Fondling Ollie

So.  Thanksgiving.

Ollie turned out fine but I did not like the sugar and spice rub I tried.  The cloves, the nutmeg -- just the wrong tastes in my mind. 

Here is naked Ollie.  Sadly, he came with his own bondage gear so I didn't get to tie him up myself.

This is the sugar/salt/spice rub that I rubbed into a naked Ollie.  While not so good on turkey, it'd be find on say dessert.

Ollie, after he's been rubbed down and wrapped in saran.  I kept walking around all morning, saying "He's dead, wrapped in plastic" in that Twin Peaks accent.  Remember that?  Pretty hard to avoid Twin Peaks when you live in the Pacific Northwest. 

He may not have tasted like I expect a turkey to taste, but he sure came out pretty.  And he was moist.  Today I took his stripped down carcass and made broth.  And that smelled like turkey should.  Tomorrow I make cream of turkey soup from scratch.  Yum!

Gigi is doing better.  The night I wrote about how she was in mourning, we took a walk to the mailbox and then we went for a long car ride.  She sat in the back seat with a huge doggy grin on her face the whole ride.  Even when I left her in the car for about 20 minutes while I got some sushi, she was so happy just to be out and looking around with new sights and new smells.  We've had a few digging incidents this week but not every night and not as bad.  Today we've been hanging out and petting each other.  She's keeping my toes warm right now.

I've been thinking about goals for the new year.  I'll do a formal recap in January but I know that I sucked at meeting my goals for 2011.  And I'm finally starting to get the running bug again.  I haven't had it since the marathon, and when I realized that Gigi was sad about Maggie being gone I also realized that I've been very sad too.  It was the day after the marathon that she crossed the bridge, so the timing makes sense.  While I don't want to be out in the cold and wet right now -- I've got a wicked squared to infinity sinus infection again, almost enough to send me to urgent care today -- I'm starting to plan for 2012.  I'm leaning heavily towards signing up with a marathon training program through Fit Right Northwest, a local running store.  It's a great bargain in my opinion, $120 for 20 weeks, two in person training sessions per week.  It would run from the end of January to the middle of June, culminating in the Vancouver USA Marathon. 

In conjunction with that, I'm planning to sign up with a gym again by the middle of this month.  I would need to back into running three times a week by the end of January, in order to avoid a recurrance of a stress fracture.  The gym I'm looking at also has a nice selection of group classes, with ones that I would want to take at the times I would want to take them -- in other words, at o'dark thirty. 

I know I say this every year, but I am really sick of being fat.  I know the goals I have in mind for my body.  I want to to be lean and strong and muscular.  I want to have control over what I can do.  I'm not going to do that by doing nothing, or even doing a little.  I've got to make what is likely to be a big change; the little ones that build on each other don't work for me.  I tend to forget why I'm doing what I'm doing.  I need to go cold turkey on my life in order to make a new one. 

But more on that later.

Cheers,
the CilleyGirl