Catching up

Since starting my online Anatomy and Physiology course, I've had a lot less time for yoga, coffee, friends, the dog, and basically everything other than studying (including you, blog). On a good day, I spend 3 hours reading, reviewing and quizzing myself. Then I put on 1000000 layers to shovel my car out of the snow, and go to work.

Luckily, I get to learn cool things like why nicotine makes smokers cough, and less cool things like the fact that proteasomes contain numerous enzymes that break down denatured or damaged proteins. Woohoo!! Science!!!!

Hi dog... sorry I've been neglecting you...

On the Green Smoothie front, I've finally reached the point where I'm finally not hungry 20 minutes later. I've begun putting ground flax and some sort of nut butter in my smoothies, which really helps with the fullness factor. In fact, I'm usually not hungry until noon, which is a HUGE change for me! But with my tighter schedule, I'm really happy to be able to sit down and concentrate all morning without a growling stomach.

As for my evenings, I've suddenly had a lot more single-lady-eat-in-front-of-the-tv-nights. I was surprised that a lot of my meals were actually pretty delicious:

Roasted Eggplant and chickpea tomato sauce with spaghettini tossed in pesto.

Mashed potato with salad and leftover falafel.

Grilled eggplant, roasted green beans on a bed of mashed potatoes.

If you can't tell, I've been on a serious mashed potato kick these days. It must be the cold weather. I just bought another bag of potatoes to play with in the next few days, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Gifts galore

We're getting close to the new year and there are still about 700 houses in Toronto out of power from that terrible ice storm last week. Workers are still out there plugging away at the one-off disconnections, but most intersections have been restored. 

If you're in the Toronto area, please donate to the local food banks, like our North York Harvest Food Bank, which is low on it's donations this year due to the fact that so many homes in the area were out of electricity and donating food was probably the last thing on people's minds. 

Now on to some happy stuff!

For Christmas, my sister got me these cute socks with polar bears on them. Only downside is that they won't possibly fit into shoes, so I can't wear them out.

 Then, today, I got the a gift in the mail even more awesome than cute socks:

My new physiology text book!! Woo hoo!! I've signed up for a course at the online university, Athabasca University, starting January. Eventually, I want to enroll in a physiotherapy program somewhere, but I've got a whole staircase of baby steps before I get there. 

Wish me luck!