Celtic Solstice

I was supposed to run this race in Baltimore at Druid Hill Park on Saturday morning.

Instead, I stayed home and cleaned, cleaned, cleaned to get ready for showing our house to a couple from the DC area.  Initially Dave and I were both going to go to the race and have brunch afterwards at Gertrudes at the Baltimore Museum of Art (close to Druid Hill Park).

Love the BMA.  Love Gertrudes, named for Gertrude Stein, a former Baltimorean, or as I call us, Baltimorons. She is the one who penned the phrase, A rose is a rose is a rose.  She was an author, art collector, doctor (I think she finished med school...I know she attended, and this was back in the day where it was rare for women to be docs). She was an ex-pat in Europe and hob knobbed with the mukkety muck well know writers and artists there during the Impressionists era.

Hmmmm.....gotta get a run going.  Gotta start doing planks again.

15K with the Annapolis Striders

Got it done.

15K on Sunday morning at Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis, while a nice snow started falling.

Initially there were a few flakes as we were getting ready to run.  Then nothing.  Then as we were around the 3 mile mark, miniature snowballs started landing on us.  I wanted to look at them through a microscope, or at least a magnifying glass, thinking of Rachel Carson's quote, "Some of nature's most exquisite handiwork is on a miniature scale, as anyone knows who has applied a magnifying glass to a snowflake." Later, great big fat sloppy snow kisses landed on us.  It was awesome.

I'm still sore.  I haven't taken any naproxen.

And I'm still not out-running my fork.  I've put on winter weight.  Too many nachos, too many pizzas, too much ice cream and cheesecakes.  I put on a pair of pants this morning that usually have a bit of a sag in the butt and are almost too long, but now there is no sag as the material is stretched across my wide behiney and thighs, lifting the length from the floor as I flow outwards.

I joke to people as I get older - and our spines compress, causing us to get a bit shorter, that I am melting, melting into a pear with feet.

On another note, there was supposed to have been a Snowy Owl sighted at Quiet Waters the day before our run.  I was hoping to see it.  No such luck.  I went for a walk before the snow, before the race and here is what I saw:

Thanksgiving Forking & Next Challenges

So for Thanksgiving, I didn't really fork off that much.  I brought two desserts: Pumpkin Cheesecake that I'd made for the first time (it was awesome) and a pumpkin cream cheese roll that I've made for years and is also awesome.  I'd have made several other dishes but one, a five layer white chocolate, red velvet cheesecake that is on the front cover of the December 2013 Southern Living magazine, was a total disaster.  Not sure why.  I followed the recipe very closely.  I need to study this some more to see if it was my fault or a bad recipe (got it on-line).  Surely, the cover photo recipe is not a bad one.  So it was probably my fault.  I admit it.  But I still don't know where I went wrong, and on multiple fronts.

Anyway, I'd have made more dishes yet, but simply ran out of time.

My husband and I went for a nice walk about the day after Thanksgiving (what others call Black Friday, which was  a beautiful day to me).

For the future, I'm signed up to run a 15K this weekend in Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis, and the Celtic Solstice in B-More the following Saturday.

Yes.