Category Archives: personal

So long 2010

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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It’s been a crazy year for me. Here’s what I remember:

2010 was a great year, I learned a lot about myself  and met some of my goals. I lost a total of 30 lbs (still not exactly where I want to be, but it’s a big improvement) Here are some of my goals for 2011:

  • Learn to run. This past year I started running to help with the weight loss, but I’m not very good at it. This year I want to be able to call myself a runner.
  • Travel more. While I travel quite a lot, there is a lot of this country that I haven’t seen. Growing up in NYC you tend to ignore the rest of the country, but this year I really want to see the US.
  • Go to culinary school. I am hoping to be able to attend 105degrees academy in the summer of 2011.
  • Hit my goal weight. While it would be nice to do this by my birthday at the end of February, I would like to hit my target of losing 50 lbs this year. Then I can finally post my before picture alongside my after.
  • Take more pictures. Photography is my first love and it was my first career. I truly miss it and I am going to make an effort to take more photos in 2011, not sure where that will lead me, but it will be an adventure.
  • Do what makes me happy, even if it’s scary. To often I put myself into a box, thinking I can only do one thing, or have one career. But I have lots of interests, and there is a ton of stuff I want to do. I am going to enjoy everything I do this year.

I am grateful to everyone who has supported me this year. Laughed with me, cried with me, told me that everything would be ok. I love you all. Let’s do this new year thing!

Listening to your community

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
1

Building community is something I’ve always loved. My first experiment in community building was this blog, my personal blog. That community has grown, and stayed with me these last 3 years. From back when I started video blogging on Viddler, when I was doing Y! Live videos every night, when I was a featured user on Pownce,  when I started a video podcast, there have been so many awesome adventures that this community has supported me through.

But when you build a community, you also need to see how it reacts to changes that you make. When I started blogging about health and food, those posts never got nearly as much positive feedback from the community as the posts I would write about iPhone apps, or my geek gift guide. Just because my personal interests shifted, I can’t expect the entire community I built to be interested in it too.

So even though this is my personal blog, I feel that the content has lost direction and I would really like to re-focus it. I will continue to write about technology, geeky things, and online communities here on Random Sarah.

However, writing about food, health and my diet is something that I have a growing interest in and while I won’t write about it here on Random Sarah anymore, I am pleased to announce that I am started a food blog called Eat Raw. I wanted to start from scratch and build a community there that is interested in learning more about raw foods, and health in general. I have different goals for Eat Raw now then goals I had when I started Random Sarah. Some of my goals are the become a featured publisher on FoodBuzz, to grow a community that is interested in Raw Foods, and possibly attend a Raw Foods culinary school and see where that takes me.

These are all things that I would love to happen, but it will take hard work and dedication to the community for it to grow. But I wanted to let all of my Random Sarah readers know about my new endeavor into the world of food blogging and to let you know that I will continue to bring you the same Random Sarah content here that you are used to.

Thank you again for supporting me and reading Random Sarah.

20 Questions

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Earlier today Keri from I Eat Trees posted some questions to all of us participating in VeganMoFo so I thought I would thae the chance to answer them here.

What is one food you thought you’d miss when you went vegan, but don’t? Cheese! I love cheese, but I honestly don’t miss it. It becomes a non issue after a while.

What is a food or dish you wouldn’t touch as a child, but enjoy now? Salad. When I was growing up salad consisted of romaine lettuce with dressing on it. I was never really fond of how boring it was. I didn’t discover all the amazing things I could put in salads until much later.

What vegan dish or food you feel like you “should” like, but don’t? Scrambled tofu. I love it in restaurants, but I can’t seem to get into making it at home.

What beverage do you consume the most of on any given day? Water! I really do drink a lot of water.

What dish are you “famous” for making or bringing to gatherings? Guacamole! Everyone loves my guac! It’s great to bring to parties because it’s such a crowd pleaser and it’s 100% vegan!

Do you have any self-imposed food rules (like no food touching on the plate or no nuts in sweets)? Hmm, the only thing I can think of is that I no longer drink caffeine.

What’s one food or dish you tend to eat too much of when you have it in your home? Bagels. If they are in the house I will eat them even though I know I shouldn’t.

What ingredient or food do you prefer to make yourself despite it being widely available prepackaged? Tomato Sauce. I recently discovered the amazingness that is homemade tomato sauce.

What ingredient or food is worth spending the extra money to get “the good stuff”? Olive Oil and Raw Coconut Oil. I use olive oil almost every day. You should have 2 kinds in your home, the good stuff (for salad dressings and other uses where it won’t be heated) and the not-as-good stuff (for cooking). I use the coconut oil on my skin, it’s seriously the best moisturizer and it doesn’t contain any chemicals.

Are you much of a snacker? What are your favorite snacks? I am a huge snacker, but I try to keep it under control. My favorites are brown rice chips, cereal, and stove popped pop corn.

What are your favorite vegan pizza toppings? I want the pizza to have a lot of sauce, then olives and basil. I like to keep it simple.

What is your favorite vegetable? Fruit? Wow, I don’t know if I can answer this one. If I had to chose I would say that my favorite vegetable is kale for juicing and string beans for eating. Fruit is hard, but probably fresh strawberries in the summer and apples in the fall.

What is the best salad dressing? Olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper! I put it on everything.

What is your favorite thing to put on toasted bread? Take really crusty toasted bread, rub a clove of garlic on it, then rub a ripe tomato on it, and finally drizzle with a little olive oil and sea salt.

What kind of soup do you most often turn to on a chilly day or when you aren’t feeling your best? Either plain homemade vegetable broth, or miso soup.

What is your favorite cupcake flavor? Frosting flavor? Chocolate and chocolate!

What is your favorite kind of cookie? Oatmeal Raisin.

What is your most-loved “weeknight meal”? Rice and beans.

What is one dish or food you enjoy, but can’t get anyone else in your household to eat? I usually can get my mom to try just about anything.

How long, in total, do you spend in the kitchen on an average day? Probably about 3 hours.

Losing the next 25

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
12

As many of you know, back in February I decided to make a change in my diet in an attempt to lose weight and get healthy. I made the commitment to a vegan diet and it was once of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Since then I’ve lost 25 lbs. I know that’s a huge accomplishment on it’s own, but I don’t really feel like its the end for me. I lost the weight mainly through diet, there was very little exercise. I did a little yoga but that was about it.

While I do feel much better, I’m still at an unhealthy weight for my height. I realized that losing the next 25 lbs is going to be much harder than the first 25. So I decided that I was going to have to shake things up again in order to get the weight off and really get into shape. So a few months ago I started swimming again. I was a competitive swimmer in high school but I hadn’t been back in the water in some time. It was good to start swimming again but I needed to do more if I was really going to kick my body into shape.

Working out alone is hard! When you are on a sports team or you have a personal trainer, you always have someone pushing you to work harder. But when you work out alone it can be difficult to push yourself. I decided that I needed a goal, something to work toward, that would help me push harder in my workouts.

I’ve decided to train for a triathlon (I know it sounds crazy to me too). Just a short one, the sprint distance. It’s a .5 mile swim, a 13 mile bike ride, and a 3 mile run. I’m not a biker and I’m certainly not a runner, so hopefully this training will be good for me. I’ve been using RunKeeper on my iPhone to keep track of my walks, runs and bike rides. It’s encouraging to see stats on my workouts, and it helps to keep me motivated to push harder.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress as I train. I don’t have an actual race in mind yet, I’m just training to condition myself toward that goal.

On “Women in Tech”

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
1

Recently there have been a lot of posts floating around the blogosphere about “Women in Tech”. Michael Arrington wrote a post titled “Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men” This really hit a nerve for some people and the web was littered to responses to his opinion.

I knew about the article the day it came out but I had decided not to read it. The entire topic of “women in tech” just tends to upset me. Not because I think there are too few women, but because as a women I want to be good in the field I work in, not just good among to women in that field. I don’t like to make generalized statements about a gender in a certain field.

That being said, after reading Jolie O’Dell’s post today entitled “Why We Don’t Need More Women In Tech… Yet” I agree with her point.

This dubiously accurate nomenclature of “women in tech” places the entry-level PR girl at a startup in the same monolithic group as 50-year-old engineer at IBM. This is unfair to the women who do real technology work; it’s doubly unfair to women as a gender, as it smashes the “tech” label onto anything related to the Internet. Does having 50 male engineers and 50 PR women at tech companies mean we’ve achieved gender equality? Hardly, but it does make it more difficult to correct the true imbalance: There are not enough women doing real technology work.

The whole article is a great read.

I have often been referred to by others as a “women in tech” and frankly the title makes me uncomfortable because in my opinion, I’m not! It would be MUCH more accurate to refer to myself as someone in media or communications, not technology. I studied Media Studies, not Computer Science. While I have worked for tech companies in the past, it was always in a media, marketing, or community capacity.

I enjoy technology, but I’m not out there creating it. Not one day goes by where I don’t wish that my coding skills were better (or that I had any to begin with) but presently it’s not my goal. I applaud those that are doing real technology work and those like Jolie who have been inspired to go back to school for computer science. I can’t wait to see the amazing technology that they produce.

At the end of the day I hope that these discussions and opinions encourage everyone (regardless of gender) to go out there and be innovative! While there may be more room for women in technology, there is always more room for innovation.