think he might have had a lazy eye or something, but I couldn't tell that he was looking at me, so I just looked around awkwardly until my boss turned to him and said, "Her name is Amanda." SO embarrassing.

P90X

*This post will not make sense unless you have done P90X before*

So David and I started up P90X again at the start of the semester, and there are just some things that really bug me about some of the videos.

1. In the Ab Ripper X video on the very first exercise the guy in the back has his hands up the whole time to make it harder, then like .05 seconds before Tony turns around the black guy puts his hands up and Tony praises him for making the exercise harder. WE ALL KNOW THE GUY IN THE BACK IS MORE HARD CORE!! He deserves some credit.

2. There is some serious sexual tension between Dreya and Tony. He's always like "your boyfriend is a lucky man" and other comments like that. Lay off. She is taken. Sheesh.

3. Remember German Potato girl? Everything about her bugs me. She is a giggly little school girl when she is working out. Normal people aren't like that. And she keeps trying to out do the guys! When the guys say they will do 20 pull ups she says she will do 21. Seriously?! You are just trying to show off and it's annoying.

4. Tony always raves about the "Karen Pot Stirrer" stretch and we do it probably twice every workout. The pot stirrer is probably the worst stretch on there. I don't feel it anywhere. All you do is swing your arm around in a circle.

5. "Scissor? Get it?" This is just annoying because I can't get it out of my head. Ever. I think I bring that up in my every day conversations on a regular basis.

6. The guy who posted this http://legeytimate.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/the-p90x-players/ gets me. It is his list of the five people on P90X that annoy him the most.

7. Tony seriously does like 5% of each workout. He brags about how he's using such heavy weights, "Not everyone can do this" but he is constantly taking breaks claiming he has to "check the kids" to make sure they are doing it right. I think he's secretly not in that good of shape. He is just really bulky.

Okay, but one thing that I laugh out loud at every time is a joke Tony makes. During the quad stretch he has his hand on a stool for balance. He says to grab a chair, or a brother or a sister or an uncle to balance. Then he points at his stool and says "That's a short uncle right there." Hahahah gets me every time.

Trilogy

I am an avid reader. My favorite is young adult fiction. It's an easy read but it still has a good story. I went to Barnes and Noble a while ago and saw this trilogy that is clearly a love story (Perfect Chemisty, Rules of Attraction, and Chain Reaction). I am ashamed to admit it, but I love romances. I get sucked into the story line and it almost always has a happy ending. I thought the cover looked like it was decent, so I bought all three books.

I read the first one, shed some tears, and enjoyed the ending. The story goes like this: A punk Latino boy is in a gang and lives on the bad side of town. Through some random events, he associates with a rich girl and they immediately don't like each other. They keep running into one another and eventually their hatred turns into love. They are inseparable. She hates that he is in a gang, so he has to risk his life by getting jumped to break out of the gang during the scuffle a supporting character gets shot. Then they live happily ever after.

 I eagerly started the second book anticipating a roller coaster of emotions and a developing story of the characters in the first book. The story starts of with a punk Latino boy who is in a gang and lives on the bad side of town. Through some random events . . . Wait a minute. "This is exactly the same" I thought. I kept reading just to be optimistic. No luck. 

"Well", I thought, "maybe the third book will be really good. I bought it so I might as well read it." Literally, it was exactly the same as the first two, but the characters in each book have different names. Is that even legal? There must be some type of copyright infringement policy on your own work, right? 

On the bright side, at least I'll never forget the story line, since I read it three times.

Pinterest Picture

So I was on Pinterest the other day and I saw this picture:

I usually think I am pretty flexible, so I decided David and I needed to get a shot like this. We needed someone to take the picture, so we waited until SuperBowl Sunday and had my sister Natalie take it. This blog is about the process of getting a picture as perfect as the one above.

So it starts by Natalie taking my camera, and the second Gage sees that she has it, he runs across the room and lays down right in front of the camera and poses for her. He obviously knows what to do when a camera is brought out.

So once we tell Gage it is our turn to take pictures, the following madness ensues.

This looks pretty cool, but if you look back at the original the man's legs are straight. I was determined to get this perfect, so I made us keep trying and told David to keep his legs straight as an arrow.

Oh trust me, this happened more than a few times. I started to think we could never get it perfect. I thought maybe I could do it better than David, so we switched roles.

Turns out I wasn't that great at straight legs and he definitely wasn't as graceful. Just look at his legs in that second picture. I still wasn't giving up. I thought maybe David was really the reason why we couldn't get a good shot, so I tried it with my sister Stefanie.

Turns out Stef was actually really good at it. My vigor was instantly renewed. I thought, "If Stef can do it, I know David can do it!" So we tried again.

I became a perfectionist, so I was too straight in this one. My back wasn't bendy enough.

We fell probably fifty times in the process.

And THEN we got a good one. So let me remind you what the original looked like:

And what our copy-cat looks like:

So what did I learn from this experience? That it takes about an hour, a lot of fumbles, a lot of sweating, and a willing husband to get a cool picture like the ones you see on Pinterest. It is never as easy as it looks.