Miranda Levi

Admittedly this month has come at me from a bad angle and caught me a bit off guard. There have been some personal matters to attend to and they really have sucked all of my energy and time over the last few weeks. On the bright side though I felt so inspired by Wil Wheaton’s blog post about making changes in his life last month I made strides to do the same in mine.

My best friend and I joined a local gym about five weeks ago. We both recognize that we needed to start taking better care of ourselves. I’m thirty now and things just seem to get harder not easier. I have my 2 and 3 year old niece and nephew in my life now and keeping up with them has not been easy.  From week one we’ve managed to go at least five days per week. We both started barely being able to manage 15 minutes on the elliptical before we were winded and ready to call it quits. Baby steps. Now five weeks later, we managed to walk/jog/run at least a 5k every day this week. We average roughly 50 min straight on the elliptical and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’ve just taken to showering at the gym instead of home.

Wil recommended an app called Zombie Run and I couldn’t agree more myself. It really is a pretty fantastic addition to my jogs, and works in conjunction with my Amazon Prime Music app. I remembered a friend telling me about this back when it first came out but I’d never actually used it until about two weeks ago, when I was looking for a way to make my workout more interesting. I’ve never seen the point in waiting for new years to make positive changes in my life.

Last year I learned that I was allergic to everything: cherries, wheat, rye, corn, garlic, onions, apples, oranges, raspberries, baking yeast, mushrooms, blue cheese, and the list goes on and on and on! Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy having to go gluten free or cutting out many of my favorite foods. But it is possible and so is going to gym. One step at a time to better my life.

I wish that I could say I have some new review to share with you but with all the chaos and my very sad attempt at #NaNoWrMo I’ve not finished anything recently. I am very close to finishing Bag of Bones by Stephen King though, so expect that review in the next week I’d say.

The holidays are around the corner and I’m determined not to let them put any sort of added stress in my life. I’m taking it slowly and I’ve nearly finished all of my holiday shopping as a result. I hate crowds and feeling rushed. So for the sake of my stress levels I’m getting it all done now so that I can simply enjoy the holidays as they come. Next week is Thanksgiving and it’s looking like we’ll have a full house with lots of friendly faces.

So I just remembered, while cleaning up my desk top, that I was doing a 30 day challenge. I warned you all that I’d probably forget or get behind. Such is life. So the next question was:

Talk about a book you love and one you don’t:

There have been so many books that I love, I think the list is very endless. Ready Player One by Ernie Cline comes to the top of my mind (Like you’d expected anything different). For so many, many reason (that I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs) I love this book. I’m also a big fan of The King Killer Chronicles by Pat Rothfuss. I’m a lover of Autobiographies and this year I loved Felicia Day’s as well as both of Mindy Kaling’s. As far as classics go, my favorite has always been Pride and Prejudice.  I LOVE to hate Wuthering Heights. Who doesn’t love Harry Potter as well?! Those books really turned me into reader fanatic girl who would go to midnight releases.

But a book I didn’t like? I guess I don’t finish books I don’t like. I have a rule: I always give a book 50 pages before ditching it for something better. There are millions of books and why should I have to painfully sit through something that I don’t like? I think the last book I read all the way through and didn’t like was Lord of the Flies. It was assigned to me for Sophomore English class way back in high school. I thought it was barbaric and really quite horrible. Since then, I’ve come to understand it’s social commentary and have considered re-reading it as an adult with new eyes. Yet I just haven’t brought myself to do it. Another book I just didn’t get into was Lord of the Rings. Let me back up a moment first. When the first LOTR movie came out in theatre, I was like 15 or 16. My friend and I saw it a dozzen times in theatre that summer. I was in love with it. I went out and bought a large 3 in 1 copy of the books but only barely manged to muddle through 200 pages before giving up. I was so disappointed that it didn’t resemble to movies at all. This is also when I made the pact with myself to always read the books before watching the movies. It has served me well.

Till next time,

M