Tag Archives: rooftop120

Marvelous Thanksgiving at Home!

I have to start this post with a quick Cyber Monday plug for 90+ Cellars! We are doing FREE SHIPPING on everything in our online store, so head on over and check out our wine selection! We ship to over 35 states, so click here to find out if yours is one of them!

It’s been quite awhile since I did a Marvelous In My Monday (MIMM) post! It’s been quite a weekend away from Boston, back in Connecticut to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. I certainly ate and drank plenty, but I also didn’t let any bad feelings get me down and keep me from continuing to enjoy myself. Though I weigh more right now than I ever have in the last few years, I also felt happier and more fulfilled over the course of this long holiday weekend than any Thanksgiving I can remember in “recent” history. And that’s certainly marvelous!

Link up with Katie today if you too are sharing the marvelous!

Marvelous is…being able to drive home Tuesday night. Especially given the snow we got on Wednesday! I worked from home that day so was able to beat (a little) traffic by heading out of Boston around 8PM on Tuesday. Plus I had a car buddy – I gave my neighbor Molly a ride too. The 1.5 hour ride took 3 hours, but according to her that wasn’t nearly as much of a delay as she experienced last year. And I was home in time to accompany my dad and Nana Connie (yes she was back!) to get my sister from t he airport at midnight.

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Thanksgiving Eve With Nana C!

I have so much to say about the long Thanksgiving weekend and it will take several (as in four) posts to do so, but that’s okay. You guys can just look forward (I hope) to a week of  fun-filled recaps, with a pinch of thought-provoking reflections. I’m going to start by announcing the winner of the Gymdoll giveaway though…congrats to Amy! I will be contacting you about getting you your Skulls & Barbells active tank!

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Last time my Nana Connie visited us (in June), I was bummed that I didn’t have time to take her to one of my special favorite restaurants. So I knew that for her Thanksgiving visit, I had to bring her with me to Barcelona West Hartford for Thanksgiving Eve. I spent the night before Thanksgiving there last year (with Molly) and it was so great! And who better to spend it with this year than Nana Connie?

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MIMM: One Early Night, One Late Night

Be sure to check out Friday’s blog post about New Britain Museum of American Art events, and head to their Facebook page to like them and enter the giveaway for a pair of tickets to this Friday’s Scotch vs Bourbon tasting! I’ll be there!

I feel like it’s been awhile since I did a Marvelous In My Monday (MIMM) post! Not that my weekends haven’t been marvelous, but I’ve just been busy with real-life work and blog posts I’d previously committed to publishing. I promised myself I’d start this week off with a post about one of my marvelous weekends.

Be sure to join Katie’s weekly linkup!

Marvelous is…kicking off the weekend with a podcast feature! Awhile back I recorded a podcast with the Bate brothers of The Lifestyle Accountability Show. It went live this past Friday! Click here to listen and if you have a chance after doing so, please head to iTunes and submit a review. I had a nice time connecting and chatting with these gents!

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Marvelous Work Day (Yeah Right)

The Biena Foods roasted chickpea snacks giveaway closes tonight at 11:59PM EST, so make sure to enter! I will announce the winner tomorrow.

Who has the day off for Columbus Day? Oh, you do? Well I don’t like you. Sorry, I am a bitter Betty today. My alarm went off for work and I felt as if I could’ve slept another few hours (realistically I probably would have slept about one hour more, but I’m just sayin’).

At least Columbus Day meant my commute was not long or crowded.

Let’s focus on the marvelous though, because it’s marvelous that I even have a job, after all. And my weekend was full of marvelous too.

Be sure to join Katie’s link-up and share your marvelous!

Marvelous is…Friday night pizza and salad at Kat‘s house with her, hubby Mike, and baby PenelopeI provided the wine, Kat provided the delicious food, and Penelope provided the laughs (and alas tears – she is teething). Kat prepared a fresh spinach salad with radishes, heirloom tomatoes, balsamic, and EVOO. She also made four naan flatbreads – one with roasted shredded baby cabbages and goat cheese (we obviously had some on the side too), one with fig and prosciutto, and two with buffalo chicken and fresh basil (bro-friendly for Mike). My favorite was definitely the fig and prosciutto but the Brussels pizza was obviously a close second.

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MIMM: Summer’s Wine-ding Down

Remember to enter my Marshall’s Bishop’s Corner giveaway – you have until tomorrow night to do so!

Another Monday, another marvelous weekend behind me, and a low-key one at that! Well, low-key in the sense that no drives longer than 40 minutes occurred. That’s really all I can ask for, especially since this coming weekend I’ll be off to Boston (and will see this marvelous lady). I over-use this word but it’s all about balance…balancing my weekends away with weekends at home has been key to making it through this marvelous summer (I can literally feel in the air that it’s ending, ugh!) and focusing on how grateful I should be to have so much marvelous to even FEEL stressed over.

Inspired by Katie, a blogger who is SO good at seeing the marvelous!

Marvelous is…my beloved StepMill #39 getting fixed at my gym. Long story, but that machine is the only one of my gym’s four StepMills that I like to/can use. My solo cardio sessions have been nothing without it (running and elliptical are not for me). Friday night I REALLY needed kickass cardio before a dinner out and StepMill #39 was good as new and definitely kicked my ass.

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Three Things Thursday: Weekend Faves

I’ve been behind on my weekend recaps because those weekends have been quite epic, and require multiple posts when I blog about them. That’s a good problem to have! But we are headed into another weekend soon (YAY) that will need recapping next week, and I haven’t even talked about this past weekend. I thought some alliteration was in order to do just that.

I already blogged about Friday night’s cooking class at Pond House Grille, so that won’t be included in this post about my top three favorite things about this past weekend, but believe me when I say it was up there.

1. Spending Saturday by myself.

I have been travelling almost every weekend in the last month or so and it felt so amazing this weekend to have no drives that lasted longer than an hour. The highlight of my chill weekend at home was sleeping until 9:30AM on Saturday, going to the gym for a nice not-rushed StepMill + abs workout, and then taking myself, a packed lunch, magazines, and Daybreak iced coffee to the pool club. I stayed there for several hours and just read, took occasional dips, and soaked up the sun. It was amazing, serene, and exactly what I needed.

View from my chair :D

View from my chair 😀

I followed that up with a visit to my favorite nail salon, Ceci’s, for a mani/pedi (well, toe/hand polish change, AKA the cheaper option). I did my first mani in forever with no disco nail (gasp) but I just love the color I picked out for my hands – OPI A-Piers To Be Tan, from the new San Francisco collection.

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R and R: Rest and Regret

I loved reading the comments on Friday’s post about Instagram media literacy! I figured many of you would be able to relate and I will be replying to the comments and continuing the discussion as soon as I can.

Major thanks again to everyone who was so supportive of my planned rest day this past Friday, from those who had tweets waiting for me before I even woke up, to those who checked in the day after. Whenever I wasn’t THINKING about not waking up to work out before or not driving to the gym after work, I felt okay. In fact (I will never not ask you guys to support me so please don’t take this the wrong way), sometimes I’d be good and not thinking about missing a workout and then I’d get a tweet or text asking me how the rest day was going, which unfortunately reminded me that I was taking one and made me feel guilty again. Catch-22!

UConn reunion: Ravi, Kelly, me, and Jeff.

UConn reunion: Ravi, Kelly, me, and Jeff.

My co-worker convinced me to pop into a Friday happy hour at a dive bar down the street from the office, because I always miss co-worker gatherings since I hit the gym after work. I figured since I wasn’t going to the gym that day, I should take advantage and stop by before I went to meet my college friends (above) for dinner and a night out. Ravi and Kelly were visiting from Long Island and Redding, CT (respectively) so that’s why I felt missing the gym and spending more time with them was important.

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Marvelous in My Memorial Day Weekend

It may not be Monday because I didn’t think it was worth it to publish a full MIMM post on a holiday, but Memorial Day starts with M and so does Marvelous, so there’s no reason I can’t keep the alliteration train chuggin’ at full speed. My work day went south the second I picked up my cubicle phone this morning to listen to a voicemail, so I really need to focus on marvelous and not mad. Which is how I’m feeling.

Thanks Katie for hosting this party! Pretend the Monday says Memorial Day.

Marvelous is…making it to my gym’s Friday evening step class. I haven’t been able to leave work on time for that class in awhile but I decided it was the Friday before a holiday weekend so if any day I was going to leave early, it’d be that day. The step class was so fun – a routine with both familiar and new moves, a high-energy instructor who demanded cheers from us as we worked out, and fantastic remixes of old favorites like “The Call”. Great way to kick off the holiday weekend.

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MIMM: School’s Out, Let’s Celebrate!

The winner of the Brilliant Options Wellness massage giveaway is Anna! You will be contacted about scheduling with Kellie your free 30 minute massage – congrats!

I have a lot of marvelous to share! I did a great job this weekend of balancing me-time with friend-time. I gave myself permission to celebrate my accomplishments and felt lots of love and gratitude for the people in my life who made them all possible. I’m continuing to de-grandma on weekends and stay out having a good time, and I’m determined to keep up that trend as long as the (slowly getting there) warm weather keeps giving me energy to stay up later and go go go! But I also spent plenty of time staying put put put, at the house on Saturday during the day and Sunday in the evening.

Thanks for hosting the marvelous party, Katie!

Marvelous is…FINISHING GRAD SCHOOL! Yes, I got A’s in both of my last semester courses and completed my MBA at University of Hartford with a 3.94 cumulative GPA. It feels so good to be done but it won’t really hit me until a few more weekends/lunch breaks without homework I think…or until I get my diploma in the mail. No I am not walking in the ceremony because really, ain’t nobody got time for that.

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Company, Not Cravings

I figured now that I have a grand total of six recipes (thanks Mom) that I’ve posted on this blog, it was better earlier than never to create a Recipage! I hope to continue to add to it (albeit slowly).

During a Gabby Bernstein Spirit Junkie meditation on Saturday night, the idea for this post (complete with title) came to me. I was reflecting on my evening out at Rooftop 120 with a new friend, old friends, my parents, and my favorite bartender. Memories of the evening associated with them came to mind first.

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