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How I Spent My 23rd Birthday!

Yesterday was my 23rd birthday! I ended up having a great day (so great that I didn’t have time to blog :-P) and want to thank all of you that wished me happy birthday on Twitter and/or Facebook! So how did I spend my special day? Haven’t had time to upload cam pics yet, but I was tweeting a play-by-play of life, as per usual.

The day got off to a great start when I woke up to this. I love my mom!

My co-workers continued to make the day fabulous. My friend Steve got me these gorgeous tulips. The bow matches my St. Patty’s Day nails!

The fellow ladies of our sales row (of cubicles, ha) know me well. They gave me a bottle of local CT red wine from Sharpe Hill Vineyards! I haven’t had their wine yet and am super excited to try it.

Holy moly, look at this gem! It’s from Jim, a co-worker who has access to a pretty awesome bakery (he got another co-worker an equally awesome cupcake for her birthday last month). That chocolate-cake looking part is actually ALL icing. I am an icing freak. So let’s just say I’m gonna enjoy this. Saving it for tonight after dinner maybe!

I’m a lucky girl!

My boss was kind enough to give me a half day on my birthday, and good thing, because it was about 80 degrees without a cloud in the sky yesterday. Is this the new CT March? I’ll TAKE IT!

Obsessed with Vera towels.

No, this is not a summer ’11 photo, this is YESTERDAY. Amazing! I chilled with my best friend Lidia as we drank iced beverages (coffee for me, green tea for her), read magazines/books, and chatted. She was also kind enough to use my Goodreads to-read list to pick out a couple of new books for me as a gift – it used to be we were gifting each other off our Forever 21 wish lists, and now it’s Goodreads! Oh, how adult we are!

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Now I can see what all that hype is about!

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A classic that I’ve been curious about.

Call me weird, but I wanted to go to the gym despite the fact that it was my birthday. I completed 4.08 miles on the StepMill, Level 16, speed intervals AKA some kick-butt HIIT. Felt FABULOUS after! Read the issue of SHAPE with Kate Walsh on the cover. She is one amazing lady.

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I wrapped things up with the below workout created by the amazing Heather of For the Love of Kale (who gave me a birthday shoutout yesterday, THANKS LOVE). I’m not doing any upper body today so wanted to get some in yesterday. Quick and effective!

After showering my sweaty self off, I went to meet my friend Colin (of Taste of New Haven) at Mustard Seed Cafe, a cute local breakfast-and-lunch place, for a French Wine Tasting Class event put on by my favorite liquor store EVER, Sonoma Wines & Spirits. Apps were served to start and I put together a little tasting plate, but kept it light because I wanted to go out to a late dinner afterward.

Went back for seconds on the veg (obviously).

For a wine lover like myself, this was definitely an informative event, in terms of both tasting wine and its origins. I have to admit I found myself drifting a bit during the historical parts of the presentation, but I think that was because I was so excited to get-to-sippin…

Flight #1 (three total).

The most fascinating part for me was learning how to both properly smell and taste wine. Did you know that you’re supposed to cover the glass with your hand, swirl the wine around, and then just take a slight sniff from under your hand when smelling a wine? The whole swirl and stick my nose in the glass thing that I’ve had going on is NOT correct. Too bad I put on hand lotion right before the event!

The proper method of tasting wine is really cool and made a HUGE difference. I’m having no luck finding a video or series of photos on Google (I know, what?) demonstrating the method, but it involves taking a sip, tilting your head forward and letting the wine rest in the front of your “palate”, and then tilting your head back (it reminded me of taking a shot…) and letting the wine slide over the middle and back parts of your tongue before swallowing (or spitting, something I am not fond of, and I know, that’s what she said). The taste was SO much more intense. I kinda loved it.

My favorite flight obviously – three reds, how can you go wrong?

I had a few favorites, which I marked with stars on our info/ordering sheets, and ended up decided to purchase the Chateau Picque Caillou Graves Pessac-Leognan. I know – what?? Just know that it tasted sooo oak-y and fabulous. I also received a $25 credit with my admission, and the bottle was $30.59. How often do I have a chance to buy a $30 bottle of wine for $5?! Answer: never, so I leapt at it. I’m going to save this bottle for something very special!

After the tasting wrapped up, Colin and I headed out to get some FOOD. It was almost 9pm, so we hit up the late night happy hour at Max Fish! I love going to these kinds of happy hours at nice restaurants because I get the chance to order and sample food that would normally be out of my price range.

Recycled image from my last visit but obviously I had to get the cheese plate again.

Colin offers a useful hand-size comparison for this ahi tuna with jasmine rice and lemongrass sauce.

Frozen not fresh (as our waitress honestly told us when we asked), but still so good.

Does anyone else dip fries into their ice cream and/or milkshakes? Colin thought I was a weirdo for that one!

I’m asking about ice cream because Colin not-so-secretly (I noticed immediately…) approached our waitress and asked her to send over a birthday dessert for me. I was still surprised because I had no clue what it’d be! I wish this picture hadn’t come out so blurry:

CARAMELIZED BANANA SPLIT

SO DELICIOUS. I realized it had been too long since I last had ice cream. And it had been way WAY too long since I’d made that an ice cream SUNDAE. The caramelized bananas and slightly-salty nuts on that whipped cream made it extra special.

Fabulous, fabulous birthday. And it doesn’t stop there – off to J. Gilbert’s with my family tonight!

How did you celebrate your last birthday? Do you have any go-to traditions?

First Restaurant Visit of 2012: La Petite France

Happy Hump Day! For me it’s more like a Thursday because I’m taking this Friday off work, but not for a fun reason (hate you, wisdom teeth). Had a bit of a bummer yesterday when my favorite spin class was full – got to the gym a bit later than I usually do on Tuesdays. The combo of New Year’s Resolutioners and weather that’s too cold for outdoor workouts always makes spin hard to get into at my gym until about March or so. Hope I have better luck next time, but I got a class in this past Sunday that was great, so all is well!

Ended up doing the Step Mill, my go-to machine for an efficient HIIT workout. I worked my way up to Level 16 speed intervals for the first time recently, and always do 30 minutes, so I wanted to push it and see if I could do 40. Felt like I was gonna die by the end, but I did it! Magazines are SO helpful (and the evening news during the fast intervals, when I’m climbing so fast there’s no chance in hell of me reading a single word).

If you want some cardio machine reading ideas, Diva on a Diet might be able to recommend “Working Out Sucks!” to you, since she won it recently in my giveaway. Thanks for the shout-out, girl!

Workout talk done, now who’s hungry?!

Of course I had to start 2012 with a visit to a newish-to-me restaurant on New Year’s Day, right? The star of today’s post is La Petite France Bakery & Cafe of West Hartford, CT (conveniently located on Farmington Ave, right by Blueback Square). I call this place “newish” because I did have a chance to sample one of their indulgent plain croissants at Bethany’s holiday brunch last month! After one bite I knew I would need to make my own visit, since I am a self-proclaimed cafe-enthusiast.

Remember these? Plain, chocolate, and almond croissants.

My good friend Kelly has been away at law school in Michigan all semester, and after we figured out that between our schedules our only day to meet up while she was home on winter break was New Year’s Day, we knew we had to make a date. We frequented Starbucks and Cafemantic at UConn together, so a cafe seemed an appropriate choice for a lunch spot!

I loved the exterior of the cafe from the very start. I’ve never been to Europe but it certainly looked authentic to me! I was totally starved after a good Stair Master session at the gym, so lunch sounded great to me. Of course the pastries looked incredible…but at lunch time, I’m always craving savory.

It didn’t take long at all for me to decide what I wanted. I was sold when I saw a build-your-own salad option, with an ingredients list that included some of my favorite creative salad best ingredients!

I love the casual setup of the coffee prep table!

I ordered a mixed greens salad with prosciutto, goat cheese, roasted red peppers, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and balsamic vinaigrette. I couldn’t believe that the salad was one price, meaning I could add a ton of ingredients and get a more-interesting-than-chicken meat option, for a completely affordable price! The salad also came with a crusty piece of baguette.

This salad was so, so wonderful. The prosciutto was out of this world and the dressing was one of the best balsamic dressings I’ve ever had. The baguette was perfect, nice and crusty just the way I like them, and the veggies were abundant.

Of course, seeing as we were at a cafe, we had to get our caffeine on. When I saw that LPF has mugs for their coffee and espresso drinks, I was even more excited!

Jealous of Kelly's cute mug.

I selected my usual nonfat cafe au lait sprinkled with cinnamon, and Kelly got a cappuccino, which looked perfectly foamy.

I would love the chance to come back to La Petite France and do some studying sometime. The atmosphere is exactly what I work best in.

The cafe is also very active on social media. We’ve been known to trade a few tweets, and they even linked to my post about the croissants on their Facebook!

I will definitely be back to La Petite France Bakery & Cafe. A welcome addition to West Hartford Center!

When was the last time you pushed yourself extra in a workout?

Have you ever been to a French cafe – or France?!

Winner: Anytime Fitness “Working Out Sucks!” Giveaway

Thank you to all 61 of you who entered my FitFluential giveaway for Anytime Fitness CEO Chuck Runyon‘s new book, “Working Out Sucks! (And Why It Doesn’t Have To)“. Entries closed last night at 11:59PM EST, which means that this morning I was able to pick the winners! I used a random number generator to pick three numbers from 1 to 61. And the winners are…

Tara Burner

Lizzie

Alexis

CONGRATULATIONS! Please email your shipping address to me at [email protected]. If you didn’t win the giveaway, you can always head over to Amazon and purchase a copy – it’s only about $10! And if you buy $15 more (that’s not very hard to do on that site!) then you can get that good old free shipping 😉

It was really interesting to read about the different workout excuses people have used, because almost all of them were covered (aka “shot down”) by Runyon in his book. I could also identify with a great deal of them, like:

  • I don’t have time.
  • I just don’t feel like it.
  • I’m hungry (in this case I just eat a snack and THEN go).
  • I’m sore.
  • It’s so cold out that I don’t want to leave the house (even to drive to the gym).
  • They say it’s better to get an extra hour of sleep than work out.

I do want to say that my views of these excuses are not quite as “hardcore” as Chuck Runyon’s views in the book, as I mentioned in my review. As part of my journey to find balance and be less rigid with my working out and eating, I’ve been trying to teach myself that it’s okay to miss a workout every now and then. Usually my rest days are the ones in which I don’t have time because I’d rather get an extra hour of sleep than wake up really early to fit a workout in before work, on the days that I have class or errands or plans after work that would prohibit my usual post-work group fitness class. Why look, there’s two of the listed excuses justifying my rest days! But the thing is, Runyon’s book does advocate one or two rest days each week. So from my view, if an “excuse” becomes “reasoning” for when the schedule a rest day, that seems fine to me. It’s when the rest days start outnumbering the workout days that you may want to take a look at your “reasoning” again!

Now that we’re on the subject of workouts, I guess I could recap this morning’s workout for you. I woke up surprisingly well-rested and relaxed after an evening of wining and dining last night with my wine-loving partner-in-crime, Kelly (recap to come). I arrived at the gym too late for the start of the 8am spin or Group Step class, so I took to my go-to cardio machine, the Step Mill. I always set it on speed intervals, level 15, but last time that seemed to be getting too easy, so I upped it to level 16. Wow, I was sweating and out of breath during the fast intervals, and the slow intervals were a good little recovery, but my heart rate was still up. After just 30 minutes I’d completed an efficient HIIT cardio workout – my favorite kind, because they’re over faster 😛

Actually kinda hate you.

Then I took to the mat for planks, push-ups, v-sits, and leg lifts. After some pigeon posing to get those glutes stretched, I was outta there.

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Congrats again to the winners!

Did you work out today or are you planning to do so? What’s on the agenda?

Meet Caitlin

I’m a 28 year old full-time working girl living in Boston (previously lived in Connecticut). I’m passionate about food/drink, restaurants, self-love, fitness, and the ever-present search for balance. I write about that journey on this blog – I hope you enjoy!

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Design Credit

My header was originally designed by Mai Le and later tweaked by Chris Roggi to match this theme, which he helped me customize. He also moved me over to self-hosting! Both can be contacted through their sites for design & development work!

Disclaimer

I am not an RD and do not have any official training, certifications, or degrees in nutrition or fitness. This blog is a way to write about my life. Any views I express are mine alone, based on what works for me, and should never be taken as medical advice. Always talk to your doctor or a trained professional before starting a new diet or fitness plan. In addition, this blog and its content are in no way affiliated with Kate Gosselin, “Kate Plus 8”, TLC, or any related affiliates.

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