the long slide to the holidays

Ted and I have been horrible about skipping workouts lately. (NB: by “horrible”, I mean “averaging only four workouts per week instead of five”. It’s all relative.) The excuse is that we’re between the big Sydney race and the Holiday Challenge slog. Still, if I’m not going to crater on the latter (and doesn’t “crater on the latter” sound like something you’d holler as a warning? Or conversely, the title of an Irish reel?) I need to get some more distance in.

Last year I finished really quickly because I was in the throes of marathon training – I was cranking out 25km pieces on weekends and 12 and 15km pieces during the week, before work. This year I’ll be back to something more like my normal strategy, which is to to divide the required 200,000m by however many days there are from Thanksgiving to Xmas, then make sure I do at least that many every day. (This year, that’s 6896 meters/day.) This year, I’m going to try to do enough extra so that I can take a day or two off each week.

The near future is becoming heavily scheduled, as is normal about now, but the busy period ends oddly soon, in the first week of December. At the moment it goes: errands this weekend; Ted leaves Tuesday; I start knitting hat to give him for whichever holiday (Chanukah, Xmas, birthday right before Xmas), hopefully finish hat; start the Holiday challenge on Thanksgiving (but work that day); he returns the Friday after Thanksgiving; I have Thanksgiving dinner that night (yes, Friday) with some Dutch and American people at a restaurant, at which he may join us depending when he gets home; we have our own turkey on Saturday at which we may have guests (they haven’t answered yet); I leave for the Netherlands Sunday and stay there for a week in which I take advantage of ergs in the hotel and at our old rowing club to keep going on the Holiday Challenge, and then…. no plans for anything after about December 5. I have no vacation time left at all, we have no company coming and no plans at all for travel. That might all change, of course. Ted’s made the point that I should use up all of next year’s holiday here before I leave at the end of March. Even if they have it out of my new allotment of holidays after I switch to the Netherlands, I have 40 days there. (Days. Not hours. Forty days. As in two months out of a year off work. There are reasons for moving there!!)

I’m eating chestnuts at the moment, so am in a Christmassy mood. Apparently they’re a side business of our cleaning lady in the office. The texture makes me thing they’re steamed, not roasted. They’re cold, but they’re considerably better than the last chestnuts I had in a western country – we bought some hot chestnuts in Milan a few years ago, but they were awful and we threw them out after eating only a few.