Lots of great tips on the giveaway thread!  And ‘hi’ to the new peeps visiting!  😀  I need to do a giveaway open to everyone soon.  Need to see who I can hit up what I can arrange.

With the weirdness at the gym yesterday, I wasn’t feeling like going there and running on the dreadmill.  Luckily, it was not precipitating and I saw snow dripping, which meant it was above freezing.  Good enough!  I didn’t check the temp.  Sometimes it is best not to know these things….  I bundled up and headed on out.  It was not the greatest of runs.  The sidewalks were a bit sloppy.  I also really felt like I was slogging for the first mile or so.  Then around mile 2, I went through some slush that was hiding a deep puddle. (insert profanity here).  Problem with mesh top shoes is that if water gets on top, water goes in.  Then it happened again with the other foot! (insert profanity here). I saw a 3rd puddle and leaped over it, thinking I was oh-so-smart, but when I landed my mp3 player popped out of my pocket, detached from my earphones and smacked into the pavement (insert even more profanity here). I thought it was broken because it was skipping and I could not turn it off!  I actually had to take out the battery and hold my breath while I put it back in.  Seems okay now, though.  Yay!   I ended up doing 5 miles.  Turns out it was 34 degrees out, too.  See my wet feet?

I was worried about getting blisters with wet shoes, but that didn’t happen.  I do see that I have a new hole in this pair of socks, though 🙄

Hangry at this point!  I was thinking about these during the last couple of miles:

Nom, nom!  Wymans – I love you!

So my goals today were to keep snacking under control again and spend some time cleaning.  30 minutes instead of 15.  Snacking was quite good, although I had about a tablespoon of peanuts while I was making lunch.  Speaking of, I had another hit of vitamin S!  You might want to look away, though – it’s not attractive:

• 3 big handfuls of spinach
• 1 small banana
• 5 grams of cocoa powder
• 1 tablespoon cashew butter
• 1 scoop vanilla protein powder
• ice and water.

The color is nasty from the cocoa powder.  Wish I had thought of that beforehand.  It tasted really good, though!  Like a chocolate banana.  I won’t add nut butter to any more of these, as I think it is wasted and I would rather just eat it off a spoon 🙂

John made some awesome lowfat gingerbread cookies to send to his family.  These are amazingly chewy and super gingery because there is chopped up candied ginger in them!  I’ll get the recipe up sometime this week.  You would never guess they are lowfat.  I had 1/2 a cookie (he makes them big) with my afternoon latte:

Work has been busy still.  Usually it slows down in the MT world at this time, but it hasn’t yet.  I’m glad for that!

Dinner was simple.  I tried to make an omelet with broccoli and feta cheese, but I had so much broccoli that the omelet could not hold its integrity!  Looks ugly, but very tasty.  Looks aren’t everything!

We took some relaxation time tonight.  Needed to renew my library card today  to renew the books that were due tomorrow!  So we chanced a quick run to Target to get some protein powder and I picked up a pack of socks for myself

Then it was to Starbies, where I had some decaf coffee and a bite of that coffee cake in the background.

One nice thing about our business is that we build up a ton of rewards points on the card paying for inventory each month.  So, we turn those points in for gift cards to Starbucks.   That’s a money saving way to be able to go out and not spend extra money!

Ornament of the day:

Keeping in the horn theme from yesterday.  This is one of those scroll cut brass ornaments.  It’s very ornate and is 3-D, although this picture doesn’t take advantage of that.  Maybe I need to hire a new photographer…..

Question:  Do you use reward points?