So yesterday the hub and I met up after work over at Wade Lagoon outside the art museum. I brought a thermos of coffee and we enjoyed a couple cups while enjoying the sunshine and the beautiful view.
It was a relaxing end to the crazy day. I am hoping to be able to be able to have a lot of those kind of dates through out the spring and summer!
As we were sitting by the lagoon I snapped this picture! It’s a gold fish! They grow to their environment. I am in love with this picture! It’s magical.
♥ Pompeii- Bastille
♥ Sail Into The Sun-Gentlemen Hall
♥ Shine- Wild Belle
♥ Sight of The Sun- fun.
♥ First Day of My Life- Bright Eyes
♥ Soil, Soil- Teagan & Sara
♥ Flowers in Your Hair- The Lumineers
♥ In My Mind- Amanda Palmer
♥ Everybody- Ingrid Michaelson
♥ Everything’s Okay-Lenka
♥ Pony (it’s okay)- Erin McCarly
♥ Fairy Tales- Sara Bareilles
♥ Never Wanted Your Love- She & Him
♥ Love- Matt White
♥ You Don’t Know Me- Ben Fold featuring Regina Spektor
♥ 3am- Kate Nash
♥ Two Bird- Regina Spektor
♥ Does He Love You- Rilo Kiley
♥ Past Lives- Ke$ha
♥ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot part 1-Flaming Lips
Monday morning: Winter Wonderland
Friday evening: Spring has sprung
Sunday (St. Patrick’s Day) instead of drinking the day away, we spent the first half of the day at MOCA Cleveland (Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art.) We are SO adult now a days. No worries though we ended the day at our favorite local pub (Parnell’s Pub). 
The new exhibits at MOCA were awesome. I totally have a new art crush! Kate Gilmore. Her stuff is really excellent. Gilmore’s performance based work pushes her physical limits and challenges social conventions. Gilmore often wears feminine dresses and heels while she puts herself in messy, restricting and often painful circumstances. New York Times described Gilmore’s work as “primal-conflict-in-a candy-wrapper.”
If you are in the Cleveland area I suggest you check it out. It will be there until June 19th. I will definitely be going again. If you go make sure to check out the video that accompanies this piece. It shows her process for creating this work and it really is part of the whole experiencing.
If you dig Kate Gilmore as much as I do and are in the Cleveland area you can also go to a free performance at MOCA tentatively scheduled for April 4th. Kate will direct a piece featuring female students from Cleveland Institute of Art. This piece will “showcase a post-feminist take on the absurdity f contemporary life.”
Also Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s The Paradise Institute was pretty freaking awesome too. The recreate a
Yesterday was my birthday. I am now 32 years young 
We had such as awesome day. I will post about it later in the week Tonight I wanted to start my goal making progress for this year. I will be posting each goal separately as I carefully select what goals I will be working on this year and develop a plan using the SMART goal method.
Specific:
The first up is to run my first 5K. Not just any 5K, The Color Run 5K. I have wanted to do it ever since I found out about it’s existence last year. I used to run all the time. It’s the only time in my life that I was able to lose weight. I actually enjoy running…a lot… it’s just once you stop doing it… it takes time to get back to where you were. I have been wanting to start back up for a while and have kept failing because I didn’t have a strong enough goal to aim for. The Color Run is just the thing.
Measurable:
I found this great program to prepare for the race on Pinterest. This will help me monitor my progress in the weeks before the race. While it’s still cold outside I am going to start adding cardio by doing the Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred, which I have done in the past and can testify works well. Once the weather warms up I can start the running program below.
Attainable:
I have never run a 5K before…and sadly I haven’t run in a few years…but I’m hoping that having a specific goal will motivate me to start back up again. It will be a challenge, but I have faith in my abilities to get this done.
Relevant:
I would definitely say this goal is relevant to my overall goal of improving my health. As I get older it is getting harder to ignore the importance improving my health and well-being.
Timely:
The Color Run 5K is planned for June 2013. The don’t have a specific date yet, but I subscribed to their email list and will have a date soon.
Update: I learned earlier this week that the Color Run is the exact same day as Parade the Circle. Which I am in. So unfortunately this year I will not be able to participate in the Color Run. However, I still plan on following the training schedule above and I am hoping to have my first 5k be the Cleveland Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning.
This year instead of compiling a long list of things I want to accomplish in a 12 month span of time, a list I only ever get ½ completed mind you, I decided to compile a list of SMART Goals instead. SMART Goals are not well educated goals. (ok that was a dumb joke). SMART is actually an acronym.
Specific- Goals are detailed and focused
Measurable- Goals are quantifiable and produce a specific result.
Attainable- Goals are practical yet challenging
Realistic/Relevant- Goals specify how the results will impact and support the objectives. I have also seen R represent “relevant” which is something I also think is important to ask yourself. Other questions to ask along that same vein is “is this necessary” and “is this what I want.” Why waste your time?
Timely- Goals have clear time frames and completion dates. It’s important to have an outline/plan for how to accomplish the goals. Make sure you are checking in regularly to make sure you are on schedule for completing the goal.
Why use SMART when developing goals for yourself? Specific goals have a greater chance of getting accomplished; you are more likely to stay on track to complete the goal when progress can be measured; and creating an outline and a timeline for you goals helps you attain them.
Here is an example:
The easiest example I can give is weight loss. So let’s say you want to “lose weight.” That’s pretty general. To make it more specific you would want to determine how much weight you want to lose. Let’s say you decide you want to lose 10 lbs. Now you have your specific goal. Measuring this particular goal will be easy. Obviously you can weigh yourself throughout the process. 10lbs is a pretty reasonable goal and should be easy to attain. With weight loss, realistic expectations and time go hand in hand. So you would want to pick a time frame that would be realistic. For example they say you shouldn’t lose more then 2lbs a week. Let’s say you choose an 8 week completion date. You would need to lose 1.25lbs a week for 8 weeks in order to reach your 10 lb goal. You can measure your success once a week by weighing yourself.
Weight loss is an easy application of the SMART goals because measuring weight loss is easy. When selecting other types of goals it is important to keep in mind what the end result will “look like.” This is important. How will you know if you succeeded? How will you know if you failed? How will you know if you are on track? Making your goal as specific as possible will help you visualize what success will look like. Maybe you want to fix your finances? What does this mean for you specifically? Maybe it means you want to improve your credit score. What is your ideal credit score? Once you make your goal as specific as possible the other answers will be easier to discover. Maybe “Fix your finances” involves multiple things. Try making each one of those separate specific goals.
I’m going to get to work on my SMART goals for this coming year. Saturday is my birthday! I’m going to be 32 and I am so excited to see what this year brings!
I have never been a huge fan of Spring. It’s not that I dislike it mind you. It’s just I’ve never really given it much thought. Cleveland’s seasons typically look like this:
Living in an apartment for so many years I kind of got used to ignoring Spring. My time spent outside consisted of walking from my car to the apartment and so forth and then boom it was summer. We lived in a first floor apartment for 5 years. We had to keep the blinds closed and the curtains drawn most of the time so the natural light situation sucked. It made for emo winters funks. This is what happens when you have zero energizing sunshine filling the room with hope and happy vibes.
I never noticed that it was such a problem until we moved to the house. I still get into winter funks, but they aren’t half as bad as before. In fact today I said to myself “wow I haven’t cried in a while.” I know that is a weird thing to say, but for someone who has battled depression it was a nice realization. My winter funks this year have been this weird quasi depression that occurs where I am not exactly sad, but just tired and uninspired and just kind of blah .
Contrary to popular belief we actually have sunshine here in Cleveland… but it’s not everyday and when you work from 8-5, you go to work in the dark and come pretty much as the sun is going down. The constant cold, the wet, the salt creeping up your pant legs… you’re having to put on a coat and boots and gloves and hat just to put your trash in the garage or get something out of your car… it’s enough to make anyone snap after 3 months especially when all cheery holidays that keep us pre-occupied have come and gone.
All this talk of weather you probably think I have spent most of my days thinking about the weather and my lack of sun… but actually I hadn’t given it thought lately until this weekend. We went to a couple awesome events (which I will blog about later) and in between we went for a small drive through Lake View Cemetery. Which seems weird, but really it is common to see people walking around in there. It’s a park… a park that happens to have dead people in it. It really is pretty in there… any way I came across the picture above.
And now I can’t seem to think about much else. Then as I was looking outside my window today and I saw some of my very own all over the yard… I got so excited. Soon I will be able to garden! In my own YARD! Plant vegetables and pretty things! Where overalls and a floppy hat! I will be able to fix up our sun porch and prepare for the summer where I plan to do a ridiculous amount of outdoor living. This excitement has kind of refreshed me… But of course we are apparently getting snow this week…so we aren’t there just yet… so for now I will just have to cherish these photos and know that soon Spring will be here soon!
