Quarter Year Check-in!

Can you believe it's April already? March was a really hectic month for me which helped it fly by. I looked at my calendar and realized I only had 2 days without any plans with friends, so it was definitely fun but a little bit tiring. I had a lot of highlights, but the best one was probably my busiest day of the month. It started with a baby shower, then Dan and I met up with some friends downtown for a birthday bar crawl that was a ton of fun. We actually had dinner reservations for Dan's birthday (March is a popular month for birthdays) and cancelled them because we were having such a great time. We did have to eventually leave because we had tickets for the North Carolina Symphony which was fantastic. Afterwards we had a quick dinner at Whiskey Kitchen and ended our really fun and busy day!

April is going to be an even busier month with lots of travel. For the past few months Dan has been planning  a trip for us, and I have no idea where we're going! I can't wait to find out and share with all of you. If you have any guesses please let me know! For now, let's get to our annual goals-

Annual Goals

Korean Vegan Cookbook

For the third chapter of the cookbook, I made two recipes from Side Dishes. The first was marinated kale, which was a really good side dish that I'm going to make again this month. The other was a Korean-style omelet. I tried out Just Eggs (a vegan egg substitute) and tried a new technique for making omelets that was pretty tricky but really fun! I liked how this tasted and couldn't believe it wasn't real eggs. I even fooled Dan!

Temperature blanket

We're up to three months of the temperature blanket! I went back to the single crochet this month and like how it's a little bit varied month by month.

Here are some stats for March-

- I used a total of 5 colors again

- The highest daily temperature was 87 and the lowest was 42 (just a reminder, I'm only doing the "high" of the day so I didn't record the daily low or average)

- My most used color was sapphire (used 11 times) which is used for the range 50 to 59 degrees.

Here's what the blanket looks like-

If you can't see the measuring tape, it's officially 21 inches! If the size stays similar the whole blanket it will end up being about 7 feet.

Hike 100 Miles + Check Out 10 New Parks

I made a bit more progress with hiking this month. I ended up going on 3 hikes for a total of 6.5 miles. I still have some catching up to do to hit my goal, but now that the weather is getting nicer I'm planning on going on way more hikes to make up those miles. I'm up to 19 miles so far.

I also visited one new park this month- Hilltop Needmore Park. Dan and I met up with one of his coworkers and his wife for a walk around, then visited a nearby brewery. The park used to be a golf course so it's very open with lots of hills. It was a nice place for a walk!

Read the Goodreads Best Books

Here are the books that I read this month.

YA Fantasy- Gallant by V.E.Schwab. I didn't really enjoy this book- it seemed like the entire premise was just to seem as weird and creepy as possible, and it got to be really repetitive after a while. The idea seemed great but I just wasn't a fan of the execution. Most of the reviews were similar to mine, so I'm surprised it won the award!

YA Fiction- The Final Gambit bvy Jennifer Lynn Barnes. This was the final installment of the Inheritance Games series. I enjoyed the first two books and was excited to see how it ended, but it ended up just being meh. I think it was too long since I read the last book so I forgot a lot of what happened and was confused for most of this book. I also thought the ending was a bit disappointing after waiting to see how it would end for so long!

Work from a Coffee Shop Once a Month

In March I worked from Fount Kitchen + Coffee, which is a shop I've heard so much about and drive by every time I get on 540, so I was really excited to try it out. I think it does live up to the hype of great coffee and food, and it was absolutely packed. There are a lot of places to sit indoors with even more outside, and I was able to find a spot with an outlet with no issue and the wifi worked great! It was extremely loud though, so I wouldn't recommend working there if you have meetings. I enjoyed the ambiant noise though (it reminded me of those coffee shop ambiance background videos on Youtube- very atmospheric!)

Let's see how my March goals went!

Stretch or do yoga every day

I was pretty good about this! I didn't hit it 100%, but I stretched more often than I didn't, and also did yoga 4 times.

Be more consistent with working out

This was another pretty good! I went swimming 4 times and did one of my longest pool swims ever, and also went to Boot Camp every week in March. I'm not sure if I can tell any big changes in my strength yet, but I am waking up less sore each week.

Build a garden

The raised beds are built, and we have moved our seedlings into larger containers! We should be able to start planting this month and I can't wait to share how it goes again.

Spring clean first floor

This was my big fail for the month. Like I mentioned- this was a really busy month and when I had free time the last thing I wanted to do was clean! I did a decent clean twice this month but I wouldn't consider it spring cleaning. Maybe April I'll get it done.

I'm going to skip monthly goals for April because of all the travel I have planned, but in general I need to be frugal and healthy when I'm home because of all the meals I'll be having out. I'm so excited though and can't wait to recap next month!

What are your goals for this month?