My first girls trip!

April 25, 2017April 24, 2017 | cheriarmour

Hi! Hey! What’s up? Do you miss me? Are you wondering if I quit blogging? What am I doing? Maybe not?

So hey, I’m still here. I just have a (not so) newborn, and I’ve been crushing it at work, but not crushing it as much in blogland. Which I absolutely hate, so here we are!

I somehow by the grace of the good lord above ::skin-tone appropriate praise hands:: have survived a few whirlwind weekends of work, travel, and packing the baby and husband into my little compact, and making it back in one piece for work on Mondays. It’s nuts. It’s crazy. It’s fun.

So let’s take it back to a few weekends ago, when I survived my first girls trip!

So a few months ago, a friend who was turning 30 said he wanted to plan something, and he sent out an invite, a date, and a gorgeous photo of a cabin in the Shenendoah State Park area of Virginia. I’d just had Liam, but I was really determined to do something that would require me to leave him at home with dad for a weekend or so, and I figured that early spring would be a good chance to try it. So I talked it over with Austin, confirmed, and since time is accelerating (I swear it is), found myself up early on a Friday morning, packing stuff for me, getting the baby’s stuff together for daycare that day, thawing milk, and finally, heading out of town on a rainy Friday, with my podcasts (S-Town), my audiobooks (Andy Cohen’s Superficial), and my breast pump stuff for the morning and into the afternoon.

My first stop was in Richmond, about 3 hours away from where I am in Raleigh, to have lunch with someone I used to work for. She’d just accepted a position in Richmond, and I stopped just off of 95 with her to have some lunch and to take a pump break before I finished the last two hours or so.

I arrived at the cabin just after dinner (I had to stop at the super Target in Short Pump to pick up some cleaning stuff for my bottles), and was one of the first ones there, along with the birthday boy, and some friends. I ran to my hidey hole upstairs for one more pump break (that was kind of the theme of some of the weekend because OMG) and we started the weekend. We drank, got in the hot tub, I called the hubby and the baby, who were both doing amazing, and we finished off the night by watching RuPaul’s Drag Race (now at a bizarre time on Vh1, which is a discussion for another day), and I fell asleep after promising I wouldn’t, long before everyone else did. Seriously, there is a photo of me dead asleep with my phone still up to my ear (I may have been talking to Austin?!) completely passed our for the night. I was told that someone came in and flipped lights on and off, strobe light style, and I didn’t budge.

The next day, we all woke up, and one of us cooked breakfast. I pumped, ran down our corner of the mountain and back up, and by the time I got back, we were getting ready to do a gorgeous hike in the park. It was rough, and about halfway through, we split off, and half the group headed back, and the rest of us continued to the peak. I was reminded that I don’t entirely do heights (at all), and as we came back down the mountain, it was starting to get a tad darker and a tad chillier. That evening, we cooked dinner, baked a birthday cake for the birthday boy, listened to ALL the music, practiced old tap routines with one of the theater nerds there, some of us got back in the hot tub, and just enjoyed one another’s company. I managed to pump some more and build up a little stash, and major shout out to my friends, who don’t have kids for the most part, but who were ridiculously understanding and curious about what breastfeeding entailed. They are the best.

Sunday was good

Questions I have after finishing OITNB

July 5, 2016July 4, 2016 | cheriarmour

I hope you guys had a really good 4th weekend. I did. We just had a bunch of horrible weather, so my brother and Austin painted the baby’s room, and started setting up some more stuff in there.

That would be great, except now, with a fresh, beautiful coat of paint in the baby’s room, I hate the way the rest of my house looks, and I really want the rest of the house painted, the nasty old couches gone, and the carpet ripped up and replaced with hardwoods in the back of the house.

IMG_8805 (1).JPG — Every single one of our three pets sleeps like this on the couch. It’s foul. When we get a new couch, I don’t know what we’re going to do.

That’s not a tall order, is it?

Ok, so over the weekend, we finally finished season 4 of Orange is the New Black, or OITNB. If you have not yet finished, I need you to stop reading. I’ll post a pregnancy update separately later today, but I don’t want to spoil things for you. So stop reading. STOP READING.

Ok, so I kind of want to go back and watch all the seasons straight through, and that might be my next watch while I’m on the treadmill, when I can’t trick friends into hopping on and gossiping with me. But it started off lightly enough to the point where I secretly thought that Litchfield seemed kinda like camp.

This season however, it because really really apparent that Jenji was moving more into the realm of social commentary, similarly to what she did with Weeds, and things got terrible. Like way too real. So here are the questions that I have. Some of these are observations.

Linda, Caputo’s gf is a terrible human being. This is not a question. But an observation. She is awful. I hate her stupid haircut. I hate her disregard for the inmates. I HATE that she pulled a gun on Sophia’s wife. She is awful.
Speaking of awful people, when I got a sense that something bad was going to go down, I was kind of hoping that something would happen to Piper. She absolutely sucks. Now, I did feel terrible for her when she got burned, because it was really mean and I get why Ruiz was upset, but I feel like it knocked her down a peg or two. I mean, she unwittingly (ish) started a white supremacist group in prison. I knew she was selfish before, but this is just awful. (Also reminds me of how selfish Nancy Botwin was. And we all still rooted for her because it’s Nancy, and she always lands on her feet).
Is Daya gonna do it? Shooting someone, execution-style, makes you an awful person. But that guard is disgusting and brought a gun into the prison. But her mom would be heartbroken from outside of the prison, right?
What did Piscatella do that landed him at a women’s low-security facility after working at a men’s max. It had to be bad, right? I also didn’t realize how badly he sucked. But he is just awful.
What’s going to happen to Judy King? Things weren’t looking food for her there at the end. And when the inmates quickly figure out that she was on her way out (she was wearing a jacket and holding her belongings in a box), they’re not going to be happy. Especially since they didn’t get their payout from the photo yet and Judy got the Martha Stewart treatment at camp cupcake. Which I know to be a fact – while I was in social work, one of my clients was at camp cupcake and told us how Martha was lovely and would cook using hair straighteners.
Poussey. 😦
How is MCC going to cover up a dead guard AND a dead inmate? Looks like the “secret” about the dead inmate is out (I call it a secret since it took them forever to report it to local police). Will the guard thing every be revisited or are we all going tot pretend that they didn’t dig a body out of the garden?

Those are my questions for now. Let me know if you have any thoughts/answers for me, I’m dying to hear what others think.

Thoughts on Season 4 of OITNB?

What did you do this weekend?

14 Big Moments of 2014

January 2, 2015January 1, 2015 | cheriarmour

Um. So 2014 is over? When did that happen?

So it was a big year, for things both good and bad. And here, in no particular order, are some of the biggies from 2014.

14. Coco. Coco the poodle came to us from a friend of a friend. She’s an older dog, so she was probably not going to get adopted, so without much thought, we took her in. It ended up being a pretty sweet deal, because she’s a sweetheart, and a joy to have. She came to the beach with us, and visited with my mom when she was sick.

13. We went to Fripp! This was one of my favorite memories. My friend, Kelly, invited me and Austin for a weekend. We drove down to SC, and had a blast of a weekend. One of my favorite memories of the year!

12. Snow, snow, snow! Remember snowpocalyspe that rendered Atlanta crippled? About two weeks after, Raleigh got a similar storm that left Austin stranded for hours after work. Melanie, another friend got into a little accident. And my current boss’s boss had to run home in the storm.

11. I made this, than caught a stomach flu. I’m pretty much a straight-up vegetarian, not a pescatarian now.

10. I modeled a little bit here and there. I did some shoots for Headbands of Hope, did two shows for a local boutique. I’m hoping to do some more jobs here and there to help pay off my student loans!

9. We bought a house! Which is kind of a relief, we had a few weird experiences renting, the latest of which was when a man tried to break into the girl’s apartment downstairs in the middle of the night to do her some sort of harm for not calling him back.

Us the first Saturday when we came to scrub the house.

8. A close friend lost her mother to cancer. The experience was jarring, to say the least, and a really painful reminder that our parents are getting older.

7. We acquired a foster beagle. After Mel’s mother passed, an older female beagle was left behind. We are hanging onto her until she finds a new furever home. If you’re interested….

6. I saw Stevie Wonder live! And in good seats! Stevie Wonder announced tour dates in September of 2014, and I went on the hunt to find affordable tickets, which was no easy feat. Seriously, the scalpers had bought up all the tickets, and I was lucky enough to find tickets that only cost me about $300. We had seats on the floor, and I feel like I can officially cross seeing one of the greats off my bucket list!

5. I ran….far…in Vegas! My first trip to Vegas was not some drunken slob-fest – rather – I ran an Ultra relay in Vegas with Bondi Band.

4. I literally got my dream job. I may have told this story here before, but if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, mother effin’ try again. I’d had my eye on this job as a Group Fitness Director for over 3 years. The first time I interviewed for the job, I made it through a few rounds, and didn’t get the job. I was devastated (and remember, this is all taking place back in 2012 when my ego was already wounded from learning that jobs aren’t super plentiful), and I stayed in bed for days. A few years, and some more professional development later, the job was open, and it sort of fell into my lap. It worked out probably about a month before we got married.

3. My sister got engaged, then married! Deb and Luigi had been dating sort of on and off, and they decided, in the late spring, that they were going to make it official. They got engaged, then married pretty quickly in South Carolina. They celebrated with a reception just a few weeks ago.

2. My best friend suddenly lost his brother. Probably one of the worst phone calls I’ve ever gotten in my life was this phone call. Austin and I made the quick decision that the weekend of the funeral, we would drive to Philly and back to pay our respect’s to Michael’s brother. I’ve never seen my best friend in pain like that, so it was hard, and I’m trying with everything in me to support him as best as I can through this really really trying time.

1. We got married on August 23, 2014. It was the most incredible day ever, and when I woke up on August 24th, I wanted to keep my eyes closed and bottle the feelings that the wedding gave me. It was elation, happiness, and the joy of seeing old friends meet new friends all wrapped into one. If you could shoot that feeling directly into an IV and take it, I totally would 🙂

Weekend Buzz

December 16, 2014December 15, 2014 | cheriarmour

The weekend was absolutely, without-a-doubt, one of the busiest weekends I’ve had in forevs. I say that all the time, but I totally mean it this time.

Anyhoo, so Friday night, I taught a Zumba ® Fitness party with two other fancy ladies, and we had an absolute blast. I mean, I completely overdid it in the cardio department, but it was so nice to catch up with the other teachers. The last time I saw them was at my wedding in August, so SO worth it.

After that, I headed home, and Austin and I decided to call it a night by watching a Disney movie, so we caught The Hunchback of Notre Dame on NetFlix.

Can we talk for a second about how screwed-up that movie is?

To be fair to Victor Hugo, the book ain’t no binder full of knock-knock jokes, but that is one screwed tale, and I’m not sure how or why my parents allowed me to watch it as a child. A few highlights?

Referring to someone as a hunchback in general is not really encouraged.
When Frollo murks Quasimodo’s mother and then tries to throw Quasimodo in the well.
When the crowd tortures Quasimodo.
When Frollo is racist the entire movie.
When Frollo gets creepily obsessed with Esmerelda and sings an entire song about simultaneously wanting to have sex with her but feeling conflicted since he’s so racist against her people.

Those are just a few highlights. But seriously, go back and watch it. It’s SO creepy.

The craziest, then funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life…

So Saturday night, I was able to convince my sweet husband to take me out to sushi, and then we met some friends for drinks. Driving around downtown, we saw this Santa bar crawl – so a TON of folks dressed up as Santa, drinking and roaming the streets. In this one particular group, there was a young woman in a wheelchair also participating in the crawl. Her friends were like, drunkly pushing her around, and they’d almost made it completely across when they hit the curb and she went flying out of the chair. I made sure she was okay first (she was) before I lost it. I have never, in my 27 years of life, seen something like that, nor have I ever laughed so hard. To be clear, I am NOT a bad person, and I was not at all amused UNTIL I knew that the drunky monkey in the wheelchair was fine.

Following that, I went for a trail run in which I was still intoxicated from a holiday party the night before. Because the trail was actually pretty challenging, I fell (which means it was a real good time), but managed to not break my nose. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, because if I were to break my nose, I could get a free nose job and get a nose more like my sister’s.

Now, how was your weekend?

Weekend updates.

October 13, 2014October 12, 2014 | cheriarmour

While you’re reading this, I’m actually sleeping in my little brother’s room at my parent’s party pad in downtown Charlotte. I’m in town here only for a day or so, but that’s totally cool, because it gives me a new terrain to run on, and keeps things interesting.

So a few interesting points about this weekend.

My Fitbit is turning me into a lunatic. I don’t think people really believe me when I tell them that my competitive nature has taken me to really really ugly places. But to put things into perspective, my first summer working at Camp Pocono Trails, I was playing Gaga with the kids, and they would make fun of me for how into the game I would get. At the top of my lungs, I’d scream that I would be the “LAST. WOMAN. STANDING,” as I picked kids off with the dodgeball, one by one. They thought it was a game. I knew better. Well now that I can see how many steps I’ve taken, a friend of mine and three of her coworkers challenged me to a “Daily Showdown,” so I proceeded to walk to the bar, walk home from the bar, and continue walking well past 11pm. I came in second, and I can’t really talk about my defeat, that’s how painful it was.
We had a shed put in the backyard on Saturday. So I wake up on Saturday to check out the shed, and it actually was pretty cute! Then I look over at one of the guys installing it, and he’s wearing swim trunks and no shirt. No judgement here, I’m just truly curious about his choice in attire.
And finally? I’m feeling really ready to sign up for something serious. I got over my running hump, and running is starting to feel like a natural state of being for me again. I’m playing with a few options – I ran Shamrock a few years ago for my first full, and I’d be interested to try it again to see if I’ve made any improvements. I also have an entry for Rock ‘n’ Roll Raleigh set up, but since they haven’t released the full course, I’m not sure if I’m ready to commit without knowing the course. Raleigh is terribly hilly, and that race can either be really really awesome, or kinda miserable. I also am playing with the idea of like a 50k or so, to delve into the world of Ultra Marathons, but don’t tell my husband. We watched a documentary about Dean Karnazes, and for some reason, I still have the itch to see what I can do. I have zero interest in being a regular 90+ mile a week girl, especially with all of the teaching I do, but once or twice? I think it would be worth it!

What did you do this weekend?

Weekend Update

June 23, 2014June 22, 2014 | cheriarmour

I hope you guys had a good weekend.

I’m officially swimming through all of my workouts. The heat and humidity in North Carolina is absolutely unbearable – both classes I taught last week were nuts, and then on my run on Sunday evening, sweat was literally dripping down my nose,and into my eyes. I’m desperately continuing to run, and hoping that my heat training will turn into something good by the end of the summer.

So on Sunday morning, I woke up early, and we had some friends over for brunch.

I got the idea a couple of months back in DC. In DC, a lot of my friends, both married and single, live in these group house type situations, and last time I was there, I went to a brunch at one of the group houses. It was cool, it was kinda like being at Bob Evans, without having to go to Bob Evans. Plus here in the Bible Belt, they can’t serve alcohol out until 12pm, so if you try and go to brunch much earlier you’re all…

Rookie mistake. 😦 😦

Then you have to drag out brunch for a very long time while people glare at you for not giving up your table.

So we decided to do brunch at our place. Wanna see why the South has such a problem with weight?

That would be a biscuit, eggs, some really really good hash brown casserole, some fruit for good measure, scones, and some mimosa. All of which I ate. I ran after cause I felt really bad!

Your favorite breakfast food??

How was your weekend?

How was your weekend?

June 16, 2014 | cheriarmour

So for your personal enjoyment, I will share with you a few of the pics me and Kimmy went through after my brother’s graduation on Thursday night.

We were very active kids. Animals in fact. There were like two other pictures of us doing things on the swingset that are not OSHA approved.

That’s me in the mask, I had a sore throat when my brother was born, so I had to wear this so I wouldn’t get the baby sick.

Preciouso.

And lastly, my brother as a sheriff. How cute right?

Anyhoo, so this weekend was really good. I was not as productive as I would have liked to have been, but I got a ton of rest, and woke up Sunday morning almost at 10. I have not done that literally in forevs.

Saturday, I went and checked out a performance of Marcus Anderson, a pretty sweet saxophonist (did I spell that correctly?!) The really cool bit about him is that I’ve been watching him for like 4 years when he came down to regularly perform where I worked in graduate school. I have semi-fangirled him over the past few years, and now he’s playing with Prince.

Prince guys.

I need to get my life together.

From there, we headed to Buffalo Wild Wings in Cary where the female server treated us like garbage. But the dranks was poppin!

And from there, I had a semi-lazy Sunday.

We started the day off by binge-watching 3 episodes off Orange is the New Black, and then I cleaned, and topped off the day with some time in the woods on an almost 4-mile trail run.

And since you asked so nicely, here’s a pic of my poodle. We were in full-cuddle mode, which includes me talking in strange voices.