Brandice.net Blog

Woah! Guess who has contacts after 26 years of wearing glasses every single day of her life?

I can’t even express how weird it is.

I went to my yearly eye exam last Friday and on a complete and utter whim decided to ask about contact lenses. My fifteen-year-old-looking optometrist cheerfully informed me that we could put some in same day and fifteen minute (and an awkward, eye-poking struggle between he and I) later, I was sporting some high tech saran wrap on my eyeballs.

Had some difficulty with the prescription being off initially (holy nauseating vertigo, batman!), but when I went in today, Doogie Howser strengthened the prescription in both eyes and I am suddenly REALLY excited. It isn’t as consistently clear as my glasses (astigmatism = strange weighted lenses that I have to blink into the right position and they easily blink back OUT of position), but man is the convenience ever worth it.

It’s so weird to be walking around with what I’ve always considered to be such a huge part of my “look.” I honestly had a bit of mourning, and I still get a little nervous about walking around without my specs, like I’m somehow more naked, but really, I’m just more… me. When I feel like wearing some nerd prop-ness, I can whip out the specs, but I don’t have to anymore, and that’s pretty cool.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow. Four stars instead of five because I feel a bit worn out from the stress of the almost constant struggling of every single character, and the intense description of cathedral construction was a bit much at times, but it was SO worth the read.

Several different passages at the end of the book brought me to tears, and overall this was such an epic, sweeping description of the struggle between good and evil, while also constantly detailing the grittiest and tiniest details of each significant moment. I don’t think I could go through it again, but I’m glad I read it this one time, and I loved the ending.

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Here’s a final shot from the last race I did on July 5th. Jessica (right) did the 5-mile and I did the 2-mile and we both had to do some walking because it was over 90 degrees at 8 freaking a.m., but I was really happy with finishing at all.

Later though, last Thursday actually, I went out for a run and I did the entire 2-mile course plus an extra 1.1 miles to complete a 5K without any walking whatsoever, to prove that I could do it at 5:30 a.m. even if I didn’t run the entire thing the day of the race. I was pretty psyched. :)

I’ve been slacking a bit with the running for the past week though… It feels like I don’t have anything coming up soon enough to keep me sharp with the running, so it’s more of a push to really get me out there 3 times a week. Still pushing, though!

I’m also pretty sure that my “yay, I’ve lost 50 pounds!” milestone gift to myself is going to be a bike (of the bicycle variety, not a hog). Something to keep me active seems like it would be a good pick me up when I will still have 25-30 pounds left until I hit my goal weight. Only 5 pounds until that bike, though! :)

Absolutely my favorite feature of the new Flickr photo page. I hated having to click around to get the embed code from other screens. Woo!

So, I had planned to blog about my second 5k race a week ago, the Jackson Night Glow 5K, but it just didn’t go well and I think I blocked it from my mind after last weekend. I had wanted it to be my first ALL running 5k and it just didn’t happen after I forced myself to run a fairly steep hill and then just crashed multiple times. I ran at least 2.5 miles of it, but I was struggling so much at the end that I was nearly in tears.

I ran it in about 46 minutes (worse than my first by a couple minutes) and I’m just chocking it up to a really humid night and pushing myself way too hard at the most difficult point of the run. I had a popsicle, listen to Jim’s reassurances, and then moved on.

One thing that this 5k reminded me of, however, is a criticism that I have of the Couch-to-5K program, which I finished in May. The program is really great, and it really did ease me into running in a really positive way that felt truly manageable at every point (even when I was pushing myself it was never an impossible push), BUT…

I wasn’t able to run a 5k when I finished, because it doesn’t train you to truly run a 5k. The program helps you to be able to run for 30 minutes, which is only a 5k if you run just under a 10 minute mile, which might be possible for someone who wasn’t a true couch potato when they started, but it’s kind of unrealistic for someone who’s never run in their life (me) and had a lot of extra weight on their body at the start (and is still firmly in the overweight category, despite losing 40 pounds).

I signed up for a 5k back in May that was right after I finished the training and at my 14-15 min mile pace, I was completely unprepared for a 45 minute run with no walking, especially road running. The program was amazing, but calling it Couch to 5k is a little misleading. I’ve started the Bridge to 10k program and I know it won’t truly train me for a full 10k at my pace, but it might actually get me comfortably up to doing a full 5k with no fear of failure.

On a positive note with the 5k running, I did complete a 3-mile run to Jim’s grandparents’ house on Thursday night with NO walking for the first time. Google mapped it as exactly 3.1 miles, but my running app measured it as 2.89 miles afterward, so I’m just taking the difference and counting it as a great 3 mile run that DEFinitely gets me closer to an all-running 5k completion than I’ve ever been.

Stay tuned for results of my first 2-mile race on July 5th. I’m very comfortable with running 2 miles, so I’m really looking forward to it. :)

Here are the shots I took during the unboxing of my iPhone. A proper review might come later, but mostly I’m just enjoying the phone’s existence.

[Photo album if you can't see the slideshow]

Things I love:

1. Display quality (holy COW)
2. Camera(s) (HD, 5 MP, front-facing, all gooood)
3. Battery life (it is noticeably better)
4. iOS 4 (rocks)
5. iMovie (although I’m still figuring out how to use it)
6. Design (it’s substantial to hold, beautiful design)

Thing I want:

1. Qik and Ustream compatibility with iPhone 4 cameras (fix it!)

So, today was… a day.

I started off by twisting my hair up into the usual “I don’t want to fully blowdry my hair because it’s already hot and I’m barely motivated to go to work” bun, only to realize 15 minutes into running around the hospital that I had a huge chunk of hair that was just totally askew and sticking out from the one side of my head like “DUDE. You forgot me and you look like a disheveled twerp.”

Oops. (Why don’t people TELL you about things like that?)

Then I made the mistake of saying, “Hmm… this is looking like it’s going to be a manageable day” out loud, and then the day from discharge planning hell commenced.

Oops.

In the midst of the discharge planning flurry, I got a text from my friend Trish, and the following lunch adventure ensued:

Trish: [text msg] I’m sitting at Parasson’s.
Brandice: [text msg] Jealous!!

*couple minutes, then I look at my phone again*

Trish: [text msg] Aren’t you joining me at noon?

Brandice: [in head] SHIT. That was today? But I know I put it in my calendar right in front of Trish with a 30 minute reminder… *checks calendar and lunch is listed for today, but at 8 PM.* SHIT.

Brandice: [text msg] Oh crap yes! Might be a few min late shit shit lol. Gimme ten min.

*I run to my office for my purse, run to the parking deck, fly through traffic and run frantically into Luigi’s, looking for Trish*

(Did you catch the part where I’m at Luigi’s? The OTHER Italian restaurant near the hospital that we didn’t decide to eat at?)

Waitress who is seating people: “You’re meeting someone? Is that her?”

*She points at a woman in her fifties, sitting alone at a booth.*

Brandice: “No, that’s not her, but I am meeting a friend. I’ll look around.”

*I look around frantically in all three sections of the restaurant and don’t find Trish. Waitress is helpfully following me through this process repeatedly asking if the woman in her fifties is my friend. I assure her that it most definitely is NOT my friend and that I am quite certain that I know what my lunch friend looks like.*

Waitress: “Well hon, she’s the only one waitin—–”

*I stop, because I just realized where I am and where I suddenly remember Trish is. I check the text msgs*

Brandice: “Oh SHIT!”

Oooooops.

*I run to the car, call Trish and explain, fly like a bat out of hell to the RIGHT restaurant and apologize profusely for being a giant moron.*

It was just one thing after the next today, launched into motion by bad hair decisions, kept in motion by frantic Italian food adventures, and it’s only just now winding down because I’m in the confines of my own home and can’t really do much damage for the time being.

Of course, now that I’ve said that “out loud” on the internet, I can’t do any laundry or operate any of our appliances for the rest of the nice, just to be safe.

OOPS.

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I grabbed this book for my iPad a while back because a few people that I trust in their smutty book taste had rated it highly and I wanted to venture outside my normal handful of authors.

The book is SO not a smut book, and I’m not really sure what category it best fits in (time travel = sci fi? 1700s = historical? relationship = romance?), but what I DO know is that I really enjoyed it. I had a really hard time putting it down and it was REALLY long, in a way that I found satisfying, like a series of stories that were all contained in one book.

I love the relationship that developed, I love how the main character handled the unexpected emergence of a *crucial* opportunity for her (no spoilers!), I loved the history (especially a history I really don’t remember learning much about), and I loved how invested I felt in so many of the characters, even those that were definitely not upstanding.

Not sure who to recommend the book to, but I do recommend it. I enjoyed it immensely and will probably go on to read the subsequent books in the series. I hope each volume is as good as this one. :)

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