Weekly Eats: 5 Things

A weekly round up: eats, watches, and reads.  This week I'm taking a shot at a "Five Things" post, talking food, watching a bunch of silent movies, and ranking Lisa Jewell novels.  Good times.

In the manner of the 5 Things Posts that have been going around:

5 Things I Miss:
1. Travel.  Actually I find travel to be very tiring but I enjoy spending time on the beach.

2. Trader Joe's.  No reason to miss it, I could go anytime.  It's just that it's near work and I can't get my head around making an hour round trip for coffee and fig bars.  My company is enforcing WFH until September so that's the projected date of my next TJ's visit.

3.  Running races and being with my IRL Running Community

4.

5.

Yeah, I can't quite come up with five.  Just a general comment that the world has lost a lot.  A lot of people have died and a lot of people don't have a paycheck right now.

5 Things I Don't:
1. The Daily Hustle to Be Everywhere and to Do All of the Things.  I never thought of us as being super busy, but once the hustle stopped it was clear that we were always rushing.  We rushed to get kids to schooland then we would rush to work so that we could rush home and rush through dinner to get the boys to their nighttime activities so that we could rush to bed and do the whole thing over again the next day.

2. Office Life.  I like my job a lot and I like it even better at home.  90% of my communication with my coworkers was by Slack even when we were feet away from each other and we're getting by without the other 10%.

3. Hair and Makeup.  Yo, I totally blow dry my hair and put on clothes for morning meetings, otherwise I air dry and stay in my jammies until noon.  I've done my hair and worn makeup twice since March 13th, once just to say that I had done it and once for my FIL's funeral.

4.

5.
See this is why I am not a Real Blogger, I can't populate a list of 5 things.

5 Things I am Grateful For:
1. My family, plain and simple.  Being under the same roof 24/7 with this crew is a dream come true.

2. Our jobs.  The job that I had before this one was truly dismal.  Someday I need to write a post about the decision to leave after just six months and how taking that leap made my entire life better.  The short version is that today I have a good job that I enjoy with a good company that has only had a minor downturn in business and is not laying anyone off, even our kitchen staff.  Sometimes I have more work than I'd like, but it's all good.  And hey, no complaints about getting a paycheck right now.

3. The kids are thriving.  One kid is able to get all of his school work for the week in done in two days (and has the grades to back it up), the other kid struggles to get things done but no more so than "real" school.  They are just so much more chill now on their own schedules.

4.  Our health.  Early in the shutdown hubs painted our bedroom and the day after we woke up with headaches and nausea.  The big headline when we got on our computers that morning was that lol headache and nausea can be early symptoms of COVID-19.  Luckily it turned out to be symptoms of paint fumes. Last week we both had An Allergy Incident that had us both asking "is it or isn't it".  I don't take one minute of this for granted.

5. My perception of time has slowed down.  I used to feel that it took about 5 minutes to get from Monday to Friday, and now time feels more real.  In many ways this is a happy time and I just want to lie back and soak it all in.

What's Next
My state was very aggressive about shutting down early and now they are being cautiously aggressive about opening back up.  Masks are a way of life and most cities are limiting crowd size, so it's not quite business as usual, but it's a start.  Our numbers are looking good and I'm optimistic that people know what they're doing.

My company is owned by a big global mammoth and they're calling the shots on WFH...from the global perspective they say September.

Cool, let's switch gears and talk about food!

Breakfasts
A few rounds of avocado toast and variations on cereal bars, fruit, and cheese.  Husband-made waffles to fuel up my long run on Saturday.

Lunches
All tacos all the time.  I have plans to switch it up next week.

Dinners
Monday: Food of the Gods.  Grilled cheese and tomato soup.

Tuesday & Wednesday: taco nights!  Plan A was that I just made one pound of beef thinking that there is no reason to eat the same meal for days like we used to do back in the bad old days when life was so hectic.  But everyone loved the tacos so much that the next night found me browning up another pound of beef for another round.

Thursday: fridge clean out night.  The boys finished the last of the tacos, hubs had a chicken and rice burrito that I squirrel away in the freezer last week, and I put together a very random bowl of rice, roasted sweet potatoes, and chicken sausage.

Friday: mandatory take out night from our local Italian spot.  Hubs got a burger (the Italian spot is good for more than just Italian), I got penne with shrimp and pesto sauce, and the kids got a cheese pizza with extra cheese...so much extra cheese that even they approved.

Saturday: mandatory burger night

Sunday: chicken parm night, individual style.  I baked up four Costco panko chicken breasts and three servings of pasta - I had the leftover penne with mine, the kids had buttered noodles, and hubs had marinara.

Grocery Store Report
Last week the big news was the meat shortage, and sure enough our Costco was down to turkey burgers.  This week they were almost fully stocked.  They didn't have any ground beef but they had frozen chicken breasts and hamburgers so we're good for the present.

And sigh, this happened today.  I've been exclusively drinking Trader Joe's coffee for more years than I can count but I am days away from running out.  Like I said there is absolutely nothing to stop me from going to TJ's except it's near work and dear God did I really used to make an hour+ round trip commute every day?

Watching
Hubs and I are still working on Jungletown on Youtube (here's a link to the series playlist on Youtube)

The boys (all three of them) had a video game night on Saturday so I kicked back with an old school double feature:

• Sunrise.  A Very Famous movie, but don't let it's pedigree fool you, it's a good one that I hadn't seen in a long time.  I remember the first time I saw it it didn't click with me right away and for the first 20 minutes or so, I was like "OK, this is the weirdest movie ever, just gonna watch 5 more minutes and then bail" but once the boat hits the water and the dog chases after it, I was fully onboard (argh...boat...onboard...did not mean to write that but I'm not about to edit it).

• Lonesome.  This is another all time favorite, one that I watch a few times a year.  Parts of the plot and the feel of the movie fall within "kissing cousins" range of Sunrise.  It's about two bitter, lonely singletons in the Big City who meet by chance at Coney Island and have the time of their lives before being separated by the crowd and oh no how will they ever find each other again?  This movie is a 1928 love story and 2020 horror flick on the social distancing front.  Apart from the brief moments when the singletons are alone in their apartments they are never more than 6 inches, never mind 6 feet away from hundreds of people.  Take a gander at the trailer and you'll see what I mean.

Reading
I finished The Third Wife by Lisa Jewell, thumbs up.  My FWIW ranking of the Lisa Jewell books that I've read so far:

• Top place tie for Then She Was Gone and I Found You.  I truly can't decide which book I liked better and oh my goodness please read them both.
• 2nd place The Family Upstairs
• 3rd place The Third Wife (ha ha, the irony).  Without going into spoilers, her other books have Something Very Disturbing at the root of their mysteries and Third Wife is more of an Everyday Thing that Went Wrong situation.  It's a good book that may be a little easier on the spleen for Sensitive Readers (a.ka. Human Beings).
• Last Place: The Girls in the Garden, I just never got fully into that one.