Super Easy Healthy Snack Idea

Right now, the food world has been taken by storm with the newest fad: the organic all natural diet.  While I love what this is trying to accomplish, I am not completely convinced that everything we see is 100% true.

For my family, there is no such thing as a straight three meal day.  We either have three meals with snacks in between or breakfast and dinner with a long collection of snacks between them.  So, snacks are a big part of my day.  However, working at following a more natural diet, the question pops up: without eating processed food out of a bag or in a wrapper, what kind of snacks can I eat?

I (along with my family) am quite busy and don't always have time to put together a smoothie/drink or something like that, it just takes too much time.  Luckily, I have found a great combination that makes a great snack and is so easy to put together.

An amazing snack just needs three components: a fruit, a vegetable, and a protein.  Pretty self explanatory.  Pick any fruit (grapes, a banana, an apple, an orange, etc.) and any vegetable (carrots, celery, cucumber, tomatoes, broccoli, etc.)  These are all already pretty snack sized and very quick easy to grab on your way out the door. 

The protein aspect of the snack is the only one that may take more than a couple seconds to grab on your way out the door.  Choose either a small handful of mixed nuts, peanut butter (or any nut butter) to smear on a slice of bread, a banana, or celery, or even take a hard boiled egg or two.  Combine all these and you have an endless supply of quick, easy, and healthy snack options!As an additional health component, make sure to mix it up so you get a variety of vitamins and minerals.  And for a bonus, throw in a yogurt (or something similar) every couple days.

And don't forget!  Beginning October 3rd, every other day will be a part of our countdown to Halloween!  Thirteen awesome DIY Halloween decorations to help spruce up your home.  Three cheers for Halloween!!

Announcement!

Hello all!  Today's post isn't a real blog post, sorry.  No new information or ideas or anything like that.  I just wanted to announce that we can all look forward to 13 DIY Halloween decorating ideas beginning October 3rd!  So, every other day will feature a new fun and hopefully not too difficult DIY Halloween decorating idea!  Hope you are all as excited as I am!!

The Hydroflask

For all of us just getting in the swing of things back at school, or have a child doing the same, hydrating is extremely important (especially with athletes) on these hot summer days (yes, I know summer has ended, but someone forgot to tell mother nature of that fact).  Hydration helps to keep your body running and functioning as it should be, but can be difficult to get in the habit of.

Here in Southern California, it has been quite warm, and so cold water can be particularly refreshing, especially when the sun is highest in the sky and beating down on you full force.  However, myself and many others that I know don't particularly care for sweaty water bottles.

Who wants a water bottle sweating all over their desk, backpack, car, or anywhere else for that matter?  While some people may not care, there are plenty of other people who don't want to lug around a drippy water bottle all over the place either.  A couple months ago, I found my own solution to this problem.  The Hydroflask!  A double walled, vacuum sealed, stainless steel water bottle, I found that it works amazingly to meet all my needs.  Not only does it not sweat, but this canteen can keep my water cold for HOURS!  I first saw this bottle when hiking with my uncle, who, equally amazed showed me that even out in our 90 degree weather, hiking, a couple hours in, his water was not only still cold, but still had ice in it.  I'm not going to lie, I was quite impressed.

After doing a little bit of research, I realized that there was a whole line of different food and drink products of varying sizes and colors (hurray for colors!) all sporting the same vacuum sealed double walls.  Claiming to keep hot food/beverages warm for 12 hours and cold drinks cool for 24 hours, you naturally want to be skeptical.  While I have not tested my hydroflask for hot beverages, I do use it constantly for cold water.  And now, everyone in my household has their own in all different colors.

In case you were wondering, no, I don't work for this company, any company affiliate, nor do I get money from saying any of this in any way.  I just think that this is an awesome product, and so great for athletes to be able to have access to cold water when they need it.  We use these for hiking, to keep our drinks cold for after runs, and just for the general school or work day.

Yes, I will admit, they are a little bit on the expensive side.  The 32 ounce size most common to my household runs somewhere around $30 if I remember correctly, but I personally believe that it's worth it for the advantages of cold water all day, no sweaty bottles, and the money we save now that we use so many less water bottles every day (my family drinks quite a bit of water).

The choice is yours!  Leave a comment below letting me know if you have or have used a hydroflask or what you think!

My Favorite Not-So Einstein Quote

Everyone knows that everything you read on the internet is true.  No one would put anything on the internet that wasn't true, it just doesn't happen.  And people who write things on the internet, only do so because they are experts, and they know what they're talking about.

If you found these statements to be ridiculous in any way, shape, or form, congratulations.  You have some common sense, oftentimes sorely lacking nowadays.  Looking at the statements I have written above, I can't imagine hearing anyone actually agreeing.  Yet, it's astonishing how it seems so often, we forget these very same things.  So many people accept things that they read on the internet without going in much depth or doing very much of their own research to see if whatever they're reading actually has some merit.  It's astonishing to me really, the sheer overwhelming amount of propaganda that is seen all over the internet.

One of my most favorite quotes of all time happens to fall into this "everything on the internet is true" circumstances.  This quote is most often attributed to Albert Einstein, though if you actually delve into the quote a little further, you'll find that the quote definitely does not come from Einstein, and in fact, no one seems to have a definitive answer as to where it actually came from, but here it is:

"Everybody is a genius.  But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
~ Anonymous (or so it seems)

My Favorite Einstein Quotes

I had a friend once who told me that it was impossible for a person to be both intelligent and wise at the same time.  While I vehemently disagreed with him, he was sure that wise men could not be super intelligent and super intelligent men could not be wise.  But while it may not be common to find incredibly wise geniuses, I can at least hold faith that Einstein could be my example.

Albert Einstein was what many would call a great man.  Most well known for his physics contributions, he is the creator of both general and specific relativity, shedding light in a whole new way to physicists about the way things move with relation to each other. He is widely accepted as a genius in his own right.  However, not everyone is as familiar with the wisdom he possessed as well.  He had this incredible insight into humanity and saw things that many people still don't see.

Below I have included 10 of my all time favorite Einstein quotes.  Some funny, some profound, but all with a great message:

1. "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.  The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."

2. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

3. "A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be."

4. "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."

5. "Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding."

6. "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

7. "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.  It takes a tough of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."

8. "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary.  Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

9. "The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."

10. "Most teachers waste their time by asking questions that are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning is to discover what the pupil does know or is capable of knowing."

Oh, people

Today, while heading to school, I hit some unfortunate construction, and when I finally got far enough to see the construction (so I could pass it), I saw this:

It is a little difficult to see in the picture, but here we see one construction worker digging away, and two standing there watching him do it. I sincerely hope that somehow this digging was actually somehow important to whatever the other two had to do because otherwise this is just a sad example of human waste/laziness. It doesn't take three men to use one shovel and I would think that there would be at least SOMETHING useful for the other two to be doing rather than "spectating." Sure, who am I to assume? But I must say, it didn't look particularly promising. 

Mean Girls

So, I had to "duh" myself when I realized that this blog is a blog and it's mine.  So, basically, I can make it whatever I want to make it.  So it can be my college piano, tutoring, children, grad school, girl's hair styles, movie watching, holiday crafting, anything in the world blog. 

Unfortunately, I don't have anything so interesting to say today.  Hopefully I come up with something even remotely interesting some time soon otherwise this will easily turn into a pretty sad blog.  I have never done a blog before and know nothing about blogging, so I suppose I'll just have to live it and learn it, like so many other things in life.

I recently found out that my brother (recently turned 15 years old) has never seen mean girls so I have decided to make him watch it with me.  I am appalled at some of the things kids watch nowadays and how few of them have actually seen all these movies that people my age grew up with! It's crazy.  Anyway, I have a research presentation coming up and my professor said that a lot of people were able to find relevant clips in the past from Mean Girls (and then went on a little tangent about how he had to see the whole movie so that he could figure out who the "plastics" were).  So, showing this to my brother does have that whole "two birds one stone" kind of thing going on.  Maybe I can find relevant clips for my part of our group presentation and he gets to see a movie that is actually surprisingly universal.

First Post EVER!

Hi, everyone! So, today, I will be posting my first post in a blog where I don't even know what it will be about. How exciting! For those of you that don't quite get my title, it's just a little psychology joke.  Carl Jung (pronounced more similar to young) is a very well known psychologist, and I just thought using his name would make for a silly little title.  Anyway, I will have to cut this a little short, seeing as I really should be working on actual school work rather than typing away in random meaningless babble.  Until next time!!

Hopefully by then, I'll figure out what I actually want to put on here...