IT's about time...learning about makeup

At a recent party I noticed that one of my friend's had the most amazing eye makeup.  She is one of my triathlete buddies and she can go from athlete to glam in a flash.  I joked with her that I needed a make up lesson and she signed me up for a personal class with her this weekend.  I'm going to share some of my friend Britt's tips with you all.  I'm not a beauty blogger rather just a regular girl that has always leaned towards very little makeup since I just didn't know how to put it on that well.

We met up at Ulta to do some pre-shopping before the lesson.  I picked up some new products including a couple of new eye shadows, eye liner, mascara, and some moisturizer.  I have been squeaking out the last bit of moisturizer over the last week so it was definitely time for a new purchase. Shopping in the anti-wrinkle, anti-aging section is only slightly depressing.

My purchases included eye shadow from Urban Decay.  I won't lie...I sat down on the floor in the store and tried out the different colors on my hand in order to decide on the two colors to buy.  I went with Easy Baked which is one of 78 different shades that they offer.  I also selected an accent color which is darker to wear in the crease.  For this, I chose a color called bust which has a light purple tone to it.  For both color choices, I went towards the less extreme color options...have to ease into color!




After our shopping, we headed to Britt's house for the lesson.  To get started I showed her my current eye makeup routine.  I got praised for having good technique in how I apply makeup but failed in that my current color selection was skin tone and thus not actually that noticeable.  I left one eye done up with my old colors and then did the second eye with the new colors.  The difference was pretty significant with the extra color and made a huge difference.  It was hard to redo the original eye in the new colors since normally you do both eyes at the same time so you don't forget a step.  The most important lesson was to blend, blend, blend.  Also, she gave me the fun ideas for eye liner such as how to extend the liner beyond the eye.  It was crazy how something so simple makes a difference.


 

Here's my new eye color scheme! It's a horrible selfie but in my defense it is pretty hard to capture your eye makeup in a pic!  Outside of the eye color change, Britt also coached me on adding some bronzer and highlight product to brighten up my look and enhance my cheekbones.  I'm going to venture into the changes slowly but definitely going to try and be more polished in my look.  

On Monday, I was shocked when several co-workers noticed and complimented me on the new eye makeup.  I texted Britt and let her know that her lessons were successful! I can see the payoff of putting a little more effort into my look and feeling more professional in my appearance at work.  Something about turning 35 makes me feel like I need to be more polished and I'm glad to discover that I can get that look for virtually the same amount of time as I was doing before by selecting better color options.  And so my look doesn't get boring, I have a feeling I'll be returning to the store to pick up some alternate color options.

I Spy With My Little Eye

I spent this past weekend with my sister Lindsey and my nephew Gavin and niece Livia.  Gavin is turning 7 in a few weeks and he is always a blast to be around.  We were driving to pick up dinner one night and Gavin decided to play I Spy with us and the little stinker would pick things that we couldn't see from the front seat of the car! In honor of Gavin, I decided to do a picture recap of my day. 

Here's Hershey going potty before I left home for work.  I think it was about 7:05 when I finally left which is a little later than normal.  If I leave at 6:45 it's about a 10-15 minute drive and when I leave after 7 it becomes a 25 minute drive due to traffic.

Packed in the car today were two swim bags and one bag with running clothes and gear so I could swim at lunch and run after work.

Breakfast at my desk was a mini bagel with strawberry cream cheese.  I had an 8AM meeting so I had to eat quick.

Lunch time and headed to the gym.  This is a cute mural that's painted along one wall of the gym.  I swam a mile at lunch.  I did one of my lazy day workouts which is sets that are 200yds long.  So I start with 200 warmup, 200 kick, 200 free, 200 back/free, 200 free, 200 breast/free, 200 pull, 250 free cooldown. 

Propped up in the car is my grocery list that I needed to remind myself to do tonight.  Girls Night Dinner tomorrow and I'm making a Jello Fruit salad. 

12:40 and it's back at work...can you believe it was 61 degrees out for the 1st day of February!

After work and had to stop for gas on my way to meet the running group.

Perfect clear night for a run!

Our Wednesday night group runs start off from the Downtown Activity Center.  I noticed tonight that the city's motto is "Enriching lives through recreation, leisure, and culture."  Bentonville has done so much over the last few years to make the city accessible for runners and cyclists.  It is great!

Some of the routes from the Activity Center.  I went with a route that kept me intown and covered right around 5 miles.  My run tonight was my participation in Maine Mom on the Run's Runniversary Two Mile Virtual Run.  My run was really peaceful and the weather was perfect.  I didn't take a picture of me on the run so I hope that Carrie will accept my picture of the trails and activity center in it's place.  Go check out her site...you have until Feb 14th to complete her virtual run. 

When I got home it was time for laundry...

and blogging. 

Hope you enjoyed seeing my Wednesday and my version of I Spy with my little eye!

My run with Rinny!

On Monday I noticed a posting on Twitter that Mirinda Carfrae was hosting a Twitter Party with Sheex this week.  I was super excited because I love a good Twitter Party! They are fun and fast moving and usually you can learn something interesting. 

Unfortunately, I realized around 4PM this afternoon that the Twitter party would coincide with my group run.  I have shared that I am working on recommitting to my running so I didn't want to skip out on my run.  So I got out my phone and tried a few jogs down the hallway in my house and decided yep, I can run and be on twitter at the same time.  Why not do both and Run with Rinny!

So I sent a Tweet about my predicament and then headed out to meet the group for the run.  It was awesome because the Sheex team and Rinny both responded to my original tweet! Kind of awesome and the party hadn't even started yet.  

I got the Square for the run and I had to switch from my new KnuckleLights to my trusty old headlamp so that I had my hands free to hold my phone.  I explained to one of my friends that I was going to do a Twitter party during the run and he thought that was a little funny.  I tweeted a picture of the group heading out but it was taken in motion and you really can only see the blur of reflective clothing.  For the most part, I held my phone and every so often would refresh TweetDeck and read the most recent tweets.  I took a few walk breaks so that I could write in some questions to Rinny. 

Oh yeah, it was so much fun to see her responses to my questions! Especially her response about hills since I was heading up my last hill when it came.  I guess since Rinny says I need to embrace the hills I should probably restart doing hill repeats each week! Gotta listen to the superstar pro, right?

Here are a few other tidbits from the party:
Time off: Two weeks off and then 2 one week breaks during the season which equals to four breaks per year.

Cross training activities: one on one bball with @tointri, snow shoeing, but mostly couch sitting

Basketball competitiveness: I kick his ass in ashoot out, but he is very competitive in oneonone, I am better, but he is so much bigger

Favorite Run Workout: I love fartlek runs and also my test sets on the treadmill 15 to 20 x 3mins is a good one

Her bet with TO for Kona: If I outran him then he would have to have "rinny's bitch' written on the back of his shoes, and vica versa

Best Advice: Be kind to your body and it will be good to you.

Here's a little more info about Sheex which is a company that produces luxury performance sheet sets.  I was a random prize winner during the Twitter party so I'll get a pillowcase to try out and it might even be autographed by Rinny herself.  If it's autographed I'll have to decide whether I really want to use it I guess.  Either way, I am thinking about trying these sheets out because they sound awesome!

Temperature and sleep quality are closely related. The human body experiences a slight drop in body temperature right before falling to sleep. Traditional sheets trap heat and can disrupt sleep. Sheex performance fabric breathes better, allowing your body to do its job naturally.

Thanks so much to Sheex and Mirinda Carfrae for spending time with all of us tonight on Twitter!

Today I Became a Dam Idiot!

The Arkansas Masters Swimming club put on a very unique event today.  Our fearless club president,
Jeff Spencer, came up with the idea to swim a 40 mile relay from the southern edge of our local lake to the dam at the northern edge of the lake.  The event was called The Long Dam Swim and all of the participants got to leave with the moniker of Dam Idiot!

I was assigned mile 38 in the relay.  The event kicked off Friday evening at 5:30 PM and finished around 2:30 PM on Saturday.  Around 62 swimmers participated which meant most of the miles were covered by a group of 2-4 swimmers.  The swimmers were protected by a flotilla of kayaks, jet skis, and ski boats.  This event was a logistical challenge with swimmers being given pick up locations and times for various boat ramps along the 40 mile route.  My pick up spot was just across from the dam where we finished up the swim. 

Our group was picked up by a boat and we met up with the rest of the flotilla and then got under way.  Mile 37 was covered by two of my friends Carie and Kyla.  Mile 38 was myself, AJ, and Jason who was challenged to participate in the event by a friend.  It was Jason's first open water swim ever and he did great.  Our mile was fairly easy except we had some confusion on where we were finishing up so we all ended up doing more zig zagging than we would have liked.  We ended up doing around 1.2 miles which was great for me.  The water was clean and cool and there wasn't a lot of wake. 

The final group headed out to swim across the dam headway and we all drove across the dam to the park site where our post swim party was going to be.  A couple of us went ahead and swam out to meet the final swimmers and enjoy more of the relaxing lake water.  The post race party was a nice potluck with hot dogs and snacks under a pavilion.  Below are some pics from the event that other participants shared on Facebook. 

This is the logo for the event and if you look at the tail of the Beaver you can see a sketch of the lake and the route.  Pretty clever logo!  Below is the full version of the map which shows just how crazy shaped our lake is!

Spectating Party - Hogeye Marathon

Sunday was the 35th Annual Hogeye Marathon and Half Marathon in Fayetteville.  The Rush Running team hosted a water stop on the course.  The water stop was at miles 7.5 and 8.5 of the half marathon course and mile 22 of the full marathon course.  We had a great sound system blasting out the tunes and a fun party atmosphere to pump up the runners.  I think the runners appreciated the support and quite a few took advantage of the optional beer stop we offered too!  Here are some pictures of the fun we had!

Margaritaville according to the Rush Running crew!

Keeping runners like Cathy refreshed with water and Gatorade or the optional beer!

Super-soakers were used to cool down the runners in the hot temps.

Yes, a man in a hula skirt will make you pick up the pace!

A Little Cache on the Run

Recently I visited my sister and her family in Oklahoma City to celebrate her birthday.  My sister had asked her husband for a new GPS device so that her family could take up Geocaching.  She had been interested in geocaching for a while but had waited until my nephew got a little older and could also participate.  Well, Gavin is now six and the Alberts clan is taking up geocaching!

I spy...a Geocache!

I arrived for my visit on Friday evening and was given homework by my nephew to read his book by the boyscouts on the rules of geocaching.  They had found some caches in a nearby park and my sister told me that we would have to get an early start to beat the "Muggles" to the park.  On Saturday, we all got up and ready and headed out to a cache that had a travel bug in it.  My sister really wanted to have Gavin find the travel bug which was a Pinewood Derby car put together by a BoyScouts troop in Tulsa wanting to see how far it could travel.  I stayed in the car with my sleeping niece for the first cache but Gavin was super excited about the find and the bead necklace he chose out of the cache supplies. 

My sister with one of our cache finds!

We headed out to the park next and spent almost 30 minutes looking for the cache there.  Finally, I logged onto the http://www.geocaching.com/ website from my iPhone to read the recent logs for that cache.  Others were having trouble finding it so we decided it must have been moved.  On the way to the next cache I decided to search the app store and buy an app for my phone.  Yep, after only 3 cache locations I was on my way to being hooked into the competitive search for the caches.  With the addition of my phone app, I was able to read logs and hints which helped us find some of the caches and also helped us decide to move on when others marked the cache as no longer there.  We ended up spending the entire morning out hunting for the caches and I think we hit up 10-12 different locations.  We encountered lots of prickly bushes which made my nephew not so happy. 

Geocaching App by Groundspeak

I left Oklahoma City with strict instructions to hide the travel bug in a cache near my town.  I knew just the friend to help me geocache...Kyla! Kyla and I headed out on a Tuesday after work with her dog Pilgrim.  I had researched and found that one of our running trails had a few cache hidden along it and one of them would be big enough for the travel bug. 

Who brings a bear on a run? Not us, that is the cache hiding spot silly!

We used my iPhone app for the tracking and ran to a spot on the trail that seemed to be in the general area.  We then turned on the Geocaching app and used that to hone into the cache.  Our first stop was called the Hill of Doom and it was aptly named.  From there, we meandered on the trail system and then got back to the paved trail in order to visit a couple more sites including one with a unique cache.  We both had a great time and it was a perfect way to add some fun to our run.  We got to mix in some breaks while we hunted for each cache.  We didn't trade souvenirs with any of the caches except for leaving behind the travel bug.  We just signed the log books and headed onto the next one.  I think we would both consider doing a geocache run again...a friend has already told us that his daughter has hidden some caches so now we have motivation to go find those too. 

For more information on geocaching visit: Getting Started Guide. 

As for the Pinewood Derby Travel Bug, it's on it's way to the next stop on it's journey.