Work Hangover Wednesday: Twinkies, Pie, and Tempo

I am now the proud owner of a pair of....

Twinkies!

Thanks to Felix, and his cats Oreo and Tiger, who left a little holiday-wrapped present on my doorstep the other day, which I found when I got home from work.

I survived the last two days of work plus a third morning today with a 7 am staff meeting. I couldn't just sit there and zone out, either, I had to give a presentation along with a coworker, plus I had another agenda item at the meeting that was mine, so I had to be fully awake. Always a challenge for me at 7 am.

It was super slow at work on Monday, probably due to an extension of the holiday weekend. But Tuesday everyone came charging back, and we had all the fun plus some...

I did bring my gigantic pumpkin pie to work on Monday, along with a can of whipped cream, and my coworkers helped me eat it. It was gone by 3 pm. Nurses are amazing eating machines.

I was pretty worthless today after the staff meeting, I came home, and despite Iris's efforts to convince me to get her outside, I couldn't do it. I needed food, and a nap. That was all I could handle. I got a long nap during the afternoon, and then I met Wheaties Boy at the usual time and place for our tempo run.

I did about 12.2 miles tonight, and I thought I was running pretty well, according to his Garmin we were hitting 8:07 pace for a lot of the run, but according to my calculations I only averaged 8:33 pace. Must have slowed down a bit somewhere. We did have a few hills this time, too, and Hail Mary hill was one of them.

Hail Mary hill is on south Lemay, north of Fossil Creek park, across from a big Catholic church, hence the name...

I felt pretty good on the run, but Hail Mary was a reminder that I haven't been doing hills. I will start again after the new year, when I'll be doing once or twice weekly runs up at Horsetooth. I might need to get my butt down and do some Hail Marys before then, though, I can tell I am pathetic on my hill strength.

Not much on the agenda this week. Just personal business I need to take care of, in between running. I should be getting a good upper body workout when I take the girls running, because I noticed tonight the sidewalks are now covered with Iris's favorite delicacy. The geese are back for the winter.

Snack time!

It's the Bacon, STUPID!

No more Twinkies! Boo-hoo. It's the latest poster child for the anti-union movement. Actually the company was struggling anyway. People don't want Twinkies as much as they used to, demand has dropped.

People are easily mesmerized by more interesting products these days. If the company had been wise, they would have made bacon-filled Twinkies.

Despite Hostess defenders' whining about how unions destroyed Hostess, I wonder how much they paid their CEO and other senior management, and what their business practices were like. I'm sure they didn't make any mistakes there...and is there something else the Wall Street Journal wants to tell us? Who do you want to believe?

How did they treat their employees? Did they produce a quality product that was valued by and benefitted the consumer? Looks like this will cost 18,500 jobs, that's a lot of people employed for the purpose of obesifying America.

I don't know much about Twinkies, but it seems to me they were a dying breed, like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I never was a fan of Twinkies. In fact, I never even tasted a Twinkie until I was teenager and Hostess had come out with chocolate covered Twinkies, called Chocodiles. They were okay, not my favorite. I grew up as a kid on the east coast in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Tastycakes were the thing. They tasted a little better than sugar sweetened cardboard. They had a spongy, chewy consistency that ruined the whole effect for me.

The twinkies I tasted inside Chocodiles were a softer texture. I forgot about Chocodiles for the next 30 years until my friend Heidi, who doesn't even eat this stuff, sent me a recipe for Twinkie sushi.

I always thought using Chocodiles would have been a little more appealing in sushi. Without the chocolate, it's just plain disgusting.

Then some geniuses decided to be creative.

Twinkies lived just long enough to see the bacon craze...

I can think of a few other foods, brands, and chain restuarants I'd like to see follow the Twinkies dinosaur on the road to extinction. Almost everything in conventional grocery stores wrapped in brightly colored plastic could go, to begin with.

Buh-bye Twinkies, good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the big fat ass when you leave the free market. I'm sure this isn't the last we'll see of Twinkies. Soon we'll be seeing a resurgence of fake Twinkies, possibly made in China.

On that note, I'm off to run another 20 miles this morning. It's a beautiful day. Maybe I'll stop by a convenience store and buy a case of Twinkies...before they're all gone. I'll keep it as a souvenir and see how many years it lasts. Or I could always sell it on e-Bay.

You never know, there might be some fool out there willing to pay big bucks for it. I could run Badwater again...