I’ve deemed today the first day of Cold.

Yesterday I was able to sport leggings and long sleeves, but this morning the temps dropped to low 30s — which means I had to go to Level 3 of clothing (I have 4 levels of clothing length/layers based on temperature ranges that I’ll explain sometime, it is extremely type-A). Which meant leggings, TWO shirts, TWO pairs of gloves, and a head warmer. Brrrrrrrr! For the majority of my 5.5 miles I felt like crawling back into bed and cuddling my space heater, but then I saw this:

So yellow. So pretty.

How do you stay motivated when it comes to running in the dark and cold? I don’t have any genius tips other than I like to get my butt out of bed ASAP so I don’t have time to think about canceling my run. Also I have a Rihanna playlist on reserve for especially non-inspirational jogs.

Speaking of uninspiring, last night Anthony and I headed to Pulpo, in Cleveland Park, for dinner. Pulpo recently inhabited the space of Tackle Box, a yummy seafood eatery that we actually though was good, but apparently wasn’t good enough because it closed. Sigh.

So anyways, I had a Livingsocial deal that I completely forgot about until yesterday when I got a reminder saying my deal to Pulpo was expiring in 3 days. I won’t let anything expire on me (especially cereal, which I will eat in its stalest form) so we had an impromptu dinner date.

Unlike our successful impromptu lunch date earlier, this spontaneous outing was a complete fail.

I’ll save the full, 1-star review for Yelp and Google Plus, but basically, Pulpo appears to be one of those very ritzy-like spots that serves small food on obnoxious plates at enormous prices. The restaurant serves “tapas,” small dishes, but in my opinion it was more like tapas of tapas. So like, a sample of a sample. Of a sample.

In addition to being miniature, the food was pretty bland. Luckily we had a bottle of wine and a good sense of humor to wash down all 5 bites though. Our waiter was also extremely apologetic and the manager even came over to comp some of our order because he felt so bad. Wonderful service, terrible food, hilarious experience. In the end we didn’t have to fork over the full $90 or whatever it cost, and the staff was so nice, so we just strolled out in giggles.

We were still hungry when we got home so we poured ourselves big bowls of cereal (not even stale) that tasted like a million bucks. The end.

• Have you ever tried tapas?
• How do you stay motivated in the winter?
• Winter running hat/beanie recommendations (I need a new one, with room for my ponytail!)?

Pulpo on UrbanSpoon: