Well I beat Doughnut Day and escaped without falling prey to their tasty plot.  I even went home with Adam’s Cycleops fluid trainer and rode for an hour and half.  However I drove to work Friday and as it was our office Thanksgiving celebration, I promptly gorged myself on deep-fried turkey, stuffing, a bun and a baked potato with bacon bits.  And some yams.  And dessert.  Pretty sure I had enough caloric intake to ride my 80 kilometre loop to Chestermere but I didn’t.  Ride that is.  Nooo…Instead I packed up the family and headed off to gorge myself further  on more turkey dinner  visit my parents.

Friday night came and went without too much untoward culinary scarfing.  My dad had BBQ’d up some fantastic chicken breasts some chicken breasts in the fridge so Trace cooked them up and we had some super-tasty chicken-breast sandwiches for supper.  Saturday was spent grazing primarily on my staple toast-with-peanut-butter and anything else that couldn’t escape my grasp in time like the box of Junior Mints, the Three Muskateers bar, ice cream, frozen yogurt and yet another birthday cupcake.  I now had enough food packed away to ride the 120 kilometre trip home.

Sunday was of course Thanksgiving, held at my aunt’s place for the first time in a few years.  She is a notoriously, unbelievably excellent cook.  The dishes are prepared perfectly and are all, without exception, mouth-watering.  The usuals  – turkey cooked to perfection, fluffy mashed potatoes, melt-in-your-mouth buns, perfect stuffing and gravy from heaven – and the family staples – a strawberry-and-goat-cheese salad, turnips prepared with butter and brown sugar, yam prepared with goat cheese and I-don’t-know-what-else-but-wow-it’s-good, beets, artichoke hearts, pineapple salad, homemade cranberry sauce and…more.  There was so much fantastic food I can’t even remember it all.  I ate some of everything and went back for seconds.  I suffered a massive bout of self-induced turkelepsy.

After all the leftovers were packed away and the dishes done – which is no small feat for 13 people, though I had no part in the clean-up shamefully – we had dessert.  Two kinds of pie – pumpkin and peach, topped with real whipped cream.  As one who is lactose-intolerant and generally avoids cow-based dairy of all types, I slid the whipped cream off and spread it on the kid’s pie.  No.  No I didn’t.  I took that quarter-pie piece of peach pie topped with homemade whipped cream and what did I do?  I put it in my piehole.  All of it.  However when I was offered an equally over-sized piece of pumpkin pie piled high with more homemade whipped cream, I turned it down.  No…that’s a lie.  It chased the peach pie down the piehole and tried calling for reinforcements.  I do believe of the 5 definitions St. Thomas Aquinas used defining gluttony, I hit 4 right out of the park, the lone hold-out being the inappropriate time (when is it an inappropriate time to eat food one might ask).

I capped this weekend orgy of food off this morning with not one but two of my aunt’s absolutely stellar cinnamon buns.  No other cinnamon bun comes even remotely close to delivering the sheer pleasure that these carry.  They’re so good I’m not sure I feel guilty.  However…  I hopped back on the trainer after arriving home this afternoon and couldn’t avoid noticing the extra padding I’d developed.  While trying to recover from the interval sprints I’d been riding, I was laid out across the bike, my forearms resting across the bars, head hanging gasping for air while I pedaled feebly and tried not to puke continued a more relaxed pace and speed.  This position nicely amplified the smack smack smack smack of my sweaty thighs meeting my sweaty belly with each pedal stroke.  Or maybe that was my heart trying to pump the weekend’s adventure through my system.  Either way, I’m pretty sure I have enough energy stores to do the Chestermere loop and the Red Deer loop now.  In succession.

Ah well.  It looks like a week of cold but otherwise excellent commuting weather ahead of me so perhaps the trainer and I will spend some evenings together to address some of this excess.  Or not.