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!

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