Follow my down the yellow brick road!

Wow it has been awhile since I have written here. I feel like its been a decade! Medical school slows time I think. You learn so much information in a short period of time that it seems hard to believe it could only have been a year.

In any case – I do a lot more focus on fitness and nutrition then I do on crafting. That and the vampire diaries (my most recent obsession). and as such, with what time I do blog, I spend blogging it HERE.

I’d love to have you come over and visit me there! As of yesterday, I even added a “crafting” category so that I can showcase the few projects I do do. atm I am working on a couch pillow. Should be done this week!

I love all of you have have followed me here and would love to see more of YOU over THERE!

🙂

ERRANDS Ipad App Review – To Do Lists!

If I had to describe myself in a handful of words – To-Do Lists would definitely be on there. I make pretty much everything into spread sheets or to-do lists. I just love the way spreadsheets look and I love crossing things off of lists.

Today I found a lovely to-do list app for my ipad and I love it 🙂

It is FREE and it is called ERRANDS TO DO LIST- with currently over 1600 reviews and 4.5 stars, I certainly had to try it out.

On the left you can create folders, ie individual to-do lists by categories

This is my to-do list for my exam on March 26th – we have three subjects on that exam. And then – within each subject, I can list all the lectures, labs, to-dos for that subject that will be on this exam.

You can also set alarms, due dates, sort by dates, and many other interesting features.

So – now that I have wasted a good 15 minutes inputting lists through my next exam, along with a list of chores and other things to accomplish today specifically, I suppose I should start crossing things OFF the list ❤

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Do you use to-do lists? Do you hand write them? Do you have an app of choice? Have you tried this one?

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Hope everyone has a good day!

Don’t Miss Last Week’s Fitness Posts!

I haven’t been around here much. And for that I apologize. I do hope to get some more knitting done. But it always seems to get pushed aside for something else (studying, sleeping, eating, reading, exercising etc). Needless to say – I have put my exercise, and thus my exercise blog, on a higher priority these days. Here are my posts from the last seven days!

March 2nd – Crossfit and Insanity? Danger Will Robinson!

Woke up this morning and could hardly move. kept crawling back in bed. I am SO incredibly sore. Which of course, means that I had quite a successful workout yesterday.
Last time crossfit training at the gym was hard but was pretty much all strength training, so when my hubby asked me to do Insanity with him yesterday, before crossfit, I of course agreed.

READ MORE…

March 3rd – What does your dream body look like? Crossfit trainer Amanda Welliver

ith my recent obsession with Body Pump and Crossfit – I have “liked” both of their facebook pages and that is where I came across this photo. This women had a baby 10 months ago? Are you for REAL? I am thoroughly impressed.

My goal is to look HALF as good as her this time next year. I want all that muscle too!

READ MORE…

March 4th – Starting on a Journey with Les Mills Pump

Have you seen the movie Anastasia?
The kids version I mean. Random, but when I started writing this journal entry, a song from that movie jumped into my head:
We were strangers, startin out on a journey
Never dreamin’ what we’d have to go through
Now here we are, and Im suddenly standin’
At the beginning with you
Anyways – doesn’t have much to do with workouts – but I am indeed starting out on a journey with a new workout program. One I had literally been counting down the days to its arrival. 

READ MORE…

March 5th – Reviewing My February Goals and Looking Ahead to March!

Back on February 2nd, I wrote down a series of goals that I hoped to accomplish the in the month of February. Some of them were done easily, others still have some room to improve. But either way, I did make steps towards all of these changes and am quite satisfied with where I am today.
I split my goals into two categories: Nutrition & Exercise.

READ MORE…

March 6th – My Back Feels Sunburned – What is YOUR Solution to Sore Muscles?

I am SO SORE!
I think I may have overdone it a bit these past few days. I did crossfit last thursday which included several hundred push-ups, Body Pump Video on Saturday, which is all weight lifting, Ab Video and Body Combat on Sunday, which turned out to be a lot of upper body strength, and THEN last night I did ANOTHER Body Pump class, again all weight lifting. By the time I left class last night my entire upper back was tight.

READ MORE…

March 7th – Wordless Wednesday: Born to Run

SEE PICTURE…

March 8th – My version of a Greek salad with an Italian twist

Last Sunday I went to an AMWA event (American Medical Women’s Association). It was a really nice dinner at a local restaurant here where I got to interact with a few fourth years, a doctor, and of course a few other girls from my own class. It was quite the event.
One of the things they served was a salad which was finely chopped and included lettuce, feta, chick peas, onions, and who knows what else. But it was positively delicious and inspired me to get back into making my own salads.

READ MORE…

I hope you enjoy! Keep checking back – I only have about two inches of these socks left to do – so if all goes well there might be another crafty post for you in the next week or two!

Google + Hangout System for Studying

okay – yes, my four person medical school study group is full of nerds. and we are awesome. this weekend we discovered just how useful (and brilliant) Google + could be.

Today, one of the four of us is away visiting her boyfriend, I am at church (studying while my husband does some social event with his students), and the other two of us are at their individual homes.

Together, we logged onto google+, created a hangout – and held a live video study session! which is kinda awesome. Not only can we see a video of all four of us. But we can also choose to show our screen, instead of our self, when we need to discuss a particular slide or diagram.

It was truly amazing. Now we are gonna be a bit lazy this week and meet that way in the evenings too so that once we leave school (after being there for classes from 8:00 am – 4/5:00 pm) we don’t have to return in the evening for more studying. Instead we can all just use our computers from the comfort of our homes and study together 😉

Amazing

Pretty crochet “Phannie” hat

The Phannie 

Crochet pattern available from ravelry

One of my closest friends made this hat but it was too small for her so she gave it to me. I do have a child’s size head after all. Anyways, now that it is cold and I am way too lazy to take the time and blow dry my hair, it is really great to have such a beautiful hat that I can just toss all my hair up into. Isn’t it pretty?

 

I never knew just how great slouchy hats were. And the color is perfect for brightening the chilly Chicago days 🙂

Thanks Jess!  

Obama’s speech

“We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.”

This is how medical school makes me feel

Saw this on pinterest this morning….

Just another big exam tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Blogging Apps Review for the iPad

BE write  
I recently downloaded BE write for the iPad as a blogging app, but it didn’t take me long to realize it pretty much drove me crazy. First of all, when you hand wrote anything, it was difficult to get the drawings to appear as images IN the text rather than behind or in front of text. Eventually I was able to correct the HTML, as seen in this entry, but it was way too complicated to do on a regular basis. Also, if you have more than one blog, as I myself do, (I primarily write in this one actually), you have to log out of one before logging into the other. AND BEwrite only allows you to type in portrait mode ( as oppossed to landscape) which seems really silly to me. 
 
However, BE write was not a total loss, as I really do enjoy being able to draw things out and save the drawings as individual images for inserting into entries, as seen in this entry. also, the support for this app is great, thus I definitely like the company that made the app.  
 
WordPress app  
This app provides very little quick buttons for HTML, and you cannot view blog entries in rich text as you write. The interface is rather boring and extremely basic.  
 
What I do like about this app though is that you can view, approve, and reply to comments. Since it is free, I download and use this app primarily for that purpose.  
 
BlogTouch 
I actually ended up not downloading this app, but strongly considered it. Blogtouch gets great reviews and is cheaper than blogsy, which I will discuss next. After my experience with BEwrite, I decided I wanted to contact blogtouch to find out more about it before purchase. I asked them about the rich text/HTML and the multiple blogs and received the following: 

 

“Apple with the release of iOS5 included some rich text functions, but they are very limited ie Bold, Italic, underline and and indent quote level, but it still doesn’t support all the other functions of rich text like colorizing text, inserting pictures, multi quote levels and many others, some apps appear to support rich text, but in reality, they don’t and still have to convert to HTML at publishing time.
 
We decided that at least at this moment in time that we would stick to HTML only as it get extremely complicated to do rich text/ HTML conversions via the iOS at the present time, we always wanted Blogtouch to be a rich text editor, and it may well still happen if Apple include more functionality in the future releases of iOS.”

 
They also mentioned that you can have more than one blog added at a time. After contacting a few users of Blogsy and Blogtouch, I was able to determine that Blogsy allows for many more rich text options and thus I downloaded it instead of blogtouch.
 
Blogsy
I recently downloaded blogsy and it is by far my favorite of these four blogging apps. My only complaint this far is the cost (4.99 seems rather expensive to this gal, personally). But I love it and it was well worth the cost.  First of all you can type the entire entry in rich text, including: bold, italics, numbers, bullets, indents, alignment (left, right, center) and font size, family, and color. 
 
Additionally there are undo/redo buttons that are quite useful. AND I can have more than one blog here, and view/edit all prior posts, pages and drafts from online ( something else you cannot do in BEwrite)
 
I think Blogsy’s claim to fame though is really their image services, which allow you to insert images from Picasso and other online sources and videos from YouTube. You can resize and realign images and videos directly in the rich text mode. 
 
I am a huge fan of Blogsy.
 
Hope you found this helpful!
 

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I typed this whole entry using blogsy

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Do you use an app to blog on the iPad? If so, which one? What do you think of it?

Heels are Overrated

Heels are Overrated

Hard to believe that I have literally watched an entire season of 24 in the past ten days or so. That’s a little much. I know. What is sad is that I only completed about 3-4 inches of the socks I am knitting. I’m really glad I decided to do this two socks at once thing. Or I never would have finished the second one.

As you can see, the heel is a bit big too be honest… Which is rather unfortunate because a smaller heel would certainly have shortened the time a bit. I actually ended up having to do the heel a number of times before figuring out a way to do it successfully. The author of the pattern also provided a modification PDF to describe how to make them smaller. But I think her directions for the heel were a bit lacking. She pretty much told you to change only the first row of the heel and otherwise to follow the remainder of the pattern exactly. But first of all, this leaves you with a lopsided heel so I had to improvise a wee bit. And I made sure to have 21 stitches after the heel as written in the pattern but I think that should have been modified as well for smaller socks.

Ultimately I spent probably an entire hour just doing (and undoing) the base of the heel.

I do really love the colors though. I am gonna be relieved when I am through with these. I won’t let myself start anything new until they are done.