What I Wore #12

Over the weekend the sun came out and finally melted away some of the snow. I have been dying to take more outfit posts outdoors. It's almost always windy outside all year round making it hard to do so. We took our chances and stopped by our favorite park to snap a few quick photos. I am in love with my mustard yellow jeans! I still don't know if I really like the gray sweater with the yellow. I do however think my owl necklace was perfect. I love him.


Someone had fed this squirrel some peanuts. He was so happy!


Cody always makes me laugh when he takes my photos. What you don't see are all the outtakes.
Most of them are me yelling at him saying,"Take good pictures! They are for the blog!"
He always responds,"I'm not a photographer!"
We just laugh about it and then at least we get some natural smiles if anything.
Below is my Wonder Woman pose...

The squirrel was not amused by our picture taking.

OUTFIT DETAILS
Gray Sweater - Abercrombie, Thrifted $3 | Pants - Old Navy $10 | Necklace - My Work $6
Shoes - Converse One Stars, Target | Black Tank Top - JcPenney $3

Please know that I am a clearance rack / thrift store kind of girl.
I do not have tons of money to invest in a wardrobe.
I do these posts to boost my self confidence and be cute on a budget. ;)
Plus it's fun.

Meet My Furry Friends

Today I am doing a guest post over at B is for Becky! Becky has a great feature on her blog every Friday where she has a blogger share their pet story. When Becky asked me if I wanted to do it I was super excited!! I love my Fur Babies! Here is my whole family below...


Head over to Becky's blog to hear about my pets and how I ended up with so many!
Have a great weekend friends! :)

RECIPE: PIRATE STEW

This was one of our favorite meals before we went vegan.
We realized we could still eat it though by replacing the beef with veggie crumbs! SCORE!

INGREDIENTS:
12oz package of Veggie Crumbs, (this replaces your beef)
1 cup uncooked Brown Rice
3 cups diced Potatoes
1 cup diced Celery
2 cups of sliced Carrots
2 cups canned Kidney Beans
1 tsp of Salt
1/8 tsp of Pepper
1/4 tsp of Chili Powder
1/4 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
1 cup Tomato Sauce
3 cups of water

If you want to use a slow cooker instead of a big pot, only use 1/4 cup of rice and 1/2 cup of water.
Layer the ingredients in the slow cooker in the order given above.
Cover. Cook on Low for 6 hours, or until potatoes and rice are cooked.
We cook ours in a huge pot so that we can add more rice and veggies!



This a very filling hearty winter meal! Great for cold days. :)

My Favorite Pins #8

1   I have been looking at a lot of Vegan tattoos on Pinterest :)
2   Love this print. How adorable. We should all hugs trees everyday!
3   I actually started a Walking Dead pin board. I get with-drawls, okay...
4   Zion National Park, beautiful! Hope to go there this year
5   Just funny! I guess even cartoon characters have a thing for Ryan


6   Andrew Lincoln & Walking Dead = PERFECTION
7   I actually want to quit my job so I can dye my hair bright colors!
8   A dolphin and a cat friends? Awwwww
9   Beautiful.
10  I love windmills :)

Can you see all my pins HERE.
Pinterest is so addicting! I love it.

VEGAN FOR 1 YEAR & A GIVEAWAY!

So we did it. Vegan for 1 full year. A year ago we watched the film Forks Over Knives on a whim. Little did we know it was going to change our lives so drastically. It effected our everyday food choices, the products we buy, the way we view the world and our overall well being. Since going Vegan I view life completely differently. I don't feel like I have an empty VOID anymore. I feel like I have a life to live and it's full of things to live for.


The one thing I find frustrating as a Vegan is people always saying to me, "I couldn't do it." OR "I can't do it."
I can't give up Cheese.
I can't give up MEAT.
Etc..etc..

I get it, I understand. The difference for me I think is I watched a film on a complete WHIM and it simply just made sense to me. I didn't have a blogger or a Vegan sit there and tell me I needed to change. It all happened by chance. FATE I guess you could say. :) I ate meat, dairy, and everything else for the first 30 years of my life. The way I look at it is, I am living proof. Don't ever say that you CAN'T do something. You should never underestimate yourself or set yourself up for failure in anything you do in your life. I've lived my life both ways and I gotta say if someone would of gave me the information I know now SOONER, I would of went Vegan years ago.


I will admit that there are side effects to being Vegan. I do however feel like the side effects are different for everyone. My friend Kara who I inspired to go Vegan (woot-woot) has a hard time giving up Twizzlers and Mac N Cheese. (Twizzlers probably are Vegan, but loaded with sugar and chemicals. Which we also do not eat.) Giving up the food from my old life was NOT hard for me. There are so many great meals that imitate meat and dairy products that help you to fight your cravings. Being Vegan to me is not hard. It just seems hard till you try it out yourself.

The main problem for me is being judged by all the HATERS out there. If you follow my blog you may have read about it HERE. I get very emotional over people who DON'T know me at all, criticizing me for my lifestyle. This is not just a diet or food choices, it's the core of my being. It's becomes practical a religion. May sound crazy, but it just happens. I remind myself of the Grinch from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. At the end of the movie when his heart grows like 5 sizes bigger, that's me. Being Vegan has made my heart full of love for life.
It's amazing.

My last side effect would be the sadness I feel over watching all the people around me everyday NOT be Vegan. Sound crazy? You seriously judge the world so differently and it makes you sad when others don't seem to care about the things that you do. Again, this could just be me NOT all Vegans. For me I would love for my family and friends to adapt to my lifestyle. The health benefits is the number one reason. Of course second being animals rights. I want my family to live a long healthy life and being Vegan can help do that.

The way I look at it is, I went my entire life NEVER knowing about Veganism or evening knowing what a Vegan was. No one was around to tell me about it or educate me about the food choices I was making. Now I have the knowledge and the tools and I want to spread awareness. Especially to the people that I love. Like I said above, if I would of know about this years ago I would of changed then. When I watch the videos of how (most) farming is done in this country, it rips my heart out every time. This brings me to my last topic I want to talk about...


In my daily life I know lots of people who LOVE animals. Have many pets of their own, can't stand animals being beaten and abused and just have COMPASSION in general for animals. If any of this is you, I believe from the bottom of my heart that you could be Vegan. All it takes is COMPASSION. I recently have been debating on getting a Vegan tattoo. I lean towards just getting the word compassion tattooed on me instead. It's all about loving all living creatures. I went Vegan for the health benefits after watching Forks Over Knives.


Months later was when I started learning about how abused farm animals are. It's disgusting. How any human being can throw a LIVE baby chicken into a machine that grinds them up I will never understand. My heart aches for those animals that die such painful deaths just to end up on someones plate. I can say that up until last month when I watched Vegucated, I didn't realize how bad the treatment of farm animals is. So needless to say, I'm going into 2013 even STRONGER. I don't like to go into details on my blog posts about animal abuse. I know if you are interested, you will make the decision to research it yourself. In conclusion, for me the word Vegan and compassion have basically the same meaning. I also want to give a shot out to all the awesome Vegetarians out there!!! :) Now let me lighten the mood a bit and move on to my giveaway....


I wanted to celebrate my 1 year anniversary of being Vegan by giving away one of my favorite cookbooks. It's called Happy Herbivore by Lindsay Nixon. She is like a hero to me. She is making being Vegan super easy for people worldwide. Many of the recipes you see here on my blog are from her cookbook. I figured if you won the book for FREE, you would be more likely to try some of these yummy recipes out yourself. (Free is always good.)

How is this giveaway going to work?
Well just leave me a blog comment below just like you always would and also tell me how you follow my blog. :) Simple.
I am using Rafflecopter for this giveaway. Make sure to enter below...
a Rafflecopter giveaway
I hope to offer my readers more personal giveaways like this throughout the year. This book will be purchased by me with my own money. Make sure that you leave me contact information or a link to your blog so I can email you if you end up being the lucky winner! The winner will be drawn on Friday January 25th! GOOD LUCK! :)

(I will ship this this book international!)

4 Simple Goals Before 2013 // The Results

You may or may not remember me posting about my 4 SIMPLE GOALS BEFORE 2013. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to do a RECAP post about it, but after reading Kitty's post I decided to. She inspired me to share my results. So here we go...


FAIL! This is the only goal I feel I completely failed out. I feel like you can always make time for things that are important to you. I failed at making time to workout. I will say that my job physically wears me out daily. When I get home I have very little energy. I walk what feels like miles at work. I don't feel too badly about not working out. I just know it's better for me. Especially since I want to bike so much this year. I need to "train" for my first real season of cycling. I have worked out a little bit this month. I am also already starting to not drink as much caffeine/coffee. I am heading in the right direction, just not before 2012 ended. HA! Oh well. Next goal...


This is a tricky one to answer. I started out really good in October and into early November. Then we ended up buying a house so quickly that my life and schedule was turned upside down. Most of my time management issues have to do with my blog. I love my blog, but it takes up so much of my time. Too much. I didn't fail this goal, but I still need to figure out better ways to manage my time I take to do posts. Also trying to keep up with all the reading of other blogs has gotten really hard for me. I want to visit you all, but there just isn't enough time in the day!! Blog Lovin' is helping me out a lot right now with keeping up with my reading list. I am trying to do most my blog posts on only a few days of the week. (Freeing up the other days.) Still struggling though. I need time for real life. LOL


This goal I did. Only one huge hill, but it counts. Gosh, it burned so bad! Our last bike ride that we took in October we went a different way on the trail. There was this long long hill that I never thought I would be able to climb up. Of course Cody blasted by me. I yelled obscenities the whole time I was peddling up the hill. Cody keep yelling at me not to stop and I just kept going. I did make it to the top without stopping. It just was painful and took what felt like an eternity. This is why I need to workout more. We now have a bike trainer in our basement. My bike is hooked up to it and you just peddle like a spin bike. It's so freakin hard! I can't wait to be able to climb mountains on my bike. It will all be worth it in the end.


This I felt was a goal that may have seemed strange to people. Since I moved 1200 miles away from my parents I don't see them EVER. I don't feel like I talk to them enough and it's sad. Time goes by so fast and I don't ever want to regret not keeping in better contact with them. We have talked more on the phone since October and emailed more. I hope to start taking the time to write letters and call more often. I think it's really important. So, I didn't fail at this goal but there is room for improvement.

We all have goals for 2013. I think we just have to focus on the really important stuff. Don't put way too much pressure on yourself to do a million things. Of course I say that and I have my 32 Things list. HA! I want to be really ambitious this year. I think if Cody and I decide to start trying for a baby it may be this fall. I want to do a lot of things this year that may not be so easy with a mini me running around. :)

What is your number 1 thing that you WILL accomplish in 2013??