Posts Tagged ‘Different Things’

Okay not quite Martha Stewart. I still haven’t mastered homemade napkin holders or the perfect Halloween-themed cupcake, but I did start my very first container garden!

Having never done this before, this is 100% an experiment in the following:

1.) Which items grow best in a container garden?

2.) My ability to keep something alive

3.) Whether the $85 I dropped on this will be worth it

That last one will be hard to measure while the first two will be fairly easy (dead or not dead).

My container garden is small and humble…I would have loved to gone CRAZY and grown a bunch of different things but I’m fairly picky when it comes to vegetables and well, have I mentioned that this is my first time doing this?? I’m 13% positive that I’ll fail miserably. However, despite this fact I invested in the following:

2.) 2 sweet basil plants

3.) 3 different varieties of pepper: poblano, jalapeno and spicy banana

4.) 2 large-variety tomato plants: Early Girls (should see fruit on these in the next 40 days)

5.) 2 smaller-variety cherry tomato plants: Porter’s Dark Cherry and Sweet 100s

In the next couple weeks I fully plan to go get some different flowers, at which point I’ll have the happiest little deck around! So excited to start eating my home-grown fruits and veggies!

Happy gardening…

Much love, Pro

Ughhhh. So I cried yesterday, in public, for the first time in MONTHS (really, since the day I was “let go” from my job this past July). Making it several months in a row without crying – nevermind, crying in PUBLIC – shouldn’t be a huge accomplishment but it just goes to show how different things are for me now. Anyway, so I worked out with my mom and her trainer yesterday, much like I have done for the past 5 or 6 weeks. It started out much like it always does – we decided what muscle groups we’d be working (back and shoulders) and got started.

Sherry (bonafide badass trainer lady) told me she wanted me to start with pull-ups on the pull-up assist machine. Ummmm, FINE. I’m not gonna tell you how much weight I needed to be “assisted with” but let’s say it wasn’t just a little bit. Moving on…I got in 3 good sets of 10 which is far better than I would have done a year ago – BONUS. I was a bit frustrated but I just kept telling myself “This will get easier…this will get easier.” THEN Sherry asked me if I had ever done a “reverse push-up.” Uhhh CRAP. I knew exactly what she was referring to and OF COURSE I’d never done them. Are you KIDDING ME?! I sucked it up…told her that I’d never done them but that I was ready to try. Deep breath. Exhale.

Now, if you don’t know what a reverse push-up is (<– click here to watch – I didn’t use the towel grips…just hands on the bar), it’s this god-awful lift that could make a grown man cry. She put me on the Smith Machine gripping the bar from the underside, facing the ceiling. I was supposed to be able to then pull my self up toward the bar…however, I could only do ONE and it wasn’t pretty. Not at all. I told her I couldn’t do it and that we should move on. Seeing as how she’s a TRAINER, you can probably imagine how well “I can’t do it” went over (it didn’t) so I did 4 more with her assisting me. At this point, I was pretty annoyed, not to mention discouraged with the fact that we still had 50 more minutes until I could go home.

So my mom got in place to do her set and I walked away to go do bent over rows. As I turned my back, I felt my face go flush, my ears turned red and my eyes welled up. I was choking back my tears and telling myself “Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t you cry” but all I could think was “How is it that I’ve come THIS far…45 pounds and it feels like I’m still at point A?!” I could feel myself starting the deep, heavy breathing that is almost always followed by a flood of tears when I felt Sherry come up behind me and give me a great big hug. I buried my head in her neck and just let it all go. I was sobbing and I know people were watching…unfortunately I didn’t care about that particular detail until later. Mortified…I was mortified.

Sherry just kept telling me that I HAVE come so far and not to get discouraged…that THIS is why we’re working on it. It’ll get easier – she promised – with time. I knew all of this and I’ve known it from the beginning but it felt so good and reassuring to hear it from her. For instance, back in January when I first got serious about working out, I started out walking on a treadmill for 15-20 minutes at a time at a pretty low intensity – that used to be difficult. Now I have no problem hopping on the elliptical for 45-60 minutes at a high intensity. I KNOW that these things get easier. I think I was just so happy with how far I’ve come (see last post) that it was hard to envision having to, in a sense, start all over again.

Here’s what I’ve realized: losing weight is a challenge. It takes great determination and will-power and the challenge is – and should be – part of the fun. Somewhere along the line I forgot that. Never again.

As if my public cry-fest wasn’t awful enough…I went to weigh-in today:

Week 23 Weight Loss: -0.0 lbs (Ummmm, FML)

Total Weight Loss with WW: -37.6 lbs (STILL about 45 total)

That’s right folks. Nada. Zilch. Zero. NOTHING. On the bright side, at least it’s not a gain and there’s always next week…and the week after…and the week after…and the week after…

Much love, Pro

With a blog named “They Call Me Pro,” I figured the question was bound to come up eventually, so why not just answer it right meow? Standard answer: wouldn’t *you* like to know? Smirk, giggle, haha.

The honest truth of it is that with a last name like Prochazka, it came about quite easily. Turns out, my dad has been known as “Pro” for as long as he can remember among his friends from highschool and various sports teams. Around his friends I was “Little Pro” so I’ve always answered to it.

My friends, however, didn’t adopt the name until sometime in highschool, most likely on the soccer team and eventually it rubbed off. Lindsey is a pretty popular name so we all had to figure out different things to call each other besides “Lindsey, no the other Lindsey” and Pro became the nickname of choice. Since then co-workers, as well as clients, have adopted the nickname and I’m more than okay with it.

Of course, that then lends itself to all kinds of jokes among friends: “They don’t call her Pro for nothin’, *wink wink*” (thus becoming the semi-official tagline for my blog), being my personal favorite. You gotta be able to laugh about it, right?

Anywho, it’s not a long story but there it is.

My journey now is on one of self-improvement and self-discovery (please note the non-use of self-exploration as that has more implications that I would like to consider for this particular post. HA!)…figuring out who Pro really is, what she likes and pushing her to the limit – oooh third person felt so wrong there…dislike number one: talking in the third person; avoid at all costs. I’m a firm believer in the idea that you can’t love another until you love yourself so for now, that is first and foremost.

Cheers to happiness, for me and as me.