Earlier today I happily hopped on a plane to head home for the holidays. While I love air travel for its abundance of people-watching opportunities, I generally don’t relish the prospect of making small talk with strangers on the plane. Let’s just say that I once had an excessively personal conversation with a gynecologist on an airplane–ever since then, I just prefer to sleep through the flight.

Anyway, today I was pleasantly surprised by a different kind of seatmate. I peered around the corner of the seat and saw a pair of beautiful brown eyes staring at me:

Alright, so my actual seatmate was a woman with partial blindness, but I was delighted to also share my leg room with her seeing eye dog. I made fast friends with Kismet, as she rested her paws and snout on my feet for the duration of the flight. She also popped up occasionally for a pat on the head. Cute, cute, cute. Yeah, I know—I am such a dog person.

All that canine bonding made me all the more excited to be reunited with another certain pup:

Muah.

I could talk about dogs all night, so let’s get onto the grub already.

After an easy gym workout this morning, I made a tasty pumpkin-banana protein shake for breakfast.

Lunch was an assortment of packed items to be eaten at the airport. In looking at this photo, I just realized that I never ate my string cheese…which means it now sits in the Charlotte airport trash can. Damn. I hate wasting food.

My parents were having a tasty salad combination for dinner with grilled chicken. I followed suit, substituting marinated tofu for the chicken.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some tree-decorating to do!

Filed under: Meals