Weekly Round Up: Christmas Recap

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Let's talk Christmas plus all of the other stuff that we usually talk about.

A Christmas Miracle

I'd like to introduce you to Doggo's cousins. The black lab (girl) belongs to SIL#4 and the standard poodle (boy) belongs to SIL#3.  The dogs all get along well, and their favorite party game is to see how many times the hoomans have to refill the communal water bowl.  I'm sure that they have a count somewhere.

Doggo has always gotten on well with other dogs, but she is still working on how she feels about people.  For the past few months, her party strategy has been to hide.  However at the family Christmas party with 12 people and three dogs, she decided to be a social butterfly.  She was mostly at ease and worked the room for attention and treats.  It was heartwarming to see.

Christmas Party Recap

We went to SIL#4's house.  The standard menu is that she gets takeout lasagna from a really good Italian restaurant, and everyone pitches in to fill out the rest of the menu: garlic bread, a giant salad, and dessert.

The dessert menu was as follows.  You've seen most of the goodies in previous years, but it's always worth repeating:

• Oreo balls.  Mix one box of oreos and one block of cream cheese in a food processor, let it cool in fridge, roll it into balls, freeze the balls, and then dip in dipping chocolate.
• Averie Cooks soft & chewy M&M bars - you must double the recipe, which is my standard adjustment for all of her dessert recipes.
• Christmas Crack
• Eggnog cookies.  Knowing that the frosting is scant, I made a full batch of the cookies and 3x of the frosting.  I had some frosting leftover, but I think I was better off than trying to skate by on 2x of the frosting.
• And of course the new kid on the block: a double batch of Kelly's brown sugar shortbread cookies.

As far as Christmas presents, whoever said that money can't buy happiness has never known the pleasure of going to Home Goods and finding a giant banana dog toy for $10.

Eats

I pulled off a fun family dinner last week.  We'd had a few nights of meeting up with friends, which meant a stretch of heavy dinners, so I was looking for something lighter but still a cut above our normal dinners.  As you may know, I can't stand chicken and Hubs feels the same way about seafood.  The other item in play was that one of the aforementioned heavy dinners was at Longhorn Steakhouse.  Our meals both came with side of mac and cheese, which was obscenely good but way more than we could eat so I brought the leftovers home.  The problem was that it wasn't enough to use as a side.

I made shrimp for the three members of the family who like shrimp and pan fried a chicken breast for Hubs.  I roasted Costco frozen broccoli and a few carrots in the air fryer, and made a boxed rice pilaf.  Then I added the tiny portions of mac and cheese along with everything else.  

In other fun family dinner news, the grocery store has been flush with cheap ripe avocadoes, so I took it as a sign to make crunchwraps.  One pound of ground beef was enough for dinner for four plus dinner for two last night when the boys went out and it was just Hubs and me.

Workouts/Wellness

It's on!!!  I signed up again for the hiking challenge that I've done two years in a row now.  In the past I've started in on January 1st, but the official start date is December 26, so I hit it as soon as it started this year.  Which is just as well since we had a few nice days and now we're in the middle of a winter storm and will have extreme cold for the next few days.  

The challenge has been a little different each year, but it centers around an extensive trail system.  This year they added in an "overachiever" category of bonus hikes in other area parks, so the challenge is to complete 24 hikes that are 120 miles total (the hikes range from 2.8 miles to 6.8 miles) and there is an "overachiever category" with five bonus hikes outside of the main park for an additional 20 miles.

The first year I completed the hikes as soon as I could, which was by March 31, and last year I stretched things out and took until the end of June (the official challenge end) to do the trails.

This year I'm going to aim for double or nothing: do all of the hikes including the bonus round twice.  My only modifications are that I'm going to cut some of the longer hikes into smaller pieces so that more of them are in the 3-4 mile range and fewer are in the 6-7 (SIX SEVEN!!!) mile range.  I love hiking for an hour or two, but three hour hikes are a bit too much of a good thing.  I also don't like summer hiking nearly as much as I like winter and spring hiking, so that points toward an earlier finish.  I don't have a specific time goal, but I'm thinking 3-4 hikes on the weeks that I'm not traveling when the weather allows should get 'er done by the end of April.  Stay tuned.

I don't generally take Doggo on these hikes because the footing can be treacherous (for a human, not for a dog, which means that it's even more treacherous for a human with a dog), the trails can be very muddy, and there's always a chance that it might be too cold for her.  We've been sticking to the trails in our city parks, and here is the Top Walk Photo of the Week.

On the wellness front, my sleep has been garbage lately.  I can't fall asleep, and I've been constantly falling victim to what I call "the three o'clock hole" which is where I wake up at some ungodly hour and can't fall back asleep.  It was so bad that in the past few days I've asked everyone that I know for ideas.  The two top recommendations were melatonin and CBD, and I had never tried either.  Last night I took some melatonin, and it was fabulous for getting me to sleep, a bit less successful for the three o'clock hole, but I did sleep in later than normal this morning.  I feel a little groggy, but I'm coming off at least of week of poor sleep, and groggy is better than than the "my brain cannot brain" feeling of no sleep that I had the day before.  To be continued...

Watching

Not much.  Hubs and I saw Die Hard last week (got to get a token Christmas movie in there somewhere), a few Alfred Hitchcock movies, and Hubs and I watched another episode of Severance.  So far it's just an OK show for us, but we're sticking with it because everyone loves it.

Reading

I finished my reread of Rebecca and I had forgotten how good it was.  It's an easy 😻😻😻

I wrote up a full book vs movie summary smack down for the next Hitchcock recap post that will be coming out in a few days, and I promised to make a determination on which is better, the book or the movie.  Guys, I can't do it.  I'm biased in favor of the movie because I saw it first, but I also love the book so much.  The one thing that I think is better in the book is that the ending isn't clearly spelled out.  You're given the pieces of what the narrator and Max see as they drive back to Manderley, but it's up to you to put them together to figure out what happened.  That doesn't work very well in a movie, so they have to show us exactly what happened.  I do like endings that have a "you figure it out" element, so possibly if I had read the book first I would like the movie a bit less.  As it stands, I am deadlocked, but what a great book/movie.

Currently reading: a Work Hell book!  Discontent by Beatriz Serrano is about a woman who has a successful marketing career on the outside, but spends her work days watching YouTube videos and taking tranquillizers. I love the voice of the main character, and I can't wait to get back to it.

After finishing 168 Hours, I very much wanted to read another Laura Vanderkam book, so I asked around.  Elisabeth flagged that Tranquility by Tuesday was the book that inspired her to start her blog, so that made it a must read (okay, okay a must listen since I did it on audio but you know what I mean).  I was not disappointed.  I've been very guilty at focusing on the future at the expense of the present, and I love her focus on making sure that the present gets its due as well.

I continue to read a chapter a night of Best Laid Plans, and if there was ever a book worth taking a bit of time over, this is it.  I missed a few days for Christmas, so I'm only a few chapters in.

Peace Out!  How was your Christmas?