Hows my little November in December update?

I'm on track to have the least productive blogging year in my history of maintaining this space. It's not due to a lack of content either! Oh well. November has been a fun and busy month! Check it out:

I started the month off by running the Indianapolis Monumental Half Marathon. It's amazing what a person is capable of achieving if they actually stick to a dedicated plan. This year I did almost all of my workouts up until the last three weeks when two different minor/major injuries stacked onto a vacation. All of that didn't matter on race day though, I made a good plan in the morning and started the race feeling great. It wasn't until about 5 minutes after finishing that everything caught up to me. I set a new Personal best, with a time of 1:49:14, my best before was 1:52:35 back in April of '12. It was an unusually cold day and I ended up wearing almost everything I brought, I had planned for chilly weather not freezing weather. I keep thinking I'm going to retire the plaid tights but I just can't bring myself to do it.

The next weekend my mom came for a visit and we headed over to Indy to do some crib shopping. We found one! Plus it was actually delivered yesterday and we set it up. It's very exciting. After a long day of shopping we met our cousins for some dinner and laughs. The next weekend we did some extra shopping after we dropped Mom off at the airport. We stopped by pottery barn kids and I couldn't believe how blah the color scheme of their stuff is! It was like walking into a gallery of pastels, there was nothing to get excited about and Laura and I agreed their room mock-ups seemed almost somber. Anyway, sorry about the kid rant, but this stuff is supposed to be fun and bright (in my eyes).

The following weekend was supposed to be a bit more relaxed because we had been on the go for the past three/four weekends but since we found a crib we decided we needed to paint baby's room before it arrived. We found a nice shade of middle grey and are actually really happy with the color. The idea is the bright colors of baby things are going to be a nice contrast with the walls. So far so good!

Jinx helped.

I do all the edge work because I'm good at it *toot toot*

Grandma Jacobson...er Laura did all the rolling, we make a good team.

 Laura and I had a Thanksgiving with just to two of us this year. Laura's Mom had the good idea of asking if we wanted to get things done with the long weekend rather than entertain. We did. So we made a pretty easy dinner of beer butt grilled chicken delicious bean casserole and a wonderful pumpkin silk pie from pumpkins we bought at The Great Pumpkin Patch in Arcola.

Over the long weekend I finally remedied our treacherous back steps. This is the best before picture I could find taken in April 2013:

I had to cut out half of the steps to place that corner post for the pergola, I thought I was being clever by only removing half the stairs. Little did I know I only planted a seed of procrastination. "I'll get to it eventually...at least we can get up them!" After Laura came down with a serious case of pregnancy I decided I needed to get these stairs finished before winter. I didn't want her or anyone with baby accidentally falling into the pit of de-stair ; ).

As all of my Loyal followers know, I hate and suck at math. Geometry is like the ugliest practical math to me and these stairs mostly look like a bunch of right angles. Look again, my brain got such a workout with this my hair actually grew an extra inch over the weekend. I'm very happy with how they turned out, the steps are more sturdy than what we had ever before and there is so much room now! Next spring we'll get around to staining them along with the rest of the back porch. Also hopefully the clematis over there will find its way onto the balusters.

Laura took a stab at gnocchi over the weekend with really tasty results. It's actually easier than expected so I think we'll make it again. Due to our abundance of pumpkin we used that over potatoes this time around.

Flour, pumpkin, parmesan

Yum!

So, life's been busy, fun and rewarding, but busy.