Weekly Round Up: Snow and SANta

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, reads, and early retirement life.  In this week's edition the boys wrapped up the fall semester and came home, I made some beautiful shortbread cookies, Doggo played in the snow, and SANta came to town.

A Visit from SANta!

SANta came to town this week!  Doggo alerted me to the delivery and was very interested in the box.

My SANta was Stephany!

The haul was: a mug, salted caramel chocolates, hot cocoa, a dog toy, a notebook, and fun socks.

The mug features my early retirement spirit animal, the sloth, and says "today I will do absolutely nothing"

Doggo was very happy that she was included in on the loot.  The toy is a gingerbread stuffie with a squeaky ring.  I have a feeling that the toy will soon be a squeaky ring without the stuffie, but so far he's still intact.

Thanks Stephany!  Doggo says thank you as well and hi to Lila and Eloise.

Eats

For the past few years, my go-to shortbread recipe has been buying a box of Walker's shortbread and calling it good.  With age comes wisdom, and I've come to accept that just because I can make something from scratch, it doesn't mean that I should.

However, when I saw Kelly's brown sugar shortbread cookies, I was mesmerized by the design and decided that I wanted to give them a try.  She used cookie stamps for her designs, which I don't have and didn't feel like buying.  Shucks I don't need decorated cookies.

But I like decorated cookies, so I got inspired and used the plates from a cookie press to see what I could come up with.  I only made half of the recipe because I wasn't sure if I would like them.

This is the world's simplest recipe, and I liked the look of my amateur cookie stamping attempt.  I did question if it was really necessary to beat the butter and sugar together for five minutes, but since I am an evangelist for beating butter and sugar for most cookies for three minutes, I decided it wasn't that much longer and to suck it up and do it.  It wasn't that big of a deal.

It's all very well that they looked good but how did they taste?

Verdict: I deeply regret only making half of the recipe and will be making a full batch for our Christmas cookie tray.  In related news, Walker's sales are forecasted to decrease by approximately two boxes per year.

Workouts

Last week I got my flu, COVID, and shingles vaccines on Monday.  I felt pretty sick on Tuesday, and fine with just the ghost of a sore arm from the shingles shot by Wednesday.  It feels good to have that chore off the list!

My tailbone is still sore from the dog walking fall two weeks ago (!), so strength work is still on hold.  30 minutes on the treadmill most days, and of course all of the dog walks.  

From earlier in the week when it was just normal cold with a dusting of snow:

On Saturday we took our after dinner walk in the afternoon right before the big storm and before it got super cold:

The temperature now is officially As Cold as Balls, so we've had to pare our walks down to half a block plus snow zoomies in the yard until it gets warmer.

Watching

I finished season two of The Gilded Age and it was everything I could have dreamed of.  I'm taking a few weeks off to savor it and then I'll tear into season three.

Reading

It's been a slow week.  I finally finished Guilty by Definition.  It was...well, very slow.  The Sarah's Bookshelves crew loved it.

Early Retirement Life

I have a feeling that I will soon be calling this section just "life".  I spent the week at home locked into math and Spanish in the mornings and taking care of adulting in the afternoons.

Math - um it's a bit boring and there was one lesson that I didn't quite get.  I'm sticking with it for now but I have a feeling that this may be a short lived pursuit.

Spanish - I will finish the first unit of Pimsleur next week, and then it will be time to add in something else to the mix (Spanish TV shows, Youtube videos, maybe some more written exercises?)  As to how it's going, I'm good at hanging in with the lessons, and TBD if my studies lead to ever being able to understand or converse in Spanish.

Social:

• I went to my book club's holiday lunch, where we did a book exchange.  The only thing is that I never buy books so I didn't have anything to exchange.  To get around this, I made the rounds of the Little Free Libraries in my town and kept upgrading my pick as I went along.  In the end I selected Daisy Jones and the Six as my give book, which is a book that I want to read but haven't yet.  The book that I got in the exchange is a memoir called Unbound: A Story of Snow and Self Discovery by Steph Jagger.  When I'm done with it, I will give it back to the Little Free Library to even the score.
• I went to my local Chose FI group!  For the civilians in the crowd, Chose FI is a podcast that money nerds like me tend to listen to, and they have local groups around the country and around the world.  It was a fun meetup with like minded people and I'm looking forward to the next meeting.

Family - the boys are home for the holidays!  Hubs and I made the six hour round trip to pick up Stepson #2 on Friday.

What's Next?

It's going to be wicked cold next week, so I'm going to a place where the temperature is closer to my age.

I had been working on a post about my most recent trip, but I found myself getting bored.  These trips are fun, but for whatever reason they just don't feel worthy of dedicated posts.  But there are a few choice tidbits that would be fun to share, and of course everyone loves to play Rate the Airbnb.  After pondering it a bit, I think I might do periodic travel roundup posts to share the highlights of these shorter trips.  Stay tuned!

Peace Out!  How cold is it where you live and how much snow have you gotten?  Has anyone read Unbound?