Thanksgiving

Fact: I do not love everything about running.

I hate the aftermath of a huge race. This is what I am struggling with this week:

1. Not being able to run. With out intense stabs of pain in one or 10 parts of my legs, feet, calves, etc…I miss it. I have done laps in the pool like a little fish, ellipticalled like a hamster on a wheel, and countless other things to keep my ADHD-like personality at bay. I do it all with one thought ” Running is better.”

2. Not being able to wear heels.

3. Loss of the ability to syphon in exorbant quantities of food.

I have been turning my focus elsewhere however, school. Yesterday, I awoke at 5 am to go to campus and start studying. I was there until 8 pm. I still feel like I didn’t get everything accomplished. I wish there was a magical potion you could take where you could not sleep and still function.

O right, they already have it, it’s called coffee.

I am behind in school because of this last weekend, which was Canadian Thanksgiving. My favourite dinner of the three was not even with my family. (Don’t read too much into that, my family is great. But as much as I enjoyed piling onto the “Gator” with everyone, including Grandma…and dashing through rivers in the flats which has become a Thanksgiving tradition…

……my favourite dinner was a little heavier on the culture and lighter on the mud puddles)

My friend on exchange from France, Amandine, invited me to her house for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, which is ironic because Europeans do not celebrate Thanksgiving and I was the only Canadian present. Her friends from Switzerland were visiting and she wanted us to meet.

My friends from Switzerland and Iran were there as well and we all sat around a coffee table loaded with appetisers, chicken and cranberry sauce. Amandine and her friends had walked to the farmers market that morning to buy everything and watched a YouTube video on how to carve a chicken. We sat in a circle with our plates on our laps and our plates loaded with sweet potato puree and fresh beans, our conversation a tangle of French and English which was perfect practice for me.

Dessert was three kinds of pie …I know 🙂 … and when it was over, my new Swiss friends told me to look them up for a couple of weeks when I am in Europe and they will take me to the Alps on a snowboard trip.

Now THAT is something to be thankful for.