Mission Accomplished!

Today has been so busy! After I left the house for the day and inspected the frozen garden (did I mention it was 25-degrees when I took Fi to school this morning???) I headed to school to do some work of my own. It was a productive morning as I graded just about all of the critical papers from my 8am World Lit class, posted their midterm review sheet and got stood up by a student who was supposed to meet me today to talk about his poor class performance and attendance. Ironic, right? However, Fi and I had lunch and lamented the death of our frozen garden (not everything looks terrible, just the basil and the tomatoes, really).

(Yes, we have face-to-face desks)

Then I headed to the rec and accomplished my goal for the day! Three miles! Yay! I was pleasantly surprised that I felt no soreness from yesterday's comeback run and made sure to stretch really well for today's. I think I failed to mention that a large part of the reason I stopped running a few months back was because my left knee hurt so badly before I even hit half a mile that I decided to take some time off. For a while I was really great with going to the rec and taking pilates and yoga...etc...and then the semester REALLY kicked in. Before I knew it, I was napping every afternoon and not going to even yoga anymore.

Out with the old. In with the new. And it felt great to run again.

When Fi finished with class, we met up and drove home. We're super excited because Barack Obama is comin' to town on Thursday night and we just found out this morning while listening to our buddy Monica on her morning radio show. (Fi asked: Is it cool that we know a radio personality? I'm not sure. Is it?) But we're going on Thursday come rain or shine. To show our support (this is not going to turn into a political blog. I respect everyone's right to vote for whomever they see fit to run our country), Fi posed for me with a poster we pulled out of the Maneater newspaper (our student paper here at Mizzou) which is ordinarily extremely republican (I guess since it's a paid-for ad, though, that changes things).

And lastly, I made some Fat Free Whole Wheat Oatmeal Cookies! These were amazing! Seriously. They were so tasty I made two batches: one plain and one with dried cranberries.

Fat Free Oatmeal Cookies

1/2 cup white flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1 cup rolled or quick oats

1/2 ts salt

1 ts. vanilla extract

1 tb. fat free plain yogurt (I suppose you could use vanilla if you wanted!)

2/3 ts. cinnamon

2 egg whites

1/3 cup maple syrup (straight from Vermont, without artificial anything)

Mix all the dry ingredients together then add all the wet. Set the oven to 375 and make sure when you put the dough on the sheet you spray some nonstick on there first. Also leave plenty of room because these suckers like to expand. Bake for about fifteen minutes (keep an eye on the first batch, though, since all ovens tend to be a little different). I use two teaspoons to get the dough on there-my mom always did this with us when we were kids. You can add any dry fruit-I happened to have cranberries and thought they'd be tasty (Fi and I both liked them). Oh, also, let them bake until they're a tan-ish color. Too pale and they aren't really set and will be all runny and undercooked.

Enjoy!

I'd take a pic, but I sent them to play practice with Fi. If there are any left...I'll put one up later!

xoxo

N