Good Evening!

Summer has officially been in full swing for over 24 hours and those 24 hours have been incredible.  When I woke up this morning and realized that I was in my bed at home, I literally breathed out a sigh of relief that I had nowhere to be, nothing to study for and no work to do.  I got up, got dressed….and then got back in bed and slept for another hour and half, just because I could!

When I did finally get up, my dad and I hung around for a while before making our way to the gym.  I’m happy to have my summer gym buddy back!

  I remember going to the gym on the first day of summer last year and sitting on the floor thinking about how excited I was to have three months to do anything I wanted.  Time flies!

I really wasn’t in the mood for much cardio, so I started with 5 minutes of incline speed walking, then 5 minutes of 40 second intervals (10 seconds each of speed 9.0, 9.3, 9.5, 9.7 and 20 seconds of speed 6.0), then 5 minutes of walking, 5 minutes of intervals, 3 minutes of walking and 5 minutes of intervals.  By the end of it, I was a sweaty mess, but it felt good to get moving!  I finished up with 30 minutes of shoulder exercises and some ab exercises.  My parents and I had plans to head to Washington, D.C this afternoon, so once we got home, we had breakfast, showered, and then I decided to make muffins with a couple of bananas that were on edge.  I found the recipe on the back of the box of bran flakes that I ate for breakfast.

I tweeaked the recipe a bit and ended up with Oat-Bran-Banana-Walnut-Cranberry Muffins!  They only took 15 minutes to make and they turned out well.  They’ll make a good snack for the next few days 🙂

Hours came and went, and the afternoon ticked by, so I had lunch and squeezed in a couple of episodes of Scrubs.  Putting my free time to good use…

Eventually (5 p.m.), we left for D.C and said goodbye to my brother, Leland, and Toby.  They’ll be holding down the fort while we’re gone!

We got here in a little under two and a half hours and immediately went to get dinner without stopping at the hotel first.  There was a bit of a wait for a table, so we walked around for a bit, looking at the houses and marveling at the gardens.  We were really impressed with the gardens, especially the rose bushes!

We ended up stopping at a bar called Liquid Assets to grab a drink while we waited for a table.  We got there just in time for the end of happy hour, so we each got a beer until we got a call from Ethiopic.

We ordered the Vegetarian Sampler, which included all of their vegetarian dishes on one plate (Gomen, miser wot, fosolia, tikile gomen, kik aletcha, dinich wot, shimbra asa wot).  The waitress told us it would only be enough for two, so we also ordered the Azawe Tibs, which is cubed prime beef.  In hindsight, the sampler would be enough for two VERY hungry people, and would have been enough for the three of us.

Despite it being a ton of food, we were glad we ordered the beef tibs because we really enjoyed it mixed with some of the vegetable dishes.  I’m not quite sure what we were eating, but everything was extremely spicy, but flavorful!  My favorites were definitely some sort of chickpea purée, as well as the tomatoes pictured in the center.  Everything was eaten with injera, which is a spongy, flat bread that is ripped into pieces and then used to scoop food.  Ethiopian food is eaten with the hands, so eating it was a lot of fun and something totally different!

We’re stuffed and hanging out at the hotel, getting ready to hit the hay so we can be well rested for a long day tomorrow.  🙂