Weekly Round Up: A Hill of Beans

 

A weekly roundup: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  To steal a line from Casablanca, this week amounted to a hill of beans.  Both in my meals and in my work situation.

Eats

My latest food crush was inspired by this Cheap Lazy Vegan video (of course, I mean when was the last time that I got food inspo from any other source?)  The black bean toast was the first thing to catch my eye.  I didn't want it as a breakfast but I thought that it would make a good lunch.  I used a full can of black beans and scaled up the rest of the ingredients accordingly.  I also threw in the last spoonful out of the jar of Trader Joe's crunchy jalapeno, onion, and lime that I've had sitting around forever but otherwise I followed the recipe.

I thought that it would make a good lunch?????  OMG it made an incredible lunch!  If you've ever felt that vegans can come off as being a trifle smug, it's because they know how to do avocado toast.  I may never have it with eggs again.

Next up was the chickpea "egg" salad.  One of my local grocery stores sells "small" cans of chickpeas, so I scaled the recipe down to match (yeah yeah I scaled up the first recipe and scaled down the second, it's how things work out).  I skipped the celery and black salt since I don't have those, and just put a pinch of tumeric in since I don't really care one way or the other about making a bright yellow "egg" salad.

 

The next day I took it one step further and made a killer sammie.  You're looking at a toasted Everything Ciabatta roll from Trader Joe's, the chickpea salad, avocado, pickled onion, and lettuce and tomato.

Workouts

I moved forward with my plan to accelerate the rest of Epic III and finish that sucker this week.  The good news is that the remaining workouts look like they're going to be hard but doable.

The best workout anecdote of the week is c/o stepson #2.  The boys both had strength training for gym this fall, and they've been good about keeping up their routines at home since the class ended.

Stepson #2 had been trying to meet up with his friends after school, but for a variety of reasons they haven't been able to get everyone's schedules to line up and make it happen.  This week the issue is that one guy wanted to go the gym on their meetup day.  When stepson #2 was telling us about it at dinner, his summary was, "No one goes to the gym on Wednesday.  Everyone knows that gym day is Sunday!  It's the Lord's Swole-y day". 

Watching

I finally finished season 4 of Fauda and (1) it was so, so good and (2) it ended with one heck of a cliffhanger.  The word is that they're trying to get season 5 released before the end of the year and I am here for it.

It's very rare that both boys will watch an entire movie with us these days, but hubs found something that had them glued to the screen.   Zoolander! We previously saw it on Christmas Eve without the boys a few years ago and it was even sillier with them.

Reading

The very aptly titled Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson.

Jobby Jobbing

Hey it's been a hot minute since I complained about my job on the bloggy blog!  My game plan was to stay put for the duration of my boss's maternity leave, which will tentatively be next fall.  That gets me work experience, a few projects that I'm interested in, and another chunk of company stock.  I mean, really my job is solidly OK, as long as you ignore the fact that it consistently drains me every day.  Every time I go on LinkedIn I see more and more layoffs, so hey isn't it so good to have a job right now?

Well it would be except for the past few weeks there has been a voice in my head telling me to update my resume.  I keep seeing a parallel back to the spring of 2021 when I knew my job was over but I wanted to stay to work on a special project and how that ended up biting me in the heinie.  I keep feeling restless and my index finger keeps feeling itchy as I've scrolled past the apply button on a few postings that I've seen recently.  Rachel is writing stuff like this and I'm like, what am I hanging around here for?  I can already put the extra bullet points from doing the boss's job on my resume, the projects aren't that interesting or that unique to the company, and the stock payout is figured into my asking salary for the next gig.  Yeah it's rough on the boss's boss if I leave before the boss gets back but she'll live.

Anyhoo, we have an all company meeting once a month, which happened to fall this week.  I usually half listen and fold laundry during these meetings, but for some reason I found myself wandering around the house which led to me sitting in front of my "resume updating computer" (a.k.a. an old laptop that has my personal copy of Word on it).  It didn't take long to tweak up my resume and my LinkedIn profile and I patted myself on the back for getting it done.

My attention went back to the meeting.  The company usually does merit raises in March, and sure enough the CEO speaks up: "based on market conditions we've determined that there will be no merit increases this year".

What are the odds that the "no raises" announcement comes out the second that I finish updating my resume?  Way for the universe to give me another sign that it's time to move on.  If it's all the same to them, I think I'll check out them thar market conditions for myself.  This may end up in deciding to stay with the company like it did last spring, but Ima get back on the hunt.

That's all I've got.  See you next week!