Tomato Rice Soup !

I thought I would share one of my new favorite recipes with you. I made this for the first time last week and LOVED IT! Absolutely mouth-watering. And super easy for a dorm room.

Ingrediants:
- 1/3 jar of Mom's delicious home-made canned tomato soup
- 1/4 cup (1 serving) of Uncle Ben's brown rice
- 1/2 cup of water
- parmesan cheese

Directions:
- Mix water with rice and cook in microwave for 5-10 minutes (or until rice has absorbed all the water). Let it sit for another 3 minutes. Remove from microwave and set aside--covered, so as not to cool. Pour 1/3 jar of Mom's delicious home-made canned tomato soup into a microwave safe bowl and place in microwave--just long enough to heat. Only about a minute or two. Remove from microwave and pour the rice into the bowl of soup. Sprinkle on top some parmesan cheese and VOILA!!! You have yourself a yummy rice and sauce. Or as I like to call it: Tomato Rice Soup.

Eat while still hot. Serve alongside 6 cherry tomatoes and 8 baby carrots. Adding 5 whole wheat ritz crackers is yummy as well.

ENJOY !

Valentine's Weekend = A Series of Unfortunate Events

Sherlynn and I could not wait until Sunday to celebrate Valentine's Day, so we started Friday evening. We set out to hit up the thriving metropolis of Emporia! We were on a quest to find Sherlynn a pair of new running shoes. It was not a hard quest, we found some at our first stop: JCPenney. One of our friends works there, so we chatted with him, distracting him from his work, and nearly got him in trouble. oops! We felt so bad we offered to buy him a coffee.....another time, when he was not at work!

Our next stop in our Valentine expedition was, I hate to admit it, Wal-Mart. There we stocked up on strawberries, dark chocolate M&M's, and other essentials. Before heading back to the dorms, we OF COURSE had to make a stop at Starbucks. (It is conveniantly located close to Wal-Mart!) With a bit of heaven in our hands, we swung by Family Video to pick up a couple of movies. Here is the list of the honored three we were looking for:
1. An old Disney Princess movie (hopefully Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin)
2. Moulin Rouge (a girls-only movie that would fit the theme of the evening)
3. Cool Runnings (in honor of it being the opening evening of the 2010 Winter Olympics)

To our dismay and chagrin, Family Video did not own Cool Runnings. The two copies they did own of Moulin Rouge had been stolen. The Disney Princess movies we did find were all checked out. We spent a good deal of time roaming the rows of movies and found none to our liking. We left in great sorrow and with no movie. (The only joy I found was that the man working there was extremely attractive. I think I told him "bye" when he told me "hi"! haha!)

We finally made it back to our dorm room, tired and vexed, but excited for the upcoming festivities. We ate chips and dip, chocolate covered strawberries, dark chocolate peanut M&M's (my weakness), and pretzels dipped in chocolate. We had rented a projector from the school and used the reverse side of some wrapping paper for a big screen. We watched an old American classic, The Bandwagon, that I had received for Christmas, but had never seen. It was terrible--virtually no plot. Another disappointment.

And that was the end of our Valentine's Day.

P.S. The first picture was my Valentine's gift to Sherlynn!

Facing Fears !

For those of you who are unaware of this fact, this semester I have embarked on a new and bold adventure of a having a personal trainer. (Emporia State provides them as a FREE service to all students. So why not?) For the sake of keeping the identity of my personal trainer confidential, let's call her 'PT'! (Original, I know!) Once a week, I meet with PT and she assesses how I'm doing, trains me in new ways of working out, and provides invaluable tips on exercise and diet. Now, you need to know something about the Rec where I workout. It is a great place, but there is one room where I have never ventured more than a few steps into: the weight room. Typically, this room is full of guys who look like they could all be offensive linemen. They scare me, therefore, I refrain from entering. Last night, PT decided she wanted to introduce me to a new weight machine in the just-mentioned weight room. I panicked, but meekly followed. What else could I do? (PT works out every morning with the ESU football team, therefore, she was not intimidated.) The designated weight machine was located all the way on the OPPOSITE side of the room, so we had to meander our way through. The machine that she placed me on was extremely close to another machine where this man was doing some sort of pull-up. To make matters worse, the two machines faced each other. I tried not to make eye-contact while I pushed myself up this little pulley. All of this to say, PT made me face my second biggest fear. (My first fear is falling off of the treadmill while I'm running, which actually happened to a guy next to me the other morning.)