Weekly Round Up: Squad Goals

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition we had a family Taylor Swift girls night, a family eclipse viewing, and Doggo started school.

An Insta Reboot

I've been debating what to do with my Insta account.  I stopped posting when I stopped running, and it's fine because it's not like I need another hobby on top of life and my other hobbies.  But...in the end I guess I was motivated to post for the same reason I blog.  Part of being at a party is contributing to the party.

At the same time, I've fallen behind on travel recaps and it would be nice to have a place to give a Reader's Digest version and to shout out the cool places where I've been....

So this week I finally got off my butt and started posting a recap of the trip I went on last weekend.  After that I'll slowly do my March trip and then I'll go back to the beginning of my travels.  Oh I'll still do the longer form blabby trip recap for the blog, it's just that Insta is a faster way to get things out and maybe just maybe one person will see a post and get motivated to go to one of these places.

Eclipse Recap

Team Totality here!  Hubs and I saw a documentary about the eclipse back in December at a science museum and we've been counting it down ever since.  We had an eclipse back in 2017 which was mega cool but not a total one.  It was also in the bad old days when Hubs and I worked in offices so the family was in different places that day.

Fast forward to 2024.  After many jokes that it would just be cloudy like normal, it was a bright, warm, sunny day.  The eclipse occurred a bit after 3, which is normal "get out of school" time around here, so schools were cancelled.

We didn't know how Doggo would react so we settled her in her crate with a treat and then the four of us and everyone else in the 'hood walked down to the neighborhood park.  I failed to do any research on how to photograph the eclipse, but our 16 year old neighbor covered for me:

A fun fact that we learned at the museum is that there are "total chasers" - people who travel to see full eclipses.  I think the Hubs and I might have to add that to our list of hobbies.

Squad Goals

On Friday I left my house full of men and headed over to SIL#3's house for a girls' night.  Four of us got together to watch Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.  SIL#3 and niece saw the show live last summer.

We got Chipotle and SIL#3 made some fun drinks with a sugar crusted glass rims.  I don't really listen to the music that the cool kids listen to so I don't really know any of TS's songs.  So hey, what better way to get up to speed than hearing 44 songs in 3.5 hours?

But seriously - you can count me in as a Swiftie now.  It was a fun night.

Workouts

The only notable thing to report is that now that I've been doing the 12-3-30 workout (12% incline, 3 MPH, 30 minutes) for four months, well no surprise that it's gotten easier.  In full transparency, I think my home treadmill might undershoot the incline just a bit because the two times that I've done the workout on non-home treadmills it's been quite a bit harder.  But in any case I've bumped it up to 13-3-30 and once I max out on incline then I'll look at bumping up the speed.  It's never a problem to make a workout harder.

In my other fitness endeavors, I'm still doing pushups like a boss and things are moving along with my pull up efforts.  I can hold myself up at the top of the bar for a count of 5 up from a count of zero and repeat it 3 times up from being able to repeat it zero times.  I still do 3 x 30 second bar hangs and that's about all I have to say about Operation Pull Up right now.  Once my body tells me that it's ready to increase something I'll increase it.

Watching

Life is funny.  On Friday I spent 3.5 hours watching Taylor Swift and on Saturday I spent 2.75 hours watching a movie called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.  In case you're not familiar it's a Big Deal 1943 movie about a British soldier's life starting with the Boer War to WWII.

I'm a huge fan of the film makers and you've heard me rave about their other movies A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes many times.  I've seen a lot of their other movies but apart from Black Narcissus nothing really stood out in my memory so I've been wanting to take another look. I'd seen Colonel Blimp a long time ago but all I saw back then was a movie about a bunch of dudes and war and it was a bit of a struggle to stay awake through it.  But something about this watch really resonated and I'm still day dreaming about the movie as I'm writing this two days later.  I think that I came to like war movies more a few years ago when I watched all of the AFI Top 100 movies.  I'd still recommend their other movies over this one, but it was a worthy watch.

Reading

I finished The Breaking Wave by Nevil Shute.  Just as a refresher, this is one of my all time favorite authors, but the reason that I read it was because Jenny read it, so it was kind of an informal Cool Bloggers Book Club.  I think that I probably read this in middle school because a few details of the story were familiar but I really didn't remember it at all so I'm counting this as my first read. The Cliff notes version is that it's about "how a war can go on killing people long after it's all over" (not a spoiler - the teaser quote from the back of the book).  It's about women in the military in WWII and PTSD and it really hits.  Listen, I haven't served in the military either now or in WWII but what he wrote feels true to what I've heard.  I have a feeling that he must have based the main character on someone that he knew.

Since finishing The Breaking Wave I've returned to the next book in the Dover series (spoof of the Great British Detective series) which is Dover Goes to Pott.

For audio books, I picked up a CBBC recommendation The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown (recommendation by Engie co-endorsed by Nicole).  It's the story of the Donner party through the viewpoint of one of the women in the party.  I found some parts of the book to be a bit on the dry and draggy side but overall I liked it.  I didn't know much about the Donner party besides that they had a very bad road trip.  I listened to most of it on my latest trip, and I'd definitely recommend it for the road.

If you're in the mood for something similar I'd like to recommend Alive by Piers Paul Read which was recommended to me by Catrina many years ago (seriously...nearly four years ago)==>Cool Bloggers hook other Cool Bloggers up with good books.  As to whether I would ever eat a person, my answer is the same as it was back then: I think my survival instinct would kick in, but I as someone who can barely choke down chicken I think it would take a while for me to get there.  I'd have to eat a lot of shoes first, which was a Donner strategy.

Dawg Report

Last time I shared this picture of Doggo napping hard.  There were quite a few comments about how uncomfortable her neck position looked.

Doggo's response was "hold my beer and watch this".

Both times she only stayed in that position long enough for me to take a picture.

The big exciting dawg news from the past few weeks is that her training is under way.  When we first got her we did a few in home sessions with a trainer, but it was not a good fit.  For Doggo's part, she's territorial about our back room and skittish around strangers, so bringing a stranger into her safe space did not work out.  For the trainer's part, he gave us a few good pointers but he seemed more interested in selling us training sessions than in doing the training, so we parted ways and looked for something else.

In the back of my head I knew that I had heard something somewhere about dog training...oh yes, Engie talked about the American Kennel Club's Training Programs.  These are group classes, so it's training plus socialization, which is very important for dogs.  The only problem was that the classes didn't start until this week, and not having a way to tell Doggo to "stay" or "leave it" was getting to be a headache, so I looked for another option to tide us over.  I found a doggy day care place that has group classes so we've been taking Doggo there for the past two weeks.  For the first class she was very withdrawn and shy, but by the second class she opened up and was her normal delightful self.  On day one of the AKC class she walked in like she owned the place and got right down to work.  AKC is a six week class, and for right now we're going to keep taking her to the other class as well - we like the trainer, Doggo likes being around other dogs, it gives her exposure to other people, and oh yes it's good for us to be around other people with puppies as well.  The goal of training is to have a well behaved dog and not to save money, but I would be remiss not to mention that the sucky trainer was expensive, the doggy day care place is very reasonable, and the AKC class is stupid cheap.

Peace out!  I finally got the post about my March trip written, so I'll be back with that soon.