This has been a busy, fun filled weekend. Today, we were thrilled to spend the day with Lovely Margaret, our amazingly wonderful friend who is doing the challenge with us. Today is the first time we've seen her in seven weeks, and it was so nice to spend time with her again today. She has done a great job of cutting back on sugar and milk, while watching the amounts of meat and dairy she is consuming. She says she has noticed a few changes in the way she feels... enough to encourage her to keep on going. Lovely Margaret leads a very busy life, with several horses that she cares for and five grand-kids she works to see as often as possible. We love her and her whole family!
We met up with Lovely Margaret this morning for breakfast. We all (Lovely Margaret, her son John, her mom Jill, her grandson Silas, Brian and I) went to a place called Toast, over in southeast Portland. Oh, but it was good. I had a dish called Rain on Rain: mustard greens, brussel sprouts (of which I ate 1 and gave the other to Brian), cauliflower, broccoli, delicata squash, roasted potatoes and a poached egg. It was so fantastic. I think each vegetable had been roasted separately, then briefly sauteed in with the greens for just a moment or two. The very runny yolk of the poached egg mixed in with all the other vegetables and it was a bit of heaven with every bite. It was super pretty to look at, too. I have no idea what everyone else ordered because I was grooving on my breakfast so heavily.
Young Silas wasn't feeling great today, so we skipped the plan of going to the Children's Museum and went shopping for some slippers for Jill instead. Lovely Margaret, Brian and I drove over to Lloyd Center (a very old mall in east Portland) to see what we could find. I'm not yet good at finding my way around from south to north, so we took a highly entertaining and circuitous route to get there. Happily, no one was lost along the way. Once we got to the mall, we even remembered to take note of where we were parked and where we came into the mall. It would have been especially funny if we lost our car today, since that was a topic of discussion at breakfast. We managed to miss that bit of irony, luckily, and on we foraged for slippers.
I won't bore you with the details of our mall experience, except to say that we started to fade after about an hour and a half, so we stopped by Jamba Juice for some fortification. (I know that smoothies are all sugar and limited fiber, so get off my back!) Lovely Margaret and I had one made from mangoes. peaches and strawberries (nothing else added). Brian (after much encouragement) had one made from apples, bananas, green vegetable juice (?), spirulina, and strawberries. Brian thought it was OK. I tried it and it tasted "good for you". In my book, I'd much rather it had just tasted good.
We moseyed back over to John's house after our mall trip, stopping only to look at a house for sale at the bottom of the Mount Tabor neighborhood. This house was terrific! It had 3 bedrooms, 2 1/2 bath, a 700 square foot basement and much more. It was for sale at a mere $475K. Only slightly over our current $200K price range. I think we can get him to sell it to us for $199K, don't you? Yeah. Covering our disappointment about the house, we stayed and chatted with Lovely Margaret's family for awhile. Finally, all of our activities from the day before (aided by my cat allergy) hit Brian and me like the proverbial brick wall, and we decided to go home to take a nap... or at least sit down and read for awhile, which we did.
About 5:30, I realized that we never had lunch and that we needed dinner now. I heated up some frozen vegetable soup from a few weeks ago, and grilled some of the Ciabatta bread we bought at the market yesterday. It was mighty fine. Oh, I also made some banana bread (with Valrhona cocoa powder, pecans, ginger and chocolate chips) before dinner. We haven't had any yet, but I wouldn't rule out having some for dessert before too long.
Now, I'm going to sit back with a small dog on me and read the next exciting chapter of my British spy novel (The Running Target by Gerald Seymour). Be happy and healthy!
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