Weekly Round Up: Shorty

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Since we last talked, I went on another trip and I have a million things to tell you about it, but I also want to chit chat about everyday life.  So let's do that today and we'll talk about the trip soon-ish.

Shorty Report

The first thing that I wanted to talk about is some feedback that I've gotten on Doggo from folks who first "met" her on the blog and have now met her IRL.  The universal feedback is that "She looks so big on the blog but she's actually really small".

It's true!  Girlfriend is a shorty.  When we adopted her, she was about seven months old and weighed 21 pounds at her first vet appointment.  The shelter told us that it was impossible to predict how big she would get, and that she might either stay the small or grow into a full size German Shepherd.

From there she gained 1-2 pounds a week, which we knew because we weighed her every week.  With each gain we used to shake our heads and say "she can't go on gaining weight like this" but we also didn't really worry about it.  Her DNA test predicted that her adult weight would be 46 pounds. 

She got up to 40 pounds just to prove that she could, and that's where the scale stopped.  She eats like a horse and every once in a while she will shoot up to something like 40.4 pounds just to prove that she can but then the scale will drop to 38.8 pounds before settling again somewhere in the 39s.

Baby Doggo Sploot

Grown Up Doggo Sploot

I'm not sure if these pictures help to show Doggo's true size, but she was very pleased to learn that her internet persona is the same as the persona in her heart, which is a Huge and Mighty German Shepherd.  She continues to disregard all of the "oh is that a puppy?" comments that we get from passersby on our walks.

Up Coming Blog Plans Report

I'll be writing about the trip that I took last week very soon, just as soon as I buckle down and get it written.  In the meantime, it has come to my attention that I am woefully behind on blogging about state capitols and state flags.  As of last week my stats were that I had toured 30 state capitols and 5 provincial legislatures, and yet I've only done one round up of 10 capitols and two state flag posts (state flags here, provincial flags here).  What do you do when you have a problem?  You fix it!  I've got a "capitol" post drafted (for the provincial legislatures) which will get Canada fully up to date and then I'm going to start chipping away at flags and capitols until we're current.

Numbers wise, I left off with eight state flags, so the next flag post will cover seven flags to get us up to 15 and then we'll cover both flags and capitols/legislatures in blocks of five.

I don't want to drop regular blogging, so the tentative plan is to post twice a week until we're caught up - one weekly round up or travel post and then one flag/capitol post.

Up Coming Travel Plans Report

I don't plan my travel super far in advance because I don't need to, but it has also come to my attention that winter is on the way and that fall is an ideal time to visit the North East states.  Like Doggo, these states are small so it should be possible to mow a good number of them down before the weather gets too rough.  But I also have a few things that I need to do at home so I'll be staying put for the next few weeks.

Also, at the beginning of this year I had only visited 12 states, I'm now at 30, and if everything goes to plan I will have been to 39 states before mid November...it's crazy how much progress you can make by eating an elephant one bite at a time.

Sadly I've realized that I won't make it back to Canada this year, other than the hour or so that I was there in July, but as far as I'm concerned it's Game On for 2027.  Plus thanks to Elisabeth I can now spell Saskatchewan without looking it up!  I just need to work a bit more on the pronunciation

That's enough random stuff, let's get into proper Round Up stuff.

Eats

My version is not very photogenic, but I now have a go-to home ramen recipe that I can endorse.  If I'm being very honest, which I am, 99.9% of my homemade endeavors are not better than just making Top Ramen.

The winner is Sarah's Vegan Kitchen 15 minute miso ramen, which I only made on a whim because I was craving something warm and ironically I had plain ramen noodles but did not have any Top Ramen so I needed a soup base.  I made the following substitutions: peanut butter instead of tahini because that's what I had, skipped edamame and green onions because I didn't have those, used Costco frozen broccoli and some frozen fried tofu squares for convenience, and also "de-veganized" the recipe by throwing an egg on top because I wanted to.  I wasn't clear on how much water I was "supposed" to add to the soup base, so I went with what filled the bowl.  It was pretty good/not too much trouble so I would make this again, at least until my next visit to the Asian store.

Workouts

Not much to report.  We now have fall-like temperatures, which means that longer dog walks are an option.  This is good for me and of course even better for Doggo.

Watching

I finished season two of UK Traitors, and I'm taking a breather but I'll be continuing on shortly.

In the meantime, I came across a list of recommended shows for people who are trying to learn Spanish, which took me to a Netflix show called La Casa de las Flores.  Now mind you, at my level I have to use the subtitles so I'm not sure if it's really doing anything to help my Spanish, but it's a fun show.

Reading

• I finished Heft, which was a 😻😻😻read for me.  What I said before, it's about someone with an unhealthy coping mechanism who is (presumably) learning a different way, and about found family.  Plus I always love it when an ending isn't spelled out and the reader has to do a bit of work instead of passively bobbing along.
• I continued my Little House audio re-read with By the Shores of Silver Lake on my trip.  A summary so far:
• Little House in the Big Woods.  Laura is five and most of the book is a description of food and how to hunt/harvest it.
• Little House on the Prairie.  Road trip time!  By which I mean covered wagon time.  The Ingalls move, settle down, build a house, and then find themselves on the losing end of a land war between the US Government and the native tribes.  There are a few sentences about that which do not make for good story time reading in the present day.
• On the Banks of Plum Creek.  Dugout time!  Also Grasshopper Plague time.
• By the Shores of Silver Lake.  Whoa, things get dark fast!  The story abruptly jumps forward five years.  Mary is blind from scarlet fever and Jack dies.  Then everyone gets on a train and moves west and at the end of the book they're starting to build a little town called De Smet.
• Currently: a comfort read.  Elisabeth put Always Pack a Candle on my radar, which is the author's memoir of her time as a nurse in rural BC in the early 60s.  I was very excited to learn that she wrote a sequel, which is Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching, and Rural Living, which picks up in 1975 when the author was raising her children.  There's nothing fancy going on here: it's just a real person writing about her real life and I adore it.

I don't have a "next" book to go to after Always on Call, so I'm taking my time with it.

Peace out!  Can you spell/pronounce Saskatchewan?