Tag Archive for "Thanksgiving"

Weekend Recap: Canadian Thanksgiving!

And I am back!

I took the weekend off blogging as it was Canadian Thanksgiving and I spent some wonderful time with family and the running trails!

Thanksgiving also means Oktoberfest in this area, which is the biggest Bavarian festival in the world. All I saw of Oktoberfest this weekend was Friday at noon when I walked out of the office to pick up some lunch with a few coworkers.

Friday evening after work, I skipped out and went to see Pitch Perfect with my sisters. What a hilarious movie. In high school, I sang in choir all the way through and in my senior year, I sang in an all girls group of 9 girls called Triple Trio. (Get it?)I was also a XC runner and on the school newspaper.

Yes, I also had braces and glasses, why do you ask?

Anyways. Watch this movie if you like Glee or are enamoured by chick flicks like yours truly.

Saturday morning, I met up with Jesse and we attacked the local hydro cut to gallop through some trails. I am so excited on how cross country season improves my performance; I have shaved over 6 minutes off my regular loop – success!

I got Jesse to take my picture by one of my cool down trails – which is awesomely named.

I would like to think it was named after me…

Jesse wants everyone to notice the level of difficulty.

After that, we packed up and headed to Thanksgiving dinner #1. Obviously I have no pictures because I was too busy eating and talking (not at the same time) to care about pictures. It was with Jesse’s family and we all shared something we were thankful for.

Jesse was thankful at both dinners that he finally had a weekend with me after a 7 week hiatus. *See my Difficulty Level.

After our second dinner, held on Sunday with my family, we all went hiking. We are known to all show up from separate corners of the universe in a car per family member *wince* but Sunday we all piled in: Parents, kids, boy friends and two dogs.

We had a lovely hike and all I captured from the day was the back seat.

Love them all to death.

Monday we said goodbye to thanksgiving dinners and Jesse and I hit the hydro cut again for some more trails. At one point, he came biking up behind me and said “You look like a child playing out here!”

That is how I feel when I trail run – like I am playing. Scampering over stray logs, climbing over rock piles and sprinting down hills – gasping for air and smiling like a loon. I missed most of the trail races for this season, but I cannot wait to tackle a hard race again and spent some time researching this weekend – more on that later.

The rest of the day was spent helping my father fertilize the lawn and relaxing. I also stroked something off my Boyfriend Bucket List:

“Jesse. Want to watch The Notebook? You said you would sometime”.

“….ok.”

“I mean, we can rent a documentary or something.”

“No. Let’s get it over with.”

What a champ. His thoughts? He didn’t say much but “it reminded him of Forrest Gump”.

I’ll take it.

So what am I grateful for?

1. Being completely done my undergrad with employment I love.

2. Having a boy friend that will go trail running/biking with me and agree to sit through The Notebook with me.

3. Having my baby sister home for Thanksgiving and being able to spend it with my family.

4. Having a strong healthy body that lets me climb hills and run trails.

What are you thankful for?

Check out my guest post on Creation Care on a local event.

9th October 2012

Uncategorized

Official thoughts of Jesse

A while back, I received something in the mail that I knew exactly what to do with – and it certainly had nothing to do with me.

Firstly, let me get it off my chest that I rarely do dishes. Or load dishwashers. It is not because I am a negligent child or a lazy human being, it is just that I am almost never home so the bit of dishes I do on a daily basis are the tupperware or glass containers that I packed my lunch and dinner in.

Pitiful.

So when I got the Lexus of eco-friendly dishwashing liquids in the mail, there was only one person I knew that could do a proper analysis – Jesse.

Jesse is a healthy eater and anyone who plans and executes healthy meals knows that it takes a lot of preparation and even more dishes. One time, Jesse was doing dishes (again) and began lamenting to me while I was reading in the leather chair (what?) about how “Half of his life is spent cooking and the other half is spent cleaning up.” Again – proper analysis.

It gets even better. Jesse is what some would call detail oriented.

Specific.

Precise.

…Even picky. This is a man who switches dry cleaners if they do not reinsert the reinforcements in his dress shirts. (I didn’t even know such a thing was possible). I do love him for it because he is as detail driven as I am forward focused. What a team.

So I let him take one for the team and give his thoughts on the soap. He was throughly excited to try it out and declared that “if it can hold suds in Wellesley water, it is a brilliant soap!”

So I left it with him and waited…

Time passed and nothing was said.

The other day, I asked him how it was going. He did something (almost) like this:

So last night, I called him up for his official thoughts:

Scent? AWESOME. I am going to miss it when they are out of it. Clean smell but not a chemical smell. How soap should smell.

Cleans? AMAZING. Does the job well but no film on the dish when you are done.

Amount needed for a dish load? For the amount of dishes I do, I would normally have to add soap 2 or 3 times for the 1 time I does for Ecover soap. 1/3 the amount of regular soap. Keeps on working, can stir water up. Not overly foamy, there are suds but not foam.

Over all thoughts? I like the bottle. (He’s a marketers dream, folks. And the bottle is made of plants and is fully recyclable). I like the colours and the stylin’ nozzle.(? I didn’t go deeper into this) Also like the price.

Would buy it again? PSH! YES!

Oh, and Ian likes it too.

Here is what the website has to say:

POMEGRANATE & LIME

Cut through grease and grime to leave your dishes sparkling with Ecover Dishwashing Liquid. Using plant based and mineral ingredients and clever science, you’ll get the results you expect without those unnecessary chemicals.

Fresh fragrance from plant-based ingredients
Cleans and degreases effectively
Plant-based and mineral ingredients
Not tested on animals
Suitable for septic tanks

Available size – 750 ml

All I have to say, is that if it passed Jesse’s test, it should be on your kitchen counter. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I will return next week!

5th October 2012

Uncategorized

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.