Weekly Round Up: Life in The Treehouse

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This week we lived in a treehouse for a few days, I tried a few recipes from Cheap Lazy Vegan and learned a Game Changing Tofu Technique, became obsessed with a trashy reality show, and am raving about a good book.

The Treehouse

Spoiler: no injuries or serious damage occurred as the result of the following Dramatic Incident

The big exciting event of the week happened on Monday afternoon.  The boys had just gotten home from school and the hubs and I were both in our respective offices.  We heard a tremendous crack and felt the odd sensation that happens when something very large falls on your house.  I looked out the window and saw leaves and branches flying in every direction.

Stepson #2 "A tree fell on the house!"

Hubs (on a Zoom call in his most professional voice):  "I'll be right back.  I think a tree just fell on our house."

We all ran downstairs.  We looked out the front and saw nothing out of place.  We looked out the back and saw a bunch of branches on the ground.  Hubs and I darted out the back door, just as the Voice of Wisdom (stepson #2) said "Is it safe to go out there?"

Findings: a very large tree branch had come down on our roof.  When I say "very large" I mean that the tree is about 10 feet away from the house and our house is 50 feet wide and the branch spanned the entire width of the roof.  Several smaller branches were still coming down, confirming #2's observation that it was not the smartest move to have gone out on the side closest to the damage.  Hubs and I walked around to the front where all of our neighbors had gathered after hearing the noise.  Hubs called our insurance and then dialed tree services until he got someone to come out.  The first company said "yeah it's gonna take a crane to get that off" and left, and the second company said "yeah it's gonna take a crane to get that off, we'll be back on Thursday".  They came back the next day to do some preliminary cleanup work and told us that the branch appeared to be stable and was unlikely to fall off the house, so we got to kick back and enjoy a few days of treehouse like views from the upstairs windows of our house.

Anyways, that's all there is to the story.  The tree service came back with the crane and we no longer live in a treehouse.  We took some wear and tear to the roof and gutters, but nothing major.  We're waiting to see if our insurance will pay to have the rest of the tree cut down per the tree service's recommendation.  The presumed cause is the severe rainstorm that we had last week that did a lot of tree damage in our town.

Food

I tried out a couple of things from Cheap Lazy Vegan last week with great success.  Just a reminder of where I'm coming from, I am not and do not plan to be vegan or any other style of eating that has a label BUT I do like good food, I'm not always the biggest fan of meat, and I am cheap and lazy.

Exhibit one: Caesar salad dressing.  I'm a sucker for a good Caesar salad and I love this.  It tastes incredible and it's not as heavy as regular Caesar dressing.  So far I've had a few salads and made myself a wrap with soy curls for a picnic over the weekend.

Exhibit two: Vegan California rolls from her e-book Everyday Asian Recipes.  I got all of her ebooks when they were on sale recently - there are some repeats from the blog but also a lot of original content as well so I feel that it was a good purchase.

The bad news about this one is that I've tried and failed to make sushi in the past and I got the same result this time.  I just couldn't get the roll to cut nicely so I ended up deconstructing it and making it into a sushi bowl.

But the good news about this one is that it was still delicious in bowl form and the tofu prep technique is life changing. OMG why has no one told me about grated tofu before???????????????  Seriously WHYYYYYYYYYYY??????????????????????? 

Simply put, I had never heard about grating tofu with a box grater before and as far as I can tell it's the internet's best kept secret.  Or maybe it's a conspiracy of Things That the Meat Industry Doesn't Want Us to Know.  There are so many more applications for this technique than sushi filling and you'll be hearing more about this as I use it more and more. 

Workouts

I had a few good runs and a few bad runs this week, so same story different week.  

Monday: OK weather, set out to do an easy effort run because that's what runners are supposed to do and found it very difficult.

Tuesday: a bit on the warm side.  Speed work with 2 x 1200 fast, quarter mile recover.  I had planned to do 3 sets but wasn't feeling great in the first rep so I scaled down.  Overall this was a good workout.

Thursday: best weather day of the week, 6 x 0.10 mile fast/0.20 recover.  This workout always feels really good.

Friday: a bit warmer, did a "whatever" run but I did the polar opposite of Monday's run and pushed myself a bit and felt terrific.  I really do think that the "do your hard days hard and your easy days easy" approach is flawed for slower runners.

Saturday: dang it, I just do not learn.  The internet said it was too warm but poking my nose out the door said that the temperature was delightful.  And so it was for the first four miles and then everything train wrecked from there.  I did 6.25 miles in total and the last two miles were awful.  Note to self: I need to stick to the treadmill on days like these.  These runs are not doing anything for my fitness.  Psychologically I think that I am reinforcing my hot weather running phobia by continuing to expose myself to these conditions.  I would be far better off training in comfortable conditions and then sucking it up and dealing with whatever weather conditions race day throws at me.

Next week is going to be super hot, so my job is to embrace the treadmill.

Watching

I have gone to new levels of trash in my reality TV viewing and I love it.  What do you do when you want to get married and your partner doesn't?  You go on a reality show where you swap partners with other couples in the same situation of course. 

From the same folks who brought you Love is Blind we have The Ultimatum.

Reading

I'm about 60% into Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus aka the book that everyone is reading right now.  It's so good that I don't want to finish it.

What about you?  Ever had something fall on your house?  Any good new eats, vegan or otherwise?  Summer running stories?  Trashy reality TV reports?  Good books?