I’ve decided to change up my breakfasts. I kind of am in a rut and will move to protein smoothies for something different.  We use this brand of protein:

It’s unsweetened and unflavored so it can be used in all kinds of applications.

My smoothie this morning had frozen peaches, protein powder, almond milk and ground flax seed:

Not the best shot, but 7 am. Whatever 🙂    This was pretty good and really very filling.  Not sure if it would have lasted me until noon when I normally eat lunch since I had to eat a little early.  Lunch was a standard Fage 2% with sauteed apple and dried cranberries:

After lunch was movie time. I didn’t really have Monday off, but with the postal service being closed, only UPS orders needed to be packed, which meant I could take some time off in the afternoon. The family went to see Bohemian Rhapsody:

I really liked this movie, although (SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen it)

…..

As far as I know, Queen never broke up. Freddie did do solo albums, but he was also recording with Queen and the Live Aide concert was not a reunion for the band. I guess they did that for drama?  I guess with like with most biopics, truth is bent quite a bit for the story.

…..

Anyway, long time readers know how much I love Queen and if you love their music you should go see the movie.

Dinner was more protein and something I haven’t had in months – salmon.

This was a maple bourbon marinated salmon from the fish department at Hannaford. I have this love/hate relationship with fish. Or maybe like/hate since I don’t really love fish. Seafood  yet, but not fish.  Salmon is the one I eat more than others and this was pretty good. The side was riced cauliflower and sweet potato.  All in all, salmon is really filling for me – think it must be the fat 😀

Tonight is relaxing with some football and candy corn!

I’m going to go for two in a row and post tomorrow’s eats as well. 🙂

I’m typing this on my phone today. For whatever reason, the computer won’t acknowledge the phone when I plug it in, so I can’t transfer photos over. I have to use the wordpress app on my phone. No editing of pics, so they are what they are 😀

I need to buy a new phone as my screen is broken (about 20% dead pixels) and the battery is shot. Sigh.

Anyway, some eats!

Breakfast of protein pancakes

Morning work of postal orders today. Actually most of these were packed on Sunday. Always working…

We have a daily pickup for both the post office and UPS. UPS picks up in the afternoon, so we have time to get all the postal orders done first. One business will start to slow down now and the the retail ones will get really busy for the next month and a half.

Mid morning snack:

There is a new apple at our store called the Autumn Glory. Have any of you tried this?

It is supposed to have notes of cinnamon and caramel to it.  It’s quite a good apple, sweet and crunchy.  It is John’s new favorite apple – and he eats apples every single day.

I incorporated one into my lunch with yogurt:

I forgot to take a picture of my snack – latte and brownie.  Trying to get back into that habit of taking a snap of everything.

Dinner was easy.  This is a stuffed frozen chicken breast.

Mondays need to be easy meals or we are likely to go out for a cheap dinner – like Five Guys – since Mondays are normally really busy for us the last thing you want to do is prepare anything complicated.

More rain today, so I hopped on the treadmill for some exercise:

Yesterday was so nice and sunny, even if a bit cool. Now the sun is gone again. It’s been such a rainy fall.

Tonight is relaxing with some football and candy corn – plus doing a little bit more reading on the candidates I will vote for on Tuesday.

As a poor sleeper, I dread the time changes. They mess my sleep up big time.  Of course, this past week I have been sleeping really well. I mean a full night’s sleep, waking up after 6:30 a.m.  It was great, but figures that it was coming right before the time change. I think I worried about it because I woke up at about 12:30 and that was it. I was up for several hours and finally falling back asleep somewhere after 4:30.  Boo.

In town on Sunday was the Chronicle Book Fair. This is an event which features local authors who sell their books (and sign them), plus lectures and talks about writing and the literary space.  Chapman Museum, where I volunteer, has a table set up selling some of the books we carry. This book is about Seneca Ray Stoddard, who was a photographer famous for photographing the Lake George area. Chapman has many, many of his photos.

There are so many local and regional authors. From all ranges of nonfiction historical books to murder mysteries and children’s books. It was pretty neat. This was just one of the rooms in use for the fair.

Being so close to the election, I also met a candidate who stopped by our table that I was thinking about voting for and after speaking with her, I will be. Bonus!

It was finally sunny today, too. It’s been rainy a lot. I’m going to need to start taking vitamin D!  It was very windy yesterday and a lot of leaves came down:

John was raking today while I was at the book fair.  There are a lot of leaves yet to fall, though!   Not sure if biking season is over yet or not. I haven’t been on the bike in a few weeks because of the crappy weather. November is pretty sketchy, but I haven’t brought my bike inside yet being the eternal optimist 😀

I brought in my two hibiscus plants and one has been blooming a lot, but the orange one just kept dropping the buds before they opened. Not quite sure why, but yesterday two opened up!

This is my favorite hibiscus. I don’t know if it will survive the winter inside, so this will be a fun experiment!

I’ll be back to posting more eats this week. It’s already feeling hard reeling in the post biking season eating and logging my food on my phone and here will be helpful again.

Here is to a good week and don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!!

Can you believe Halloween is just about here?  It’s been quite cold and rainy. The last couple of Halloweens have been pretty warm, for October at least.

The garden is wrapping up for the year. Most of the tender annuals were killed by freezing temps, but a few are still going. A surprising number of snapdragons still hanging on:

This bed is closer to the house and gets more sun, so it is somewhat sheltered for them.

A coneflower sent up a new bloom:

Lots of mums. This one by the calabrocha.

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It’s really in the heart of the busy season for us, which means lots of hours working and trying to remember to take personal time.  We did get some in this weekend. Last night we attended a concert of organ and brass quintet, which was quite nice. The organ at the Presbyterian church in Glens Falls is in the top 100 largest pipe organs in the country!

That is half the organ. There is another pipe series in the front as well.

We also had our annual pumpkin carving party.

It’s always nice to get together with family.

We had a mixture of carved, painted and stickered this year.

My cyclops:

Always a good time. It is cold enough outside that our pumpkins won’t “wilt” for lack of a better term before Wednesday. Overnights in the 30s.

I keep saying I’m going to post more, but just keeping up with everything else has kept me from that. I need to get a bit more accountability with my food, so poke me if I’m not posting this week LOL!

Pink picture of the day:

This is a gerbera daisy that I decided to dig up and bring inside since there was a bloom ready to go and a freeze was coming. I was rewarded with this pretty flower 😀  Please click here to support breast cancer screenings!

Our town may be on the small side, but there certainly are lots of attractions and things to do. The Hyde Collection is an art museum downtown, which we can walk to – again another point scored for smaller towns.

Sunday was a really fall day for walking and bonus is that the Hyde has free admission on the 2nd Sunday of each month.

The Hyde consists of a historic house and a gallery annex.

It was the last day of the current exhibit of women impressionist painters, featuring Jane Peterson.

The impressionist period is my favorite art style, so I really enjoyed the exhibit.  You aren’t allowed to take pictures inside the galleries, but the rest of the house and grounds you are welcome to.

The house has a great library in it.

The library houses the Rembrandt painting:

If you look carefully at the painting, you can see the outline of an oval around the figure of Christ where thieves stole the painting and cut it out in the late 1920s. The piece was later recovered and repaired – and was then purchased by the Hyde family to come to NY.

There is a beautiful solarium type of room. When the Hydes lived there, the windowed ceiling could be opened up to allow rain to come in and water the plants. There is a drain in the floor under the wooden table.

Now that is all enclosed, of course. The second floor also overlooks this room:

Definitely my favorite room in the whole house. Or really, it should be called a mansion, I think.

The Hydes were collectors of all periods of art. This is a fantastic fireplace in what I think might be a dining room?

One of the bedrooms:

Lots of masterpieces are on the walls. This is a Winslow Homer work:

The music room:

Interesting tidbit – the piano is from 1900 and is pretty much the “newest” item in the music room.

Off in the corner is a Rubens painting – Head of a Moor:

It’s pretty amazing to have these pieces so accessible and representative works by so many masters.

A lovely piece of stained glass in one of the stairwell windows:

It was really nice to spend an afternoon here. We are lucky to have so many cultural opportunities available to us.

Today’s pink picture is from the music parlor. These pink chairs are from around 1500!

Please Click here to support funding for mammograms.

Everywhere you read that water helps with weight loss in many ways. It’s supposed to suppress your appetite, flush out whatever and keep you hydrated. While the hydrated part is true – and a good thing, the others are kind of spotty.  There is a lot of anecdotal evidence where people say it helps them, but is it really true?

Image credit

Two studies came out recently that put those theories to the test.

One study had participants drinking increasing amounts of water prior to eating at a lunch buffet to see if the water had any effect. Turns out not so much – at least for overweight individuals. Result

 increasing water intake throughout the morning only suppressed energy intake in individuals categorized as normal weight under certain circumstances, and had no effect on individuals categorized as overweight/obese.

The second study relied on self-reporting, which isn’t the most accurate. This was reporting on how much water a person consumed in a day versus the number of calories eaten.  Result:

the water and the no-water days did not differ in 24-h energy intake, or the amount and energy from reported foods (P?>?0.05). Energy density of foods, servings of fruits or vegetables and eating patterns did not differ between the water and the no-water day in both men and women

For me, drinking water never really keeps me from eating. You hear “You aren’t really hungry, you’re thirsty, so drink water”.  I find that if I’m hungry and I drink water, 10 minutes later I am hungry again and then I have to pee LOL.  Now, I do find that if I drink water *after* my meal, I will feel fuller for longer.  I don’t necessarily make a conscious effort to drink 8 glasses a day, but I do drink pretty much only water or seltzer when I’m not having coffee.

How about you? Do you find any benefits from drinking 8 glasses of water a day? Or do you try to drink 8 glasses a day?

It’s funny, the spring seemed like it took forever to get warm and now all that heat came all at once.  I drink hot coffee even in warmer weather, but it just got to be too much.  I was making cold brew in a pitcher, but it is kind of messy, so I bought a cold brewer:

The grounds stay in a filter and you just pour the coffee out instead of having to strain it.   The downside with cold brew is that it has to brew overnight and preferably 24 hours. So if you forget, no cold brew LOL.

Cafe au lait on a warm morning:

Another cool spot is biking to the lake. On the path there is a lot of shade.

Newly surfaced as well.  I was out earlier than usual since rain was in the forecast for later.

The lake is always cooler as well. Usually it is windier, too, but it was very calm this day:

Not many tourists out and about just yet, which makes it nice.

Of course, it’s hard to stay cool when biking 18 miles of hills LOL

Who’s idea was this?  Oh right. Mine. 😀

What do you do to stay cool?

It’s meme time!

I had been wearing the Fitbit at night to see my sleep and while I wasn’t really experiencing insomnia, it wasn’t great. I stopped wearing it at night because I didn’t want to see that LOL.

This week has been bad again. Up at 3:45 for the last couple of days. Ugh.

This, too, shall pass, but you kind of forget how bad insomnia feels until you get into a cycle again.

I’m really glad I work for myself so I don’t have to drag myself to an office 🙂

Flower Friday coming up – if I’m awake enough LOL

How is everyone surviving the heat wave?  I’m doing okay. Each time the weather gets like this, it affirms that I will never be moving south. I hate the heat and humidity. Plus I love the four seasons. I don’t even mind the cold so much, but I could do with less snow accumulation.

Anyway, that heat dulls my appetite some, but then I just eat snacky stuff. I like big salads in the summer:

I don’t eat salad dressing at home. Instead I have BBQ chicken on it.  Maybe I’m weird, but it tastes good. 🙂

I cooked a bunch of frozen chicken breast strips in the Instant Pot. 10 minutes on high with a quick release and I have cooked chicken for the week and no heating up of the kitchen! Winning!

I eat more yogurt in the summer as well. Pretty much always the same way. Plain greek yogurt with fruit and cereal:

John has made a few meals when we aren’t just eating our own thing. He is always in charge of pizza Friday and then he tried a falafel mix by Knorr and these were pretty tasty:

Drizzled with tahini mixed with garam masala. The tahini was purchased to make our own hummus that doesn’t have garlic in it. Neither of us is a big fan of garlic, but we like hummus – so why not make it our way?

These are baked donuts made with Bisquick to which John added some protein powder.

We each had 3 of these and that was nice fuel for a 20+ mile bike ride that morning!

Lots of cold brewed coffee, too.

I will drink hot coffee pretty much all the time until it gets as hot as it is now and then it’s ice, ice baby.

I have to share this funny Instagram message I got.  I don’t do much with my personal IG account, but I do find that strangers will follow it. In my messages waiting to be approved are often pick up notes from creepers. It’s surprising to me how many of those I will get. I never approve them or even respond at all.  This one was the most over the top I’ve gotten so far:

Ummmm…. decline thank you. Seriously, does this stuff work? It must or it wouldn’t keep happening. Anyway, it certainly is good for a laugh.

Have a Happy Independence Day to all my American peeps! Stay safe and enjoy the festivities 🙂

We had a great time at Longwood Gardens. We spent an entire day there on Saturday. The weekend was too short and I haven’t even downloaded the photos off my camera yet!  I owe you those as it was a fabulous place for sure.

But a new toy for me. I received a fun gift for my birthday. I didn’t really ask for any gifts this year and only specified no jewelry LOL.  So everything was a surprise. My sis and family got me a Fitbit Charge 2

The screen stays dark until you tilt your arm towards yourself (like looking at a watch). And yay for freckles! I can coat myself with sunscreen and not get burned, but the freckles still come during biking season.

I used to wear an activity monitor years ago, but it was a little clunky and it had a monthly subscription to the software. Not much money, but still.

I’m still getting used to all this does and getting it set right for me. It connects to an app on the phone, which is pretty cool. You can see your daily stats that update in real time. Today so far as of 3pm.

I’ll hit 10K today for sure. I do get in a lot of steps on a daily basis, so that is good. The second full day I wore it was on Saturday and we sure put in the steps at Longwood Gardens!

You can scroll through the days for activity, but the weekly exercise and sleep only shows the current day.  Speaking of sleep, I knew that it would show my poor sleep and I don’t really want to look at it.

It seems to show that I took a nap on Tuesday, but I think that was just me on the couch very still. I was so tired that day and  when you see 4 hours and 41 minutes of restless sleep, that is probably why.

I can also record my food and water intake and it has all kinds of goals and challenges you can set up.  I could use a little push to be on track and get off that extra weight. I do notice it when biking compared to last summer.

Still trying to figure out how to log the bike miles. Even though it is connected to my phone and Bluetooth, it doesn’t accurately record the mileage I ride. At all. I rode 14 miles and it showed as 2.5. However, it recorded an hour of activity, so I need to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing for that.

Anyone else have a fitbit?