Having been a vegetarian for 13 years and counting, I have no trouble navigating the food choices available to me. In addition to that, I have also become well acquainted with certain “challenges” that come along with the title of vegetarian that can be both amusing and annoying.

• I started thinking about this a few nights ago when D and I went out to pick up some food from Chipotle for dinner. As we were standing in line, I suddenly started laughing to myself. D asked me what was up and I told him that I had just been thinking about how funny it is when you go to the counter and as for a vegetarian burrito bowl and they ask you what kind of meat you want with it. Sure enough, when we got to the front of the line, here’s how it went down:

  Chipotle guy: Hi, how can I help you?
  Me: I’d like a vegetarian burrito bowl to go please.
  Chipotle guy: (Asks about rice and beans)
  Chipotle guy: (After adding said rice and beans, slides my order down the counter to the meat selection). What kind of meat?
  Me: Just the veggies please!

  Behind me, D had a good chuckle.

• When meeting someone for the first time and the subject of food comes up:

  Me: So, I’m a vegetarian…
  Other person: Oh! So does that mean you’re a vegan?

  Wouldn’t I have said I was a vegan if I was a vegan?

• A big pet peeve of mine is certain restaurants that have NOT ONE SINGLE thing on the menu that doesn’t contain meat. This doesn’t come up too frequently, because at the very least, most places will have salads. What kills me is when going to a restaurant (this happens most often with chains) that has no entrees, appetizers or even SALADS without meat.

• People who think you must starve and not eat any protein if you’re a vegetarian: I think I covered that myth pretty thoroughly in this guest post.

• People who think it must be impossible for a couple to include a meat eater and a vegetarian. It really isn’t all that difficult! In fact, I have no idea what it would be like to date another vegetarian as it has never happened. I also talked a lot about that in yet another guest post here.

• A lot of my friends and people I know in general are big fans of this philosophy:

  But that one just makes me laugh

If you’re a vegetarian, what are some of your pet peeves? For all the meat eaters out there, tell me your pet peeves about food in general!

Alisha from Musings of a Maniac Mama was kind enough to recently nominate me for the Versatile Blogger Award!

Thank you Alisha!

Receiving this award means that I need to share 7 random facts about myself. Seeing as how I recently gave you 11 random facts, I figured I’d switch this one up a little bit and instead I’m going to give you 7 random things I’m looking for in a house. My house hunting journey has just begun, and here are some of the things I’m looking for:

1. My number one priority in a house is the kitchen/dining area. I’d ideally like to have something that has a nice, open, modern kitchen and a separate dining room that would be big enough to host family gatherings during the holidays. The kitchen I have now in my apartment, is tiny, narrow and can barely contain two people without a fight breaking out.

2. Outdoor space: Having lived in apartments for my the entirety of my independent adult life, I’ve never had an outdoor space of my own. It doesn’t need to be anything big or extravagant, but a nice deck or patio would be awesome. Maybe having an outdoor space of my own would lead to me getting more sun and thus help out with my vitamin D problems.

3. LOTS of space: Between D and myself, we have way too much stuff and currently, nowhere to put it. D is a comic book collector and music/movie/video game enthusiast. This leads to having lots of media storage issues. Not to mention, I’m a big pack rat myself. Extra rooms or a furnished basement would be a great bonus for us. Plus a walk-in closet

4. Location: As is always the case in real estate, location is the one thing you can’t change about a house, and it’s the most important feature. We need to make sure we’re not too far from my work or D’s work, plus that we’re still close enough to our families.

5. Age: Okay, so here’s the thing. We live in Massachusetts and apparently that means that every other house you look at was built before 1900, and some are shockingly even older than that. Old houses come with nothing but problems, not to mention they generally don’t have many modern conveniences. We may have to pay more for it, but I want a new(er) house.

6. Bathrooms: D and I have been living together in the same apartment for the past 2.5 years and there’s one thing we’ve become accustomed to that we just don’t want to have to live without: Having two full bathrooms. In the mornings, it doesn’t matter who’s getting ready when, because we have two showers and we don’t have to budget time around each other. This is something we’d love to carry over into our new house.

7. Quiet: I don’t want to live on a noisy/busy street, and I can’t wait to have some privacy away from the hordes of neighbors that currently live in our building.

Thanks again, Alisha, for nominating me for this award!

This has been one of those weeks where I’ve felt like I had no time whatsoever to relax. Between thinking about/planning house stuff, dealing with a very aggressive work deadline, fitting in workouts and trying to keep our home running, it’s been a little on the crazy side. I can usually deal with stress pretty well, but when everything goes crazy at the same time, it can be a little difficult not to go crazy yourself.

Here are some things I do when I’m feeling overwhelmed with life to stay sane:

Video Games

I’ve been a fan of video games since I was a little kid, and there’s nothing that takes you away from your own troubles more than throwing on a game and losing yourself in another world. D and I recently downloaded A Link to The Past on the Wii (pic above) and have been playing that for some nostalgia. I love the Link and Mario series, but we also love to throw on newer games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and variety of others.

Just Dance

Speaking of games – and I’m sure this is not a shock to anyone who’s read my blog for more than a few entries – one of the best stress-relieving games out there is Just Dance. When I’m having a stressful day at work, sometimes I’ll come home for lunch and throw on the game for a little while. I also love that this counts as a workout, and I really get my heart-rate up when playing!

Get Out in Nature

I’m lucky enough to live and work in an area that, while still close enough to the city of Boston, has a quiet, somewhat naturey feel to it. Sometimes I’ll just go for a walk and look at the birds, the geese and whatever other wildlife happens to be out that day. It helps remind me that whatever problem I’m trying to work out on the computer isn’t the end of the world.

Plan A Vacation

There’s nothing like getting away from it all and taking a luxurious vacation, if it’s something you can swing. Last year, D and I went to Disney World and Vegas and each trip was amazing in its own way. The best part is, it’s not just the act of taking the vacation that helps relieve stress, but planning one and knowing it’s on the horizon is a great way to stay motivated during long, seemingly endless work weeks. We’re going to try to go to Disney again this year (it’s our favorite spot), and once things are a little more figured out with the house, we’ll start planning the details.

Relax

And there’s nothing wrong at all with sitting back at the end of a long day, throwing on a care-free movie or tv show and having a glass of wine.

How do you keep yourself going when life is stressful? Any big vacations planned for 2013?

After much anticipation, I’ve finally taken the first steps toward buying my first house as of this weekend. Since I found out I got my promotion and raise about a month ago, I’ve known that the next step I wanted to take knowing my new income was to visit a bank and get a mortgage preapproval. I kept putting it off for some reason or another – either having too much to do on any given Saturday (the only day both D and I would be able to go in together that the bank was open), or fear of the whole thing in general. A few times over the past few weeks, I went to pick up the phone and give them a call to set something up and I’d work myself up into a nervous frenzy about it and decide not to.

Well, two weeks ago, I finally decided to go for it and I talked to a nice guy in the mortgage department at the bank we had chosen. It was the bank where we attended a first time home buying seminar about a year ago, and they had a really awesome first time homebuyers program that we wanted to get involved in. This particular program only requires an 11% down payment rather than the full 20% and has lots of other great benefits.

This past Saturday was the big day, and yes I was a ball of nerves. I had no idea what kind of rates we’d be looking at and how much we’d be told we could afford. The man we met with was very helpful and answered all the questions we had. I left my financial information with him and he told me he’d get back to me no later than Monday with the results, as he had to run through the applications, numbers, etc. I was kind of disappointed that I wouldn’t be getting my money answers right away, but relieved that the first step of this whole process was over with.

We came home and I started doing my usual Saturday things around the house: cleaning, making phone calls, checking up on things online, and D settled in with some NHL ’11 on the PS3. It had to have only been 2 or 3 hours later when I checked my phone and saw an email from the bank. I had my mortgage pre-approval, complete with some very promising numbers! We were approved for up to $400,000 with some wiggle room to go higher if needed. This was very exciting and I was so relieved to find out that we would be able to afford what will hopefully be a very nice house.

Sunday I woke up with no energy, until a thought occurred to me: we can go to open houses now that we know our budget! I mentioned this thought to D and we immediately got dressed and listed out 4 different addresses in the city we currently live that were having open houses that afternoon.

Interestingly, each house we saw was better than the one before it. However, none had everything we were looking for, but we weren’t going into this spur-of-the-moment open house expedition anticipating to find our dream home. Here’s what we found:

House #1 – This house was kind of a disaster, in that we didn’t even end up going inside the house. The street it was on was enough to drive us away. It was the most narrow one-laned two-way street of all time, located on a precarious hill and just driving up there and trying to park was giving me anxiety.

House #2 : A little better. This house was very claustrophobic though, and had a really odd attic space that they were using as kind of a closet. The finishes were nice – granite countertops, nice fixtures, new looking appliances. However, definitely was not for us, and later we found out that the house had been built in 1810(!), which really explained the narrowness and awkwardness inside.

House #3 : This was a split-level house with more room, but the layout really wasn’t doing it for me. Again, nice fixtures, etc. but not for us.

House #4 : This was the best one yet. It was very large (over 2000 square feet), had a big in-ground pool with patio and deck in the backyard, a semi-finished basement, and very big, upgraded kitchen. The downsides: the closets were absolutely tiny. I don’t think I could fit half my clothes in the master bedroom’s closet, let alone any of D’s stuff. There was also only 1.5 baths, and we’d ideally like 2 full. This house was very much getting close to what we were looking for, but the price was also very high.

Overall, I was encouraged to see what our money could get us, after years of imagining the worst (that I would have to settle for something old and falling apart because Massachusetts prices are ridiculous). The next step is to get a realtor and since my mother’s cousin is one, I’m going to try getting in contact with her and moving on from there. I can’t stop looking at all of the online listings now and I’m extremely excited for this process.

Do you own your own home? How long did it take you to find the house you ended up buying? If you’re not a homeowner yet, what’s one thing you couldn’t live without in a house?

After last week’s events, plus just coming off a bad cold and D’s shoulder injury, I’ve felt extraordinarily behind on everything lately, from working out to housework and even blogging. I suppose you could say that it’s been a rough month. This week though, I’m trying my hardest to get everything back to normal and running smoothly.

I’m off to a great start on the workout front. I’ve worked out all 3 days this week so far and yesterday and today were a solid hour each. Yesterday was the first time I’d worked out for that long in what feels like forever, and it felt really good. I didn’t set out to exercise for that long, but once I got going, I just didn’t really stop. That’s another thing I haven’t experienced in a LONG time – actually enjoying my workout.

Today, I woke up an hour early to get in my workout, and whenever I do that, it seems inevitable that I will have a productive day. It’s not only because I’ve got my workout out of the way and don’t have to try to squeeze it in during or after work, but even more importantly, it makes me feel good mentally. I feel productive, and thus, I am more productive as a result. Momentum – it’s a real thing.

My workouts lately have been pretty consistent with the past few months. I’ve been doing a lot of dance-oriented workouts because they’re incredibly fun, get my heart-rate up and keep me entertained because I’m constantly picking up new choreography (which, by the way, is also good for your brain – it exercises your brain too!). I’ve also been peppering in some bootcamp workouts from earlier this year whenever I feel like I need a good strength workout. Let me tell you, those workouts never get easier. They’re killer. I probably could stand to add in even more of these workouts than I’m doing now, but I figure as long as I’m moving, it’s a win. Some days, I don’t have the motivation to do something that’s going to totally kill my body. Those are the days I turn to dance.

My eating is an ever-improving process. I’m trying to stay on track and eat lots of fruits and veggies, which generally isn’t a problem. I love veggies with a passion, but fruits on the other hand, I sort of have to force myself to eat. Also, there’s been lots of occasions in the past few weeks where I’ve splurged. Just in the past week, I’ve had cake at 3 different events (2 at work and 1 at a baby shower).

So, it’s back on track now and it feels good. I’m going to attempt to wake up early again tomorrow and try to have the same productivity that I did today.

When are you most productive – morning, afternoon or night? What’s your favorite workout of the moment?