August Brings the Heat

I can’t believe July is already over…Happy first day of August!

I was up bright dark and early this morning at the unearthly hour of 4:30am. I spent almost an hour reading magazines and watching infomercials/trying to fall back asleep until finally I gave up on going back to sleep and switched over to a news station.

The weather happened to be on and apparently we’ve had 30 straight days of 100+ degree weather and today our heat advisory has officially been lifted and changed to an excessive heat warning. oy vey.

Doesn’t this look like fun? I’ll be spending most of my time indoors this week anyways since I’ll be studying for my finals, but I feel terrible for all those high school kids who start football and marching band practice this week.

With this August heat wave coming in, I kept this morning breakfast on the cooler side.

I would’ve liked to have a similar breakfast to yesterdays, but I didn’t really feel like turing the stove on.

A play off pb & jelly oats – Oats cooked with strawberries, then topped with blueberries, raspberries, and a drizzle of sunbutter mixed with almond milk.

Todays breakfast – Pre-workout

Nature Path’s Heritage flakes and lots of sweet blueberries

I usually don’t eat much before a workout, but since I was up way too early, my stomach was growling and I knew I had to feed it.

Breakfast part 2 – Post-workout

Double Chocolate Milk – twice the chocolate, but none of all the added sugar in normal chocolate milk:

• 1 cup unsweetened almond milk
• 1 serving chocolate protein powder
• ~ 1 T dark cocoa powder

Since I had some loose ends to tie up when I returned home after my workout, I didn’t exactly get in a full post breakfast, but the chocolate milk pretty much tied me over til lunch.

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So what’s the best way to cool off in this heat (other than an ice cold smoothie)?

Iced tea

quick fact: since I took my ice maker out of the freezer to clean, it took two full trays of ice cubes to make this cup of iced tea.

Ice makers > Ice cube trays

I’ve always been more of a coffee drinker than a tea drinker, just a few occasional cups every now and then, but during my time in Hong Kong I seem to have picked up quite the tea habit.

Since tea is such a popular drink in Asia and consumed with almost every meal (having been part of the british empire, afternoon tea is very popular in HK), I’ve just developed a stronger liking to it.

One of my absolute favorites is Hong Kong style milk tea. It’s basically just black or ceylon tea mixed with evaporated milk.

You can pretty much order it anywhere in HK, anytime of the day.

Although i do prefer drinking it hot, it’s just as good cold.

My second favorite tea is roasted tea, whether it be roasted brown rice tea, roasted green tea, or roasted barley tea. I just enjoyed that roasted taste in general.

This particular bag of roasted tea is my favorite. It’s a mix of matcha green tea with roasted brown rice.

But if nothing else is available, I always enjoy a nice cup of green tea.

Preferably iced though, and sometimes mixed with a tiny spoonful of manuka honey (i promise thats some good stuff – both health and taste-wise!).

I’ll most likely be drinking all sorts of variations of these over the next couple weeks. Guess I better get that ice maker goin!

Do you like tea? What’s you favorite kind?

What’s the weather like in your neck of the woods?

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On another note, I just realized yesterday that some of my photos in my previous posts have gone missing. It may have been because I went through my media library and deleted photos thinking that once I had uploaded them into the post they no longer needed to remain in the media folder. Boy was I wrong. It’ll probably take me a while to re-load and replace them all, but eventually I’ll have all the photos back up!

Also, not that they already aren’t, but my posts may be a bit sparse this week as I’ve taken procrastination to the next level and fallen way behind on my studies. Gotta catch up and ace those finals 😉