Mom’s birthday and tons of pumpkin

First off – have my smiley faces been showing up in your browsers??  In the past couple of posts I’ve written, I haven’t been able to see them!  I’ll try a different type for this post…

Today (Sunday) was Mom’s birthday!  When she got home from church I gave her her presents and got to work making brunch.  I whipped up a batch of these pumpkin pancakes with maple pumpkin sauce (and boy did it make a lot – I should’ve halved the recipe, but now we’ve got some leftovers we can nuke or toast or something).

 

One of the things I gave her was a DVD set of the “Peanuts” holiday specials, so we spent the morning watching Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas specials from our childhoods.     After brunch, we took the girl dogs, Sophie and Madigan to Saluda Shoals Park for a nice long walk.  Maddy seemed to know something was up even before we hinted that we were going anywhere.  She never lays in front of the door.

We jogged a little bit, and I told Mom I was thinking of starting all the way over at Week 1 of C25K, and she said she’d do it with me!  I’m curious to see if I change my form a little bit if it will prevent my shin splints.  Maybe I weigh too much for my shins to support that much pressure?  Anyway, I’m looking forward to starting it over and seeing if I can do something early on to prevent the unbearable pain I was experiencing there for awhile.  I probably could start at week 5 again, endurance-wise, but this way I’ll have a buddy to do it with me and I can work my way back up again.

I always joke that Sophie is just like Eeyore, because she always seems so sullen and depressed.  On our way back, she sat in the back of my car and slouched and stared out the back window like she was saying, “oh bother…”

She’s camera-phobic, so it’s good that I was able to take as many pictures of her today as I did!  When we got back, I was starving – we walked about 3 miles and it was nearing 3pm, and I had only had 4 pancakes so far today (and a handful of trail mix…oops).  I split my leftover pizza from Friday night with Mom and also had some tabbouleh and pita chips.

And OOH I almost forgot, we got pumpkin spice lattes while we were out – Mom stayed in the car with the dogs and I ran in the grocery store to get a few things and to visit its attached Starbucks!

This latte lasted me a long time!  I made dinner for everyone – a concoction of my grandmother’s that we’ve always called “goulash.”  It’s essentially meat and pasta and tomatoes, usually topped with cheese.  I made two batches – the one for my dad had beef and onions on top of everything else, and mine and Mom’s had onions, green peppers, and Morningstar crumbles.  It included elbow macaroni, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of mushrooms, a can of tomato paste, some garlic, basil, oregano, and the aforementioned extras.  Covered in tons of cheese. 

I had a Bud Light Golden Wheat alongside it and was painfully full for over an hour afterward.  Portion distortion ahoy!  It’s been such a cold and dreary day, this was the ultimate comfort food, so I definitely overloaded. 

In other birthday news, I got mom a little cake from the bakery and wrote on it myself with a crappy cake decorating product.

Awesome.

Then to “pretty it up” I added a bunch of candles, hoping that the flame would detract from the fug.

Someone call Cakewrecks.

My piece with fro-yo:

And to top it all off, I made Bakerella’s pumpkin pie bites. 

I didn’t have near enough pie crust dough (I was supposed to buy two PACKAGES, not two CRUSTS (so my one package of two crusts was only half as much as I needed  ) so I had lots more filling than crust.  After cutting out a bunch of little crust circles, I squished together the excess and made a tiny pie crust, then made another out of graham cracker crumbs and margarine, all because I couldn’t bear to toss my extra filling.

 

I’m exhausted, it’s after 1am, and I still have to pack and scrounge together some good movies, because I’m going to MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE TOMORROW!!!! Yaaaaaaay!!!!  GAWD I can’t wait to get away from this house for a little while!  I’m taking my laptop, my knitting, and some movies and won’t have to worry about much else while I’m there.  I’ll definitely try to blog at night, though!

Good night/morning/afternoon to all!