Toledo Thanksgiving

This year, we spent a wonderful Thanksgiving in Toledo with Chuck's side of the family. We had a lovely dinner with his parents, grandmother, and sister's family (including in-laws). There were 14 people total, I believe. Chuck's brother's family is down in Texas this year, so we only had 3 of the 7 nieces/nephews there.

Bright and early Thursday morning, Chuck and I got up to run my 2nd 5K! I have not been training very hard, because it's been getting dark so quickly after work. I had gone running the day before and not felt very good about it. I just wanted to run the whole way again, with no stopping to walk. The course was very nice because it was completely flat - no hills at all.

These pictures are a little bit misleading because it looks like a beautiful sunny fall day. In reality, it was about 30 degrees, windy, and there were flurries while we ran.

Usually I like to run by myself, and I get very cranky if someone tries to talk to me while I'm running. But Chuck ran with me the whole way (walking once when I was running veeeerrrrry slowly) and kept his mouth shut. It was very nice, and we crossed the finish line together. Our time? 36:35, almost a minute slower than my first 5K time of 35:39. But the important thing was that I ran the whole way.


I love this picture of June because I think it makes her look like an opera diva singing an aria. :)


We also had our fun annual Yankee Swap at Amy's house after Thanksgiving dinner.


June surprised Chuck with a beautiful quilt she had made for him. All of the squares are from his t-shirts collected from all of his high school activities, like shows he had been in. It's very cool!


We got to go see Chuck's friend Scott at his house while we were in Toledo, and our dogs had a play-date.


Scott and his wife have two dogs - a Golden Doodle (Golden Retriever/Poodle mix) named Summer, and a Malti-Poo (Maltese/Poodle mix) named Torrent. Lenny was his usual aloof self, but they had fun running around the backyard.

Torrent looked an awful lot like the dog Annie and I had growing up, a cocka-poo named Lucy. Torrent is a little bit smaller than Lucy was.

We got to see a lot of Chuck's other friends because Saturday night was his 10-year high school reunion! It was nice because I wasn't under any pressure to remember anyone's name, and everyone wore name-tags anyway. It was at a nice restaurant, and the buffet actually had pretty good food! I had some delicious veggie lasagna. I also heard some funny stories about Chuck's high school antics, including a story about him playing piano for a high school Christmas assembly of some sort. Apparently, he was wearing a ring of jingle bells around his neck, and starting bouncing up and down on the piano bench to the music to make the bells ring. I wish I could have seen that.


Everyone asked Chuck if he was a high school band director, which was his plan while he was in high school. It was interesting to see the variety of professions that people in his class went into. A lot of people were still in graduate school, and there were also a lot of stay-at-home moms (one with FOUR KIDS already!!!!). There were lawyers, a real estate agent, people in ambiguous things like "international development," a stage actress, a surfer dude from L.A., an author living in Brazil, and even a football player from the Washington Redskins.