Weekly Round Up: Domestic Life

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This was a domestic week, spent hanging out at home.  I did a little experimenting in the kitchen and my roommate and I kept up with the chores.

Laundry With Doggo

Doggo enjoys helping me fold laundry.  By helping, I mean that she keeps me on my toes and motivates me to get all of the socks put away in record time.

Afterwards, my best guess is that she was trying to tell me that the AC was cranked up too high.  She warmed up with an undercover nap.

Eats

My experiment of the week was a last minute idea to make spring rolls without going to a lot of trouble in the process.  To get there, I grossly simplified this recipe.  I skipped the fresh herbs, used carrots, red bell pepper, and green onions for the veggies, and air fried the tofu with just a little oil and seasoned salt instead of pan frying it with a bit of the sauce.  For the sauce I used peanut butter because that's what I had, and the only reason that I had a tablespoon of "fresh lime juice" is because when I have a lime that I can't use in time, I juice it and freeze the juice in one tablespoon portions.

What I want to shout out is that the sauce was oh so good.  Don't get me wrong, there is no such thing as bad peanut sauce, but this was especially yummy and especially simple on the ingredients.  Going forward I think I would just serve this as a bowl instead of messing with spring roll wrappers, but once in a while I like to show off.

I don't have a great picture, but my current dinner obsession is roasted sweet potatoes with taco toppings.  What we've got here is half of an enormous roasted sweet potato, ground beef, cheese, salsa, guac, and of course a couple of tortilla chips.

Workouts

The heat spell broke last week and it's been so nice to be able to do longer dog walks again.  

On Sunday morning I finally did the thing that I've been meaning to do since I moved, which was to roll Bikie out of the garage and peddle down to my neighborhood biking path.  As I suspected, it connects up to a longer biking path that I did last summer.

On the strength front, my routine of body weight strength exercises are starting to feel easier, so it's time to up the ante.  I'm taking a shot at learning to do diamond pushups.  Currently it's impossible to do these on my toes, so I'm alternating small sets of wall diamond pushups and knee diamond pushups.  Stay tuned to see if anything comes of that.

It was also time to get a pull up bar.  No I can't do pull ups but I like to do 30 second hangs on the bar as an alleged first step in the process.  This leads to another edition of my very infrequent blog series, Stuff On The Internet That I Tried IRL.

In the past I've had pull up bars that hook over a door frame, and they're fine but the disadvantage is that if you want to close the door then you have to take the bar down.  To get around that, I decided to try the pull up bar that Janae has.

Verdict: yay!  It's basically a tension rod on steroids.  Once I figured out how to get it in place, it feels secure.  I can close the door without taking it down.

Watching

I can't remember the last time that a book turned TV show worked for me, and when I heard that Margo's Got Money Troubles was being made into a show, I was very nervous about that.  Eventually the hype became too much to ignore so I caved and watched the show.

Listen, of course the book is better, but the TV show was (mostly) a winner.  The actors were fantastic and it did a good job of staying true to the book without bloating up the story.  It just got a little off track toward the end.

For my next show, I had been saving season three of The Gilded Age forever, and I finally went for it.  I only saw the first episode, and now I'm caught between my attempts to be an adult and to watch it slowly and savor it, or to just be a pig and binge it all.  No one ever said that life was easy.

Reading

Buckle in and I'll catch you up!

I've continued to read Show Boat at the rate of a chapter a day, and I'm getting toward the end.  More to come.

I finished Big Time by Laura Vanderkam and I have thoughts!  The first time that I heard her say that she's been tracking her time for 10 years, my gut reaction was "what" and not in a good way.  Now that I've heard her talk more about it, I'm on board and have started playing around with this for myself.  In my own case, I don't want to know how much time I spend playing NYT games, or watching YouTube, or staring at the computer screen trying to write a blog post, but I do like the idea of having a record of what I do every day.  For right now, my time log is a very informal Word doc.  Stay tuned.  If you're after a book that makes you think, Big Time is a good candidate.

Next up: Dissection of a Murder by Jo Murray c/o Sarah's Bookshelves.  The book is about a barrister in the UK who is assigned to a high profile murder case where the defendant won't tell her what happened and the prosecuting barrister is her husband.  The first 90% of the book had me glued to the pages, and the final 10% was a mess of The Twist!!!  And then another Twist!!!  Plus the Twist That You Didn't See Coming!!!  This is the author's first book, and I feel like her publisher was probably like "well, you're a first time author so you need to add in something memorable to make an impression".  I wish that everyone involved had the confidence to just roll with the first 90% of the book.  With that said, the first 90% was such a good read that I think you would be well served by picking this up.

Next: one for the road!  There's a reason why I listen to Sarah's Bookshelves because without that podcast I would never have known about Kevin Hazzard.  He is a journalist who became an EMT and wrote an incredible memoir called A Thousand Naked Strangers that I listened to earlier this year.  Now he's back with No One’s Coming: The Rogue Heroes Our Government Turns to When There's Nowhere Else to Turn.  The book is the true story of the Ebola outbreak of 2014 and the rescue of two American medical professionals.  Hubs and I listened to this on our trip to Kentucky.  

I liked A Thousand Naked Strangers better than No One's Coming, but they are both solid reads/listens.  And then my dreams came true because he is going to be on the Sarah's Bookshelves podcast soon.  If anyone needs me, you can find me obsessively checking her feed to find out when the episode will be out.

Finally: currently but I'm not sure for how long.  I picked up State of Terror by Louise Penny and Hillary Clinton, also after hearing it hyped on Sarah's Bookshelves.  It's good but...it's a routine thriller but very long, and I'm starting to get bored.  TBD if I keep reading or get distracted by something else.

One More for Funsies

I've gotten a lot better at Connections in the past few weeks.  Why?  Because I'm now playing with an audience, which makes me think things through a bit more.  Julie started Connections group text, and it's been fun to play along with the group.

On a related note, I enjoyed/was horrified by this NYT article about NYT games streaks.  I've been playing NYT games pretty much daily for...a really long time.  I'm a big fan of having daily routines, and less fond of tracking them because it's a slippery slope to make an enjoyable thing not enjoyable. but I was tickled to read about what other folks do.  My take is that if I was on a long distance flight I would probably end up skipping the puzzles, if I was looking for a way to mark the days since a health scare, I would probably not do it with an NYT streak, but I would totally do the puzzles while I was in labor (in theory anyway, the ship has sailed on testing this IRL).

If anyone cares, my current game routine is: NYT mini, midi, and full crossword (generally at night since they come out at 10:00, although since I started taking magnesium I usually can't stay awake long enough to finish the full crossword which is a great problem to have), Wordle, and Connections.  In the non NYT world I play Waffle and Q-Less (a mini scrabble game).

What's Next

I'll be on the road in a few hours heading for St. Louis!  Woo hoo!

Peace Out!  Does your pet "help" with laundry?  Any good meals to report?  Have you gotten any bike rides in this summer?  Do you play NYT games?  Which ones and how often?  What do you think of streaks?