Butterball eating, butterball burning

Welcome to the holiday season, everyone! I don't really get into the holiday spirit until the day after Thanksgiving, even if that dang WLIT switched to playing all Christmas music on November effing Twelfth. So, let me be the first non-commercial outfit to wish you a happy holidays!

I really enjoyed my family's Thanksgiving this year. As I said, we went to a restaurant, so my morning was filled with watching this year's B-list star lineup on the Macy's Thanksgiving parade, rather than frantically trying to clean maple turkey brine out of the bottom of my refrigerator like last year.

Our reservations at the restaurant were at a pretty early 11:30 a.m., which was a good thing because I didn't eat breakfast beforehand and was kind of starting to hallucinate due to low blood sugar. The place we went to was a castle built by an eccentric millionaire in the 1930s in Dyer, Indiana. It was a cool place. Another visitor remarked that it was like Batman's Wayne Manor in its gothic-ness. I'd show a picture, but it was pretty dimly-lit, and the weather was pretty dark, so I didn't get any good shots.

The food was good. We were right next to a window, and they had peacocks running around the grounds outside. (That is, I think they did. That may have been the hallucinations. Because I think peacocks would be one of the first things to show up in a hallucination, especially with all that NBC I was watching that morning.) Anyway, I had a few servings of mashed potatoes liberally-topped with cranberry sauce, like many people might put gravy on them. The yams were not marshmallow-topped, but they were still pretty good. And they had this really good sort of rigatoni alfredo thing that I think was the restaurant's take on some people's traditional Thanksgiving macaroni and cheese. All in all, it was a good meal in a nice atmosphere.

But.

The place didn't have pie. No pie. On Thanksgiving. That's un-American, right?

We stopped and got some pie on the way home at the grocery store. Yes, I know, Weight Watchers is revoking my membership right now. Or else giving me gold membership status, because a no-willpower member like me will be pretty cha-ching for them.

We had planned to go to a movie, but food coma + gross weather outside = staying home. We hung out here and watched part of the 1982 classic Tron (Bill's choice), then played some board games.

Then this morning was the 5K Butterball Burner on the streets behind my gym. I was calling it the "Butterball Freezer" because it was 21 degrees, and 7 degrees with the windchill. But, and this is hard to admit, it was so much fun. Yes, my lungs were burning from the freezing cold air. And yes, I was running harder and faster than usual because I just wanted to get back indoors. But that get me to shave 3 minutes off my time from the last race. At the 5K I did three weeks ago, my time was 42: 53, on their official precision timing systems. At today's 5K, my time was 39:42, on the less-official timing system of my iPod. And after the run I had fun complaining about the weather with the other runners in the post-race food area.

The thing is, I think I'm starting to like running.

Well, shit. I hate it when other people are right.

Oh and also, I got a free t-shirt from the run. It's black polyester with orange writing. Win-win.