Fit to be fit

I never really liked sports or exercising. Lying in bed with a bowl of ice cream is more my thing. Dancing I do like, walking is okay, cycling goes too, but everything else, meh. The fact that I did not own any sports clothes until today says a lot.

Still, I know I should exercise more, for my own good. Lately I have started taking long brisk walks and exercising a little at home. Squats, lunges, stretching, bedtime yoga and the like. My apartment building also has a free gym for the tenants so I have gone cycling a little more or less every other day. Baby steps. I even have a secret health and fitness board on Pinterest!

Now my friend Trang and her sisters are on a vacation so my friend Erica and I rented their aerobics studio cards. Today we went to our first class and it was not even as bad as I thought it would be. If the studio memberships were not so expensive I think I could turn it into a habit.

It is so much better to have an exercise buddy. Erica lives close to me so we take walks together and now we have each other for motivation. It is so much harder to cancel the plans when there is another person involved.

After the class this morning we went to do a little shopping with Erica. I have given up shopping for the most part but I decided that proper training clothes would be good motivation. I am much less inclined to give up now that I have invested money on this, and now that I can look somewhat cute while exercising. (or at least that's what I keep on telling myself)

Who knows, maybe I will end up buying myself a membership after all, but for now I am going to learn to like exercising.

Even if I only exercise to look good despite of all the ice cream.

Rhubarb

Hey everyone, I hope you weekend went well! I spent mine with my friends, going out on Friday, watching movies on Saturday and just hanging out on Sunday.

Last week I got some rhubarb from my grandmother and on Saturday I made a rhubarb pie. As I did not want to eat rhubarb pie every day, I had to come up with something else to do with the left-over rhubarb. Freezing it would have been an option had it not been for my tiny freezer. Since I also had plenty of limes left over from Friday, I decided to make a small batch of rhubarb jam. I did not quite master the recipe though, a little too much sugar I think, as the end result is somewhat caramel-like. It tastes good but I am still not entirely pleased. Better luck next time.

The rhubarb pie was made using a new recipe, which I did not quite like. I suppose I should have stuck to the recipes used in my family for decades, even if this pie was okay. Okay, but most certainly not spectacular. The recipe asked for too much flour in my opinion and as a result the pie was somewhat dry despite of the rhubarb.

I will definitely have to get some more rhubarb from my grandparents' place, summer is not summer without a proper rhubarb pie. If you have a chance to bake one, you can try my grandmother's recipe:

An old picture from last year

Rhubarb pie

Ingredients:

250 grams of butter

3 dl of sugar

3 eggs

1 dl of rye flour/whole grain wheat flour

5 dl of wheat flour

3 tea spoonfuls of baking powder

1 tea spoonful of ground cardamom

1 tea spoonful of ground ginger

rhubarb finely sliced

jelly sugar

coconut flakes/rolled oats

OR

5 dl of sour cream/Turkish yoghurt

1 dl of sugar

2 eggs

vanilla sugar

OR

butter

sugar

wheat flour

rolled oats

1. Peel and slice the rhubarb

2. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius

3. Mix the dry ingredients with each other

4. Cream the butter and sugar

5. Add the eggs one by one while continuously mixing

6. Add the dry ingredients into the mix

7. Pour the mix into an oven plate coated with baking paper

8. Add the rhubarb slices and sprinkle some jelly sugar on the top

9. Add the topping of your choice:

a) sprinkle coconut flakes or rolled oats on the top

b) mix all the ingredients and pour over the rhubarbs

c) turn the butter, sugar, wheat flour and rolled oats into a crumble and sprinkle over the rhubarbs

10. 30-40 minutes in the oven

11. Serve with vanilla sauce or ice cream

A touch of green

I am not the biggest fan of nature, as anyone who knows me a little better can tell you. I do enjoy the seaside and flowers are pretty but plants and bugs and all that just creeps me out.

Yet, I do like my little herb garden. Coriander/cilantro, rucola, basil and spinach. I had a slightly smaller herb garden earlier but unfortunately they got infested by fruit flies so I decided to get rid of them. Poor things.

The plants I mean. Fruit flies can stay out of my apartment if you ask me.

Today I decided to give gardening another go after my grandmother bought me these charming little pots while we were shopping for a rug for my apartment.

Can't wait to see the first signs of green. I will definitely post pictures of my little plant babies as they grow.

Do you have your own little garden too?

The end of mean girls

This morning I was scrolling down my news feed on Facebook and came across this video by Laci Green on Upworthy. After watching it, I felt the need to write a blog post about it, as it really struck a cord with me.

Not entirely sure if I have ever mentioned this here on my blog, but I was bullied for pretty much all of the 9 years of primary and secondary school. It stopped only after I moved on to the upper secondary school. So I have experienced girl hate, as Laci Green put it on her video, first hand.

I do not want to turn this into a heart wrenching story that will make you reach for the nearest tissue box or a bowl of ice cream. I was bullied, it made me feel absolutely miserable about myself and the mental scars are still there, but I got over it, for the most part. I can thank D and my best friends for that. So just like girls/women can be unbelievably cruel to each other, we can be supportive to each other as well. We can help each other grow into the people we were always meant to be. Not just us girls, boys/men too.

As Laci Green mentions on her video, we have a lot of pressure on us these days. The pressure to be pretty, smart, successful, driven, sexy, independent, the perfect girlfriend/wife/mother, and all those other things we are told to be is a heavy burden. It is enough to make anyone snap. Depression, eating disorders, you name it, are killing people every year. Literally. We are bombarded by messages telling us that we are not good enough.

To make things even worse, it is not some alien enemy telling us these things. We tell each other that we are not good enough. Why do we spend the time and energy on putting on our make-up and choosing the perfect outfit before we head out the door? We do it because if we do not, someone else, most probably a woman, will either say something, or judge us by just looking at us. Well, that is what we think. Probably because there always is that one person who will make us feel worse about ourselves for not being "good enough."

I never fit in. I never said the right things, never wore the right clothes, never could find the balance of being smart but not "too smart." I never could please others, no matter how much I tried. Instead of blaming the others, I blamed myself. I had simply failed, again. If I tried just one time more, maybe this time I would not fail and others would no longer shun me out. Of course, I never succeeded. I was never "good enough." The funny, or actually, the sad thing is, no-one ever told me those things in those exact words, well except for a few times. Still, somehow the message came across.

It was not until I met D that I started to realise that perhaps, as there was someone who saw so many good things in me, I was not that bad after all. Ever since I have been taking small steps on my journey to discover that perhaps I am good enough. Good enough the way I am. Not perfect, because there is no such thing, but good enough.

Watching the video I also realised something else. I realised that as much I have been trying to tell myself that I am good enough, I have not been telling myself that others are good enough as well, good enough the way they are. I should not judge when I see someone wear/do/say/like their thing. It may not be the same thing I would do, but they are not me. Their good enough is not my good enough, and there lies the whole point. We should never judge other people by our own standards because our standards are not theirs. We can not all fit into the same box, and why should we?

So, instead of trying to make others fit into our way of thinking, we should support and encourage them on their way to finding out just how amazing they are just because they are themselves. We should inspire others to love themselves because one can never truly love someone else before they have learnt to love themselves.

It is really that simple.

Learn to love yourself the way you are and learn to love others the way they are.

Blogging again

Long time no see, my lovely readers! I'm finally back from my blogging break now that all the exams are over. Summer has arrived to Finland and I've been busy enjoying it with my friends.

I have missed blogging a lot, I didn't even realise how big a part of my life it had become. Now I hope to keep on blogging without any long breaks. The positive side of the break was that I now have plenty of ideas and inspiration, and I hope you will enjoy them.

More will follow, this was just a quick post to let you know I'm back!