Friend Makin’ Mondays: Twenty Questions

It’s been ages since I participated in FMM, so here we go:

If you’ve taken part in FMM then you know the rules. If you’re new, please take a moment to answer this week’s question on your own blog then add your link in the comments section here at: http://www.alltheweigh.com so we can all see your FMM questions and answers. Please invite your blog readers to add their links here too so everyone has to opportunity to be seen. The idea is to connect with other awesome bloggers so take a moment to post your own FMM post and comment on a couple of other posts. Now it’s time for this week’s topic!

Twenty Questions

1. Share something that you enjoy doing when you’re alone. Paint my nails.

2. What do you plan to eat next? Chicken with mushrooms and tomato

3. When did you first travel on a plane? Where did you go? 2002, I was 20 and headed for England for a year.

4. Do you currently have a crush on someone? If so, share a few of the reasons why. No.

5. List one thing that disgusts you that probably wouldn’t bother someone else. The skin on pudding. Yuck!

6. If you could buy a new car tomorrow (and money was no object) what would you buy? A mini. Surprisingly roomy despite its name.

7. Who was the first person who broke your heart? I don’t think I ever had my heart broken.

8. If you could spend the night with a celebrity tonight, who would it be? I have no idea.

9. Are you a morning person or a night person? Night. Definitely.

10. What’s your favorite board game? Scrabble

11. Can you play an instrument? If so, what do you play? Nope. Tried to learn playing the guitar, but laziness struck again!

12. What is the last thing you ate? A wrap with turkey, cream cheese and shrimps.

13. Do you wear a watch? Yes, my dad’s.

14. Do you go to church? Not in years (does sightseeing count?

15. Do you ever wish on stars? No.

16. Have you ever been on a motorcycle? Yes! I even have a license. Sadly, I didn’t drive one since the exam.

17. What is the last thing you purchased? Cat food.

18. How big is your bed? 1,40 m x 2,20 m

19. What size shoe do you wear? 43 (German size)

20. What are you looking forward to most in the coming week? The weekend. Nothing special in sight.

Your turn!

April April!

Apr1

April April! is what Germans say when making April Fool’s jokes. And today is the day. I am not a fan.

Still, it’s a first of a new month, and I am starting – again. We have today off too, as well as Good Friday. All that Easter candy? Not good. Why did they invent Kinder Riegel at all? And who decided to make them into cute little bunnies?? Good thing Easter’s over now. I have to get back on track asap. I have been really lazy with the exercise lately. Ok, I have been really lazy with everything lately. Which might be a little due to the new pill I have been taking. I have feeling very listless the past couple of months, and I have a slight suspicion it had something to do with the pill. So I stopped taking it about two weeks ago. It might be my imagination, but I did feel better rather quickly. So I will see what happens for a little longer, and talk to my doctor about it. My skin got really bad while taking it too, and that has improved as well. I was prescribed a different one because of my weight, but I don’t think getting signs of depression is helping either. I don’t really care finding out if it would get worse.

Weightwars has invited me to a diet bet, but I have decided not to take part officially due to my experience with betting for weight loss (it never worked). I will still try to lose the four percent (which is 4.54 kg / 10 lbs) and see what happens. I have set all my tools (myfitnesspal, fitbit) to start again. I’m still hoping I will win over my weight one day.

Last weekend was spent in Berlin – it was my sister’s birthday. I used to not mind so much being that far away from my family, but now I think it would be nice to live a little closer. Of course, a two-hour train ride is probably not much compared toAmerican standards, but I can’t just pop by for an evening. If I didn’t like my job, I’d probably get a new one in Berlin.

Speaking of job, we get a new colleague tomorrow. We’ve been searching for more than six months now. I don’t know exactly what the problem was – either the applicants not good enough, a useless HR department or we were not appealing enough. Either way, finally there is someone to help me with all the stuff I had to do all of a sudden after the person I was supposed to assist left the company with basically three day’s notice. Even though she was a very difficult person to work with, it hurt my workload a lot when she left. But to be honest, that was the only reason anyone minded her going. I don’t think I ever met anyone as socially unadept as her. We were not a happy office. Anyway, I hope the new colleague will fit in nicely, and we will get along well. We (I) definitely need the help, because there are a lot of things that have been done rather superficially as there just wasn’t enough time. The only thing I’m a little sad about is my new “office”.

before

after

I am still in the same room, but there is a corner with two more desks. That’s where I “live” now. As you can see, I had a better view before. I also was closer to my other colleagues. Now, I’m a little out of the way. I can’t see who enters the room right away. Actually, I won’t see a lot at all back there. Yeah, I’m nosy.

I hope everyone had a great Easter. See you!

Must I?

Mar17

Lately, I have been in a rather – let’s call it lazy – mood. I don’t want to do anything. Really, up until yesterday, I wasn’t even reading my blogs. What I did manage to do was get sick twice in a month. I was at home sick since Tuesday. That should be enough for the rest of the year, right? I really hope that was it. So of course, I didn’t get a lot of exercise. Well, to be honest – the only exercise I did get was when I got on the treadmill at Runner’s Point so they could video tape my running.

Good news is – I don’t have any weird things happening to my feet and legs. That itself is no news (we did the same thing when I bought the last pair), but I am glad that my insoles do not affect the running in a bad way. I need to get another pair of them though, because the running shoes are size 45!! (11 in US), which is two to three sizes larger than what I usually wear. And they are for men. Are there any lady shoes in that size at all? Oh, and I found out that the insoles are 150 to 250 Euro per pair if you don’t have a prescription! You’d think they are made of gold.

Last year I signed up for a 5k. As you may know (or not), I didn’t actually participate. So I signed up for the one on May 24th. Guess what? It is very likely I will not make it to that one either. We are having another tax people meeting in London. The probable date: May 22nd to May 24th. Do you think that’s a sign? It could either mean – give up, you’re not gonna make it anyway; or maybe it’s – train for a 5k and sign up when you’re ready, preferably two days in advance; or it means nothing and it’s just a dumb coincidence. Does anybody believe in astrology or any of that stuff?

I have to put in more effort. I mean that as general as it sounds. In the last month, I haven’t done a lot more than read and watch tv in my spare time.

I am still considering the Diet Bet. The reason I am hesitating is that betting on any weight loss hasn’t turned out very well for me in the past. On the other hand – it’s only 15 $ and the exchange rate is good for euros. If you’d like to participate, check out Rebecca’s post at Weight Wars. It’s still a little time till April after all.

I’m alive!

Mar3

Hi y’all!

I can’t believe a whole month has gone by without me posting anything. Haven’t really done much blog following either in that time. The last two weeks before my vacation have been stuffed with a lot of work and I really didn’t do much else. The first week of my vacation didn’t look that differently. The first weekend I went to Berlin to see my mother for her birthday. On Monday I went vacation-shopping with my sister. I needed snow pants because I thought cross-country skiing in jeans wouldn’t work out so well. We went into the shop, I picked a pair, tried it on and was done. It took my sister a little longer to find some, but eventually we found something.

When I got back, I spent the rest of the week doing basically nothing. I really needed that time off. And then I got sick. My body couldn’t have picked a worse time. To days before we were going to Oberhof I got the typical aches in my legs I get when I am sick. This is usually a bad sign. If that’s possible I did even less on Saturday and Sunday because I really wanted to enjoy that vacation. Luckily the aches where gone on Monday, just to be replaced with a nasty cough. On Wednesday the sniffles started too. It was really annoying. Luckily we spent a lot of time outside – once I got inside, I started sneezing all the time. It was really crappy. Between me and my mother being sick, I told my sister – if she doesn’t get sick now, she’ll probably survive Ebola.

Apart from the coughing and the sneezing, I really enjoyed our time in Oberhof. We took a cross-country skiing class on Monday, because the last time I was standing on skis was probably 1988. We were really lucky with our trainer – he was a trainer for nordic combined and had trained quite a few successful athletes, for example Ronny Ackermann (he won silver in Salt Lake City 2002 and a few World Championships and World Cups). We even found two pictures of him in a museum for winter sports in Thuringia. He really did a great job in teaching us.

The best thing to say about our hotel was that it was right behind what we call Loipe (that’s the specially prepared track for cross country skiing). I suspect the hotel used to be a boarding school. The rooms were ok, but the service was pretty bad. They had a little cafe that was supposedly open from 2 p.m. every day – the one day we went there we waited for 20 minutes and nobody showed up. The staff was generally not very attentive and it appeared as if half of them were still in training, even practising setting the tables right during dinner time. The food was mostly good though.

The cross-country skiing was really fun. My sister and I are far from being good at it, but we really enjoyed it. As with inline skating, stopping was not really my strong point. In the end, I usually landed on my butt, but it did get a lot better on the last day – I didn’t fall once. And I never hurt myself. A friend of my sister dislocated and broke her thumb during a fall, so I’m glad nothing happened.

When it was too steep, we took off our skis on the way down, but never on the way up. Sometimes people looked a bit funny, but I’d rather walk down than end up wrapped around a tree or crash into someone. It sometimes took us ages to get up the hills, but it did result in nice numbers on my fitbit.

By the way, what on earth do you have to do to get to an active score of 1,000? Run a marathon?

Yesterday I visited “Mystica Hamelon” with a few friends. That is a kind of Renaissance fair in Hameln (Hamelin). As I’ve been told, Hameln is one of the few German towns relatively known to foreigners as it is famous for “Pied Piper of Hamelin“. The fair was really good, they put a lot of effort in it. Yesterday was the first sunny day in a very long time, and everyone seemed to enjoy that. It got quite cold after it was dark though. I did not envy the people working there.

Forest Creatures at Mystica Hamelon

I hope everyone had a good February. I’ll go through my reader and find out what I missed – after I go for a walk, the sun is peeking through the clouds and I’m hoping to catch a few rays of sunshine. Happy Sunday everyone!

Blog of the year award 2012

Jan27

Ok, I know we have 2013 already, but Toni over at The Girl in the Yoga Pants has kindly nominated me for the blog of the year award. That came pretty much out of the blue, and I want to thank her again for that honour. I wanted to pass on that award to my favourite blogs. Initially I thought I’d say something about every blog, but I’ve had a hell of a week which resulted in me having the laziestest (yes, I just invented that word) weekend ever. I basically just went grocery shopping yesterday, did a minimum amount of cleaning and watched a full season of True Blood. So now it’s late and I still have laundry to hang up for drying. So I’ll just make a list. Here it comes:

(the never ending) Adventures in Fitness (& life)
Army Amy*
Bella on the beach
Instant Student
meals & moves
Nihrida
The Girl in Yoga Pants
The Hungry Runner Girl
The Sassy Pear
Weight Wars

I want to encourage everyone to award the blog(s) you love and read regularly. As always, there are rules (I’m going to bed now, don’t expect me to write anything else after the rules. Good night!):

The ‘rules’ for this award are simple:

1 Select the blog(s) you think deserve the ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award

2 Write a blog post and tell us about the blog(s) you have chosen – there’s no minimum or maximum number of blogs required – and ‘present’ them with their award.

3 Please include a link back to this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award – http://thethoughtpalette.co.uk/our-awards/blog-of-the-year-2012-award/ and include these ‘rules’ in your post (please don’t alter the rules or the badges!)

4 Let the blog(s) you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the ‘rules’ with them

5 You can now also join our Facebook group – click ‘like’ on this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award Facebook group and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience

6 As a winner of the award – please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award – and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar … and start collecting stars…

Yes – that’s right – there are stars to collect!

Unlike other awards which you can only add to your blog once – this award is different!

When you begin you will receive the ‘1 star’ award – and every time you are given the award by another blog – you can add another star!

There are a total of 6 stars to collect.

Which means that you can check out your favourite blogs – and even if they have already been given the award by someone else – you can still bestow it on them again and help them to reach the maximum 6 stars!

‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award Badges

Here are the six badges for you to collect – you can either ‘swop’ your badge for the next one each time you are given the award – or even proudly display all six badges if you are lucky enough to be presented with the award six times!