It rains in the Spring.  I like rain because it smells good.  It makes everything feel clean and new.  It gives variety to my life.  I even like thunderstorms because it makes me humble and reminds me of the power of God.

Flowers!  The flowers start to come back and they smell good and help me to be cheerful.

Easter.  My birthday.  May parent’s birthdays.  Passover.

The sunshine comes back warm, but not too warm.  I always forget how much I missed the sunshine during the winter and it’s like a great surprise every year.

Green grass and leaves.

Strawberries!  I had strawberries for breakfast with a little whipped cream.  Who knew that two cups of strawberries has fewer grams of carbs than a cup of cereal?

Other spring fruits and veggies!  Asparagus, artichokes, apricots, avocados, and pineapple.  (I just found a list of fruits and vegetables by season–with pictures!!–here)

The farmer’s market starts up again and I can find good produce next month!

General Conference

Kites–I should bust out our kite and take the kids kite-flying with all the wind we’ve got right now.

Spring Cleaning.  I rarely actually do a whole huge Spring Cleaning, but I do get a little bug in my head helping me to get motivated to try to get things back in order.

Anticipation and planning of summer vacations.

Did I mention flowers and sunshine?  I really love those…

As of today, I’ve exercised eight days in a row (excluding Sundays) for 30 minutes or more each time. I don’t think I’ve done that even once in my whole life before now. Yay Bethany! Also, because it’s Saturday and I managed to do each and every one of my health goals every single day this week I got to go buy myself a bouquet of flowers! Colin and the kids went with me to buy them before General Conference this morning.

I ended up choosing three little bunches of yellow daffodils from the florist’s refrigerated room of beautiful blooms. I was expecting to go to a grocery store or Walmart to pick up a bunch, but Colin surprised me by taking me to a real florist shop with lots of variety to choose from and friendly, knowledgeable sales people. It was definitely more romantic and rewarding that way. Thanks Colin! Degen held the flowers in his lap almost the entire way home (he wanted to smell them) and wanted to help me put them in a vase.

As a bonus to my great feeling of accomplishment and my lovely motivating reward, I LOST FIVE POUNDS this week! Isn’t that awesome? Plus, I’ve felt quite healthy and generally positive about life. And exercising has been really fun and a good break for me with legitimate alone time. I’ve borrowed Colin’s iPod each time I head for the gym and listened to my tween Mega Movie Mix CD that Colin bought for me a couple of years ago.
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It’s cheesy and I would hate to admit it’s what I listen to in front of a sophisticated audience, but it’s clean and a bunch of it has a good beat that’s perfect for exercise. I listen to other songs, too, but that’s my current default. Watch out FOO8!

Today I lifted weights on the crazy, huge machine that has about 10 different kinds of weights to lift. It looks like a demented black-and-white metal octopus. I never know quite what to do with weights, but since I’m almost always alone in the gym I figured I couldn’t embarrass myself too badly by trying. Ironically, just as I was finishing my attempt at lifting and heading over to the treadmill, someone came into the gym! It was a big, muscular man who must have been a football player when he was younger. I told him that he was welcome to change the TVs to something other than Food Network (which he immediately did with a little chuckle). He then proceeded to lift with great confidence and apparently no effort about 2 million times more weight than I did (yes, I exaggerate…a little) about 100 more reps than I did. This didn’t intimidate me, however, because I’m a beginner AND it gave me a chance to watch him covertly in the mirror so I could find out how the machine was supposed to be used. “Oh! That goes behind your shoulders!” was typical of my internal responses. So, thanks to the big man in the gym who didn’t know he was teaching me how to use the weights machine.

So, go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather and the yummy smelling flowers and have a picnic or something,  Maybe that's what we should do for our date tonight…