Random Wednesday

Hello all, on Wednesday's I will be blogging about something random, so the post could be about pretty much anything that I am thinking about that day :)
Today since it is beginning to feel like springtime here in MA I want to describe this beautiful place in Western MA that would be the perfect day trip in good weather for anyone at driving distance. The place is called Bash Bish Falls, its a waterfall out in the Berkshires in MA on Mount Washington, and continues into NY. You can hike up a small peak there and they say you can see NY and MA from the top. I visited this beautiful place with my boyfriend last fall when the trees were turning colors, which made for some beautiful views from the top. I would imagine it would be a great place to visit in the spring also! Do a bit of hiking and bring a picnic :)

Apparently this is both NY and MA!

Part of the stream from the waterfall

Bash Bish Falls

Healthy Recipe Monday

Hello readers,
Every Monday is the day I weigh in at my summer body challenge, today is only technically day 1 so I have no update on my progress. Did an awesome hard workout today though!
So I will leave you with a healthy snack recipe that works for the Eat Clean diet, as well as the Paleo diet, and any other low carb/high protein diet. I first tried this recipe when I did the Paleo diet for 3 months a year ago (I lost a total of 18 pounds during these 3 months, and have only gained 3-4 back, great diet if anyone can be very discplined!).
Homemade Beef Jerky
ingredients needed:
shaved beef, preferably a lean cut
spices (some good ones are curry, garlic powder, ginger, sea salt, pepper, turmeric, cayenne pepper, basically any spice you like as long as it doesn't have added salt)

Mix all the desired spices on a plate, for my recipe I used curry, sea salt, black pepper, cardamom, and Trader Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute (a must have in the kitchen!). Then take the thinly sliced beef and lay it in the seasoning plate, then flip the beef over so both sides are coated with spices. Now lay the beef out flat on a pan or baking sheet, make sure there are no pieces on top of one another. Turn the oven on to the lowest temperature and place the baking sheets on the oven racks. Leave the oven door slightly open and just let the beef dry out. Usually the process will take about 4 hours but it depends on your oven. I flip the beef pieces over after about an hour then don't touch them until the beef is fully dry. This makes for a delicious high protein, low carb snack!

The beef, we had the guys at the meat counter shave it for us.

The spices

Spices mixed on the plate

Beef slices ready to be cooked

The finished product!

I hope you enjoy the beef jerky!

New Item Sunday

I am going to try to highlight new items on Sundays that I will be introducing into my etsy store. This Sunday I have 2 new versions of my wire wrapped studs. First is the Xpression series which are made with Czech glass seed beads. The beads coat the wire so that the earring looks like a small textured button in your ear. My awesome boyfriend helped me come up with this style, then I tried out a couple of prototypes and now they are ready to be listed in the store and will soon be coming in tons of other colors! Check out a couple of these pairs...

Purple Lined Aqua Beads- Xpression series

Silver Lined Pastel Pink beads- Xpression Series

 

 

Now the other intro series today, is an extension of my Elegance Collection with the swarovski glass pearl beads. I have started to make the pearl studs in the petite size, I am adding 2 of these listings to the site today and have much more to come in the near future! Check out these light blue and dusty rose pairs...

Light Blue Swarovski Glass Pearl Studs- Petite Elegance Collection

Dusty Rose Swarovski Pearl studs- Petite Elegance Collection

 

I am also putting up some new colors of the crystal bead wire wrapped studs, so after you eat your easter feast with family and are too tired to do anything else, check out my site! V*Dazzled by Victoria Ruhl  Also top secret info: this week, Mon-Fri I am having a big Mother's Day Sale on all of my studs! (25% off!!!)

Summer Body Challenge, Day 1

So I started this summer body challenge this morning with my friend Lindsey. It is 8 weeks long with an eating plan, food logging website, and workout plan held at a place called The Asylum (which sounds pretty scary already!). The woman who runs the program, Bonnie, will look at the food we are logging and give us one workout per week where we weigh in. I am so excited about this and it falls just in time for the summer beach season! I am hoping by the end to have lost 20 pounds so its going to be hardwork! The hardest thing for me will be to resist free food at school (free food to a grad student is pretty much the best thing ever), which is at the least, donuts at lab meeting on Tuesday and pizza and beer on Friday, but I know I can do it :)
After the meeting it seems the biggest thing is to limit all sugar!! even fruits (which I thought would be my go to snack) and keep myself to 1400 cals per day, easy right?? This is going to be a huge change, but a good one, and I will update every week on my progress and plan to share some of the best "eat clean" recipes that I find. Yay for fitness :)

New blog, Life as a PhD student/jewelry designer

Hello blogging world, this is my new blog! So for this first post I will give a little insight into my world. By day, I work in a lab (not sure if "work" is really the right word for the activities of being a grad student, but we can get into that later!), once I leave lab (usually 6 or 7 PM on a good day) I go home to my highly organized, high tech jewelry design studio (OK it's really my living room that is normally in a bit of disarray).
In lab I do research on cancer biology, trying to do my part to make advances in cancer treatment hopefully after I finish my PhD I will make some larger contributions to the field....but after a crazy day at lab, I found that I needed something to take my mind off science, this is where jewelry came into play. It is my creative outlet, and now with opening my etsy shop and growing my small business it has kind of become my "night job". So there it is, my life.
On my blog I will give insights into both of my worlds, with some other fun things mixed in, hopefully provide some entertainment to my readers, and tomorrow I will be starting a summer body challenge so I will do a weekly update on the challenge with a healthy yummy recipe included, I guess this will be a big mix of things! :)

My kitty (very big kitty) 50 Cent

A small part of my "studio"