Monday, January 17, 2022

Weekly Round Up: No Surprise

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition we ate a lot of tacos, I rewatched a few Great Epics on the AFI Top 100 List, I've jumped on the Wordle band wagon, and to no surprise 50% of my household got COVID.

COVID came and went in our house this week.  Basically EVERYONE has had it in the last month, so it was no surprise that it was our turn.  Hubs was the first to come down with body aches, extreme fatigue, fever/chills (though he never had a temperature), sore throat, and congestion.  Stepson #2 followed close behind with less severe symptoms.  Both of them are back to near normal now.  Another family member who was at our party last week got it as well.

Stepson #1 has an immune system of iron, so it was also no surprise that he didn't get it.  I am either lucky and/or I made my own luck by getting the booster in mid December.  Or possibly we were both asymptomatic...tests are pretty scarce around here and in retrospect it might have made more sense to test the two of us instead of the folks who had symptoms.

The nice thing about having COVID right now is that I knew that my fellas would be fine, and I was never very worried about getting it.  The only adjustment that we made was going back to pre-vaccine living conditions.  The patients stayed home, and stepson #1 and I limited our trips to the outside world to the essentials (grocery store for me, school for him and yes that's per school guidelines) with our KN95's.  

My take away is that I will continue to stay up to date on my vaccines.

Eating

We started the week with leftover birthday tacos (shown above) and ended the week with chicken fajitas.  I made what should have been a meal plus two nights of leftovers for the fajitas, but with two big boys in the house, we have about half a meal's worth of food left so I'm back to the drawing board for next week's dinners.

Workouts

It was nasty cold this week, which made being outside very uncomfortable due to the dryness.  If I told you that breathing outside hurts right now I think you'll get the idea.  I burrowed in on the treadmill and it looks like I'll be there for the foreseeable future.  I'd gotten into the habit of ending my runs with a quarter mile at 5% incline.  I wouldn't say that it was getting easy, but it was getting to the point where I felt like I could do more, so I bumped it up to 6% which was coming out at 75 ft of up, so my next move was to stay at incline long enough to get to 100 ft for each run.  As long as I remember and as long as I don't talk myself out of it, I'll keep doing that as my finisher.

Watching

The Unspooled podcast spurred me to get in some AFI Top 100 rewatches:

Gone with the Wind.  I wasn't planning to rewatch this since I didn't have the best memories of it and you know, there are a lot of other things that a person can do in four hours.  But the Unspooled episode reeled me in, so I knocked out about an hour on the treadmill and about three hours on the couch.  Thoughts:

  • The first 15 minutes of the movie come on very strong "this is a Great Big Movie Epic and you will be wowed and you will disregard all of the British people with southern accents" which had me rolling my eyes
  • The next 2 hours and 45 minutes are shear genius
  • The last hour is a huge melodramatic snoooooooze that is a complete turnoff
  • Final summary: I'm torn between "thanks for a terrific 2 hours and 45 minutes!" and "OMG I will never get that hour of my life back".
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre a.k.a "Badges?  We don't need no stinkin' badges".  No, no, that's not the line.  Say it with me: "Badges?  We ain't got no badges.  We don't need no badges.  I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!"

 

It kills me to say this, but I would rather have watched the last hour of Gone With the Wind over again.  I have to rate Treasure in the same class as All About Eve...just because a movie has a great one liner doesn't make it a great movie.

My final visit to AFI land was Vertigo, which I watched on the treadmill.  It's the highest rated of the four Hitchcock movies on the list, but I personally would describe it as an acquired taste.  Like coffee, I've acquired the taste but I can understand how some people might not care for it.  As far as I can remember my first impression was "I didn't need to see Jimmy Stewart as a perv" and every subsequent watch has been "ooh I get it, I like it, but half of the time Jimmy Stewart makes me uncomfortable".


 My personal ranking of the AFI Hitchcock titles:
1. Rear Window
2. North by Northwest
3. Psycho
4. Vertigo
(My ranking of Rear Window over NxNW is 100% based on my mood right now...if you ask me tomorrow I might give you a different answer.  And yes I will be rewatching both of these movies very soon.  That's my final answer on the placement of Psycho and Vertigo).
 
And if I had to rate all of Hitchcock's movies I would have about 20 films tied for the #1 slot.  But that's a topic for another post;-)
 
Finally, I have done everyone a great disservice by not mentioning this before, but if you want to know what really goes on in my house, it's clips of 8 Out of 10 Cats on Youtube.  This is a hubs discovery (maybe 6 months ago?  Honestly I can't remember a time when it wasn't a part of our lives but it's been recent-ish) and anytime that we want to kill 10-20 minutes in front of the TV, this is our go-to.  Here's one example of the insanity:


If you want something a little more spicy, google clips of Jimmy Carr comedy shows on Youtube.

Over the weekend hubs and I did a puzzle together and we graduated from clips to full episodes of 8 out of 10.



Reading

I am <this close> to finishing The Disaster Artist and yes yes yes I recommend it.

Also Worth Mentioning

I am All In on the Wordle bandwagon.  And not ashamed to be a 6/6 kind of girl.


16 comments:

  1. So glad the Covid infection was a flu-like event! And even better that you dodged it! I sometimes wonder whether we had it or not, too. Neither of us ever had any symptoms... I agree, it would be nice to know!

    I like the idea with the incline on the TM runs. A nice challenge that you have given yourself. I wonder how far you will get?

    I have seen Wordle popping up in the social media but couldn't be bothered to find out what it is. I had a look at your link and I couldn't get away from the page without first solving my first puzzle. Hooked!!
    Have a great week, Birchie!

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    1. Oh yes once you've clicked the Wordle link there's no going back. With only one puzzle a day it's not much of a time commitment, so I'd say it's a fairly harmless addiction.

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  2. That's a fun looking puzzle! I love those kind. We just did a similar one a few weeks ago.

    Sorry you guys had Covid, it seems like everyone has had it in the past month. Even the people who have had booster shots! But, it seems like vaxxed people get fairly mild symptoms and recover fairly quickly, so that's something.

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    1. The puzzle was perfect - not too easy and not too hard. I agree, all of the data that I've seen indicates that the vax cuts COVID down to a nuisance instead of something devastating.

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  3. I watched the entire carrot in a box clip and am still smiling. So ridiculous! Very glad to hear that your family got through Covid without too much hassle.

    And yay for Wordle! I saw a post about how if it takes you a couple of tries to get it, you're a good guesser. But if it takes you six tries to get it, you're an excellent deductive reasoner.

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    1. I'm glad that you liked the clip! That's just a small sample of the ridiculous insanity.

      I'm glad to hear that I'm an excellent deductive reasoner. Yes, that must be the reason;-)

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  4. Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that COVID has hit your household. It sounds like you're in pretty good spirits about it, so I'm happy to hear the vaccinations are doing their jobs.

    OMG! Taskmaster was a gateway for me to all kinds of British shows, including 8oo10CDC, Would I Lie to You, and QI. I think Jimmy Carr is a fantastic host and if you haven't watched The Big Fat Quiz, I think you'd enjoy that as well. (Also, Taskmaster. Brilliant.)

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    1. Thanks for the tip! I'll report back on The Big Fat Quiz - with a name like that it has to be good. Have you seen any of Jimmy Carr's stand up? We've been dying over it.

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  5. So glad you dodged the 'rona! I'm sure your booster helped you avoid it. I'm seeing a ton of it at work. We wear our N95s all day long and I'm hoping that i don't catch it.

    I've seen all 4 of those Hitchcock movies--Rear Window was one of my favorites too. Have you seen The Birds?

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    1. I've seen The Birds! My question for you==>have you read the short story that the movie is based on? The story is completely different from the movie but it's wonderfully terrifying and well worth the read.

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  6. Well I hope you've continued to be healthy this week! Yes, you might have had Covid but were asymptomatic- I know a lot of people who got tested only because they knew they were exposed- not because they had symptoms- and were positive. But either way- my son and I both did not get the booster and we were kicking ourselves. #1 on our list of how to make next Christmas the Best Christmas Ever (to make up for this one) is DON'T GET COVID. So yes- we'll be getting whatever booster is available in the summer or fall.
    Hope everyone is feeling good!

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    1. I know a ton of people who got the booster and still got sick, but I think that most of them got it earlier this fall so it wasn't as "fresh" as mine. But heck, there is so much that we don't know about the virus and vaccines so there's no way to say.

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  7. I am so sorry you all got Covid (well, or some at your house) but I am glad everything went okay and I hope you continued to be asymptomatic/not infected. We've been pretty good at not catching it (yet) but who knows. It seems like you can do everything right and still get it.

    That puzzle looks like so much fun!

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    1. Thanks San! Our COVID numbers were insane but seem to be dropping now.

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  8. Me here with my late - per usual - comment...
    * I remain awed by your dedication to movies, and particularly those I would consider classics (or, ahem, "old" :>). I am... not a movie person. Also not a TV person. There's nothing wrong with them -they're just not for me (with the exception of sports...seriously).
    * Sorry about COVID rearing its ugly spikes in your household. So happy that it was a short-lived and less severe mini-outbreak. I suspect we'll all get it at some point, given how things are going.
    * OK, true confession time, for your neverending amusement. I don't get Wordle. As in, I honest to goodness looked at that site and could not figure out what I was supposed to do. Try one word per line? Try one letter per line? Fill up all 5 spaces on the top line and see if I hit any letters, then modify as needed on the 2nd line, and so on? (Clearly, I stink at games.)

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    1. There's no time limit on comments! Yes I try to say that I don't like "old" movies specifically just "good" movies but there is a lot of overlap there. Would you believe that I hate watching sports?

      "I don't get Wordle" or "tell me you're not on Facebook without telling me you're not on Facebook"...I think the number of Wordle posts on my feed outnumbered my state's COVID cases and now both are dying down. Don't worry, you can still lead a full and happy life without Wordle;-) But it's the last thing you said, try and guess the 5 letter word and modify for the 2nd line until you get it or run out of attempts.

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