Weekend Report Card

So i'm playing teacher* today and grading how the weekend went, its like a blog report card! Excited? I sure am as it consists of me revealing stupid embarassing moments but we all know this is nothing new to LRT :o)

So lets talk about my Friday AM

I was running around the house and realized instead of leaving early because i had to make a pit stop at Starbucks to pick up a gift card for my boss i was still running around the house trying to find my keys, so i fibbed and i texted my friend Karen (who i was picking starbucks up for as well) and told her i was stuck in line, then no less then 5 minutes of frantic searching later i realized BF had taken BOTH sets of keys to work so I had to call Karen and confess, no i wasn't at Starbucks i was running around my house searching for my keys, so after Karen stopped laughing, Amber volunteered to pick me up but instead of waiting at the house like a sane person I ran in my work clothes (and the rain i might add) to Starbucks and picked up the gift card and extra special love filled smoothies for Karen and Amber who saved my morning - thanks girls, you can stop laughing now

Grade:
F for telling a little white lie
A for amusement factor for my coworkers, i will apparently live this down when i am "dead" that quote came directly from Karen, hahahaaaaaa


FRIDAY: Rest of friday i visited with some girlfriends and came home to a hilariously disoriented BF, he was very excited to have some "alone man time" in the house at night after spending a week packed into a cabin with a bunch of guy coworkers, i think he managed a walk with the doodle and a video game before he passed out on the tv room floor till i got home!

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Best way to spend breakfast, sitting in sun beams with tea and a good book!

Saturday BF I were supposed to go by and help my sister and her husband build a fence, when we got there they had a ton of helpers so we left to run errands instead

Found this running errands, i would VERY much like it for my birthday please!

Grade: 

D for eating their pizza even if we didn't help, we did  however manage to look pretty standing around though in our lululemon outfits, teeeheheheee
B for redemption when i went back Sunday and lugged an insane amount of fence boards so i could feel like i contributed in some way!


We also decided to take the fur baby for a walk Saturday night to the new house and on the way home we passed a path that had some man made ponds so we decided to let fur baby check it out as its closer then our current park and the first thing she did was run for the water and take a little swim, of course it was more like mud then water 

Save me mum!!!

Was that really necessary?

Post bath freak out

And exhausted!

Grade: 
A for pretty much everything, seeing how the house is coming along and watching Sydney have a blast in the water made me laugh SO hard, and watching BF take the time to give her a bath and talk her through it was the sweetest thing ever!

We have a lake, aren't we fancy? 

Fun with focus points

Pre swim checking out the foundation!

SATURDAY: was an awesome day, we got to sleep in and go for a bunch of long walks, we hit up the farmers market to buy steak and veggies to have a BBQ for dinner, we got errands done including some packing, woot woot!

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So on Sunday we celebrated our Mothers Day!
Grade:

A+ for our amazing mums who are just SO awesome and we are sooo grateful to have them in our lives and they should truly be celebrated every day not just once a year!

So lucky to be her MUM :o)

SUNDAY: we did some yardwork, including mowing half the lawn because our mower ran out of battery life, i'm hoping to start a trend and pretend we actually want it to look like that!  After helping out with Katies fence, she and i took our mums and mum in laws to the movie to see Something Borrowed!


LRT Movie Review
Something Borrowed


I really really liked the movie but probably because i read the book and i know the book Something Blue which is the sequel is soooo good!  I have to say Kate Hudson looks a lot older in this movie then she usually does, and i loved John Krasinki as the friend of Ginnifer Goodwins character!  There were definitely some laughs and  it wasn't just because my sister slept through half of it, fence building is hard work!

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Okay, so i made a couple of disastrous recipes this weekend, my coconut macaroons turned into coconut pancakes (booooooooooo) and my brownies came out a little raw and had to be microwaved, oh the shame!  But seriously it was a British recipe and who has 25 cm pans?

One thing that did work out was my mum and dads recipe for Fresh Lemonade, they drank a ton of it when they were back in England and came home determined to make their own and my mum shared the recipe with me

L Family Lemonade 

Ingredients
4 Lemons
1/2 cup of organic sugar
4 cups of water


Directions
1. Juice lemons and try not to cry out in pain as the juice finds that paper cut you got at work this week, eeeeeee
2. Mix 1/2 cup of water with Sugar in a saucepan over medium heat till sugar melts into the water and makes a syrup
3. Add lemon juice and the rest of the water and put in cute glass jug and refrigerate till cool!

You could serve this over ice or you could add the limoncello you picked up in Italy and some ice and make a crazy good punch drink to have with your BBQ!

Hope everyone had a great weekend, the sun shone the whole time and its amazing what it can do for your mood!  I have today off so i'm heading on a long run then groceries and maybe if the mood strikes me, more packing!

Happy Monday lovelies xox

*BF i totally see your mind going to the dirty place as soon as i said play teacher, please meet me after "school" to discuss this ;o)

Put a hat on it

Kind of like put a ring on it, only with hats? Still with me, this is one of those posts, buckle in :o)


So is anyone else gearing up for the Royal wedding EXTRAVAGANZA tomorrow?


Now i have to tell you, hats are very important part of weddings in the UK, isn't this one a doozy?

Hi, my name is crazy and i like yellow hats that look like curly horns, they unravel into a seriously badass weapon

And i LOVE hats, see the following examples...

I look like the undercover pink detective 

Could my kissing recipient look any less interested?  Maybe she isn't a fan of my hat choice either?

I love love love this roxy hat, its a little squished and crooked from being in my luggage though, i'm so happy here i'm doing the nose scrunch smile!

Yes we are wearing matching hats in Venice, he might grumble about it, but BF loves lululemon too!

Group hat shot, note to self don't wear an ear flap hat tubing again, its hard to hold on to a tube and ear flap hat at the same time!

This is one of my favourite "hat" photos, i really think i'm rocking the pigtail hat look, sexy no? 

And BF dares to make fun of my hat choices!  Here we are rocking the mummy/canadian winter look 

This hat is super cute imho, don't worry you don't have to agree, i like my delusions!

Hats however obviously don't love me as you can see from the above photos


I've mentionned my tiny head on multiple occasions on this blog


But it really is true, i don't usually look that great in hats, they are usually all too big for me and i honestly believe its a travesty of epic proportions


I have one that BF threatens to throw out everytime he sees it, i think its cute, he thinks its fugly

Its not going anywhere though, its seen some pretty great times on holiday plus I have this unfortunate habit of developing sunstroke on vacation due to my pale pale skin and light fair hair so hats are an absolute necessity for me, i will therefore always be a fashion disaster


So todays smoothie didn't want to feel left out of all the fun...

Her Royal Highness Smoothie

Ingredients
2 handfuls of spinach
1/2 frozen banana
1 vanilla soy milk drinking box
1 dollop of greek yoghurt
1/2 cup of frozen blueberries
2 ice cubes


Directions
Blend and prepare yourself for the best smoothie ever (well so far) and get organized for the wedding

Not sure this is the kind of hat you wear to royal wedding but i didn't want to hurt smoothies feelings

Smoothie is checking on the kale to make sure we have healthy snacks for the wedding viewing 

Wants to make sure the satellite is working okay, nothing ruins a good wedding stalking watching more then satellite signal loss

Weather looks promising!

And then smoothie got comfy for the show but since its an entire day away i didn't want to hurt its feelings so i drank it instead, teeheheheeeeeee

So in summary of my totally silly random hat post, if you are having a bad day, the only solution is to put a hat on it, it will solve all issues and make for some interesting conversation starters, just don't go with the yellow one at the top of the blog, i might have to point and laugh at you and i would NEVER want to point and laugh at all my sweet, lovely blog readers (except for you BF, you make fun of that black hat one more time and i'm throwing out your new lululemon one in retaliation!)


xox

The Dangers of Blogging

This was NOT our weather this weekend, we had
snow in Ontario!

Happy monday FRIENDS


*She says in a super perky voice* 


Obviously i have the day off today otherwise i would be using my Monday doom and gloom voice, its pretty obvious via blog, no?


So its Monday Recap! I tried to have a little fun and of course got up to some mischeif and blonde like antics!


Friday: I went to bootcamp first thing in the morning with a work friend and totally got my butt handed to me by a crazy fit romanian lady who i can't wait to pay a lot of money to do it 3 times a week when the next session starts!  I also managed to leave the lights on my car draining the battery (bad blonde move on my part) and had to call BF to boost me at work, he wanted to know if any of my coworkers had booster cables and i laughed at him and said, we are a bunch of female bankers, the dirtiest our hands get is replacing the toner cartridge in our printers and i don't even like doing that - he would have better luck searching the depths of the garage looking for our cables, lol! 


Saturday: Got to work with my friend Nic for his last shift at the bank EVER, he is an awesome teacher and he is going to change students lives with his awesomeness!  A few of us had a goodbye photoshoot - it was kind of a slow day
I also made KILLER baked beans from scratch, i mean they were legendary, i didn't properly photograph them for the blog since i like to try a recipe before i blog about it but oh my gosh, i couldn't stop myself from sneaking spoonfuls from the pot, BF and I are leaking some lethal fumes today, teeheheeee


Sunday: Was crazy, not sure what got into me but i woke up, went for a run, came home, went to Physique 57 and then yoga, i'm now answering only to donna the-exercise-machine-please-bow-before-me :o) Then it was off to work for 4 hours and finally, I came home to a big arse glass of wine!  Too bad it really aggravated my headache but i forced myself to drink some coconut water and it really helped!  I'm starting to be a coconut water fan, this stuff works miracles 

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So lets talk about the hazards of blogging because its not all sunshine, rainbows and high stats you know, its pretty harrowing stuff


First there are the injuries - Graters don't just grate your cheese and lemon rind, they also take pretty huge chunks out of your hand as well, makes it pretty damn painful to squeeze a lemon i tell you!

My booboo

Then there is the chocolate addiction, did you know there is a website called Chocomize where you can pick your favourite chocolate favourite and choose from a ridiculous amount of fillings like bacon, potato chips and 24 karat gold flakes?  No wonder some of us are obsessed!

As a blogger you also have the urge to share ridiculous photos of yourself that really shouldn't be publicly aired - in the picture below i'm stretching out my toosmallforme flats with my fluffiest of winter socks, yeah, i'm totally rocking the look too

Sexy Bitch

One major concern for food bloggers is our bank accounts, i mean do you know how expensive basil and vanilla beans are?  I'm one Whole Foods and Crate & Barrel trip away from ending up in the poor house 

Now this is serious danger, let me start off by saying: I am now a kale lover, oh its bad, me and kale are likethis, so Sunday at work one of my clients (i work in a bank) actually asked me if I had weed in a baggie on my desk, yeah, ummm no!  Its Kale Chips, i started to explain the health benefits and they just laughed and looked a little dissapointed it wasn't pot and it wasn't going to be shared, Lets hope no one official comes across my snack, I think until Kale becomes a world wide phenomenon i might just refrain from taking it on public transportation

These are just a few of the dangers,  bloggers really should receive hazard pay!

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Vegan Week Recap

• So i did it, no animal crackers were harmed during vegan week!
• I really feel like the key to eating vegan was planning ahead, i was never left with that oh god there is nothing to eat, lets just grab anything feeling
• We only drank water for the whole week and even though it was a bit boring, we both found we were craving water by the end of the week, YAY for increased water consumption
• Now while BF did cheat a bit, he was really good and is totally on board for more vegan meals in the future - this is huge!
• BF's official vegan week review: Good, i enjoyed how i felt eating so clean, look at my abs babe.... 
• ... Okay, i'm back, got a little distracted there ;o)
• Most of my recipes for the week have been or will be seen on the blog but my 2 biggest inspiration for vegan eating are Mama Pea & Oh She Glows, they make it look SO easy!
• The one thing i really missed wasn't cheese like i thought it would be, but milk in my tea in the mornings, i subbed it with almond milk and have grown to enjoy it!  
• In summary I have to say that eating vegan is like going through a cleanse, it made my body feel empty and clean inside, that probably doesn't make sense but its the best description i can come up with right now!
• BF and I are not going 100% vegan at this time but there will be  a lot more vegan weeks in our future - next week is vegetarian, we are introducing dairy and eggs back into our diets, wish us luck!

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Talking about yummy Vegan recipes, this one was one of our favourites!

Easy Creamy Tomato Barley Risotto

adapted from: Oh She Glows

Ingredients

1 cup of pot barley
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried basil
1 Tbsp of minced garlic
1 large can of diced tomatoes
1 cup almond milk
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup nutritional yeast (I buy mine at Bulk Barn)
1/2 tbsp miso mixed with 1/2 Tbsp water (I bought my Miso at Bulk Barn as well)
1/2 tsp sea salt

Directions

1. Rinse pot barley in a strainer and place into medium sized pot that has a lid

2. Add olive oil, basil, and oregano and stir well until barley is coated with oil

3. Turn heat to medium until barley begins to sizzle, then add in the minced garlic and reduce heat to low-medium

4. Cook for 1 minute and then add in the tomatoes, milk, water, nutritional yeast, miso, and salt and stir well till it comes to a gentle boil and then cover and reduce heat to low

5. Let a little air escape from the lid and cook for 30 minutes stirring frequently

6. When ready the mixture should be creamy not runny and the barley will be chewy

7. ENJOY!

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I'll leave you with yet another photo that SHOULD NOT be shared but i'm gonna do it anyway, because i'm a blogger and thats how i roll ;o)

Question of the day: What crazy thing do you do as a blogger?