Weekly Round Up: Life on the Beach

 

A weekly roundup: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  It was a routine week with an unexpected trip to the beach over the weekend.

My Trip to the Beach

The weather was good on Saturday so I hit the road and did a museum crawl in a Big City that was about two hours away.  This particular Big City borders a lake, so on the way home I went to take a peak and by shear luck I ended up in a park with a beach.

In the dead of winter!  Those aren't waves in the picture above, it's ice covered with snow.  I don't know how to describe the sensation of being bundled up from head to toe in a world of snow and ice on the beach with sand but it was wonderful and ended up being the best part of the trip.  Who knew that the beach isn't just for summer?

Back to the routine stuff....

Eats

Yes there are days when I'm fresh out of ideas and nuggets and mac n'cheese actually sounds pretty good. 

 

Toward the end of the week I had a yen and made the braised tofu from Cheap Lazy Vegan's Everyday Asian Recipes ebook.  I can't decide which was better: the first serving or the leftovers.  I'll just have to keep making it until I decide.

 

The hubs was craving chicken burritos so on Sunday I whipped out the Instant Pot and made a giant batch of chicken and cilantro lime rice for them.  While I was at it, I cooked up a bunch of shrimp for the chicken hater in our house (me).  Plan A was shrimp tacos but I changed my mind midstream and ended up with "a bunch of stuff in a bowl"" rice, shrimp, lettuce, tomato, avocado, and a splash of salad dressing.

Workouts

I finished week 6 of 10 of Caroline Girvan's Epic III.  My review so far:

• Weeks 1 to 3 were excellent
• Week 4 was noticeably easier, which fine, it can't be hard all the time but yes also it was a bit boring.
  
• Weeks 5 and 6 were...eh whatever.  Some of the workouts feel very long and repetitive, and in all honesty it's falling short of amazing.
• Come on weeks 7 to 10!!!!  Get us back to week 1 to 3 territory.  I try not to look at the workouts before I do them but I did happen to notice that there is a pushup and abs workout in week 10 and I'm telling you right now that I will be skipping that workout.  Major props if this is in your wheelhouse but I'm not there and I don't see getting there in the next 3 weeks.
  

I think that once I finish Epic III the next place to go is to Epic Heat which is 30 minute workouts.  The time constraint should take care of the repetitiveness.  I also want to check out the Advent series, which is 20 minute workouts.  If nothing else clicks I can always repeat Iron and Beast Mode.  I just want to do as much "new" stuff as possible before repeating.

Watching

Season 4 of Fauda!!!  Uh you know, the Israeli spies n'guys action show that doesn't have a good trailer so I'll skip linking it.  I'm as happy as a clam and Netflix has an extra $9.99 in their pockets.

It's taking a bit of discipline but I want to make it last so I'm only watching it on the treadmill.  Back when I was running I would have finished it in a week, and I think it will take a bit more than 3 weeks to get through it. 

The hubs and I enjoyed Knives Out a few years ago and I was hearing great things about The Glass Onion so I couldn't wait to get on it.  The hubs was dragging his feet because he'd seen one negative review.  Well finally I won out and we sat down to watch.

So who's right?  "Everyone" or The Critical Drinker? (heads up, the link is to a review with full spoilers)

Look, we enjoyed it and I thought The Drinker was a bit harsh but also...yeah it's not the greatest movie ever made.

Reading

I'd started How to Start a Fire by Lisa Lutz for the simple reason that I needed a surefire hit and she's a good place to get one.  At first I felt like the plot might be a touch close to The Accomplice (life long friends with a mysterious bond), the next night I really got into it, and then I went into a spell of missing my nightly reading time and I got the thread of the story all jumbled up and couldn't make sense of who was who.

So for now I've set it aside and I'll come back to it later when The Accomplice is fully out of my head.  The other reason that I didn't fight to stay with it is that Something Else came along.

So you may remember that just over a week ago I toured a Frank Lloyd Wright house and that I'm pretty obsessed?  And then I came to learn something about his personal life.  The spicy tomato there is that in 1909 he hit it off with the wife of one of his clients and they both left their spouses and lived together.  NBD today, very big deal back then and he lost a lot of business because of it (oh he was fine, back in those days if you got shunned by American society you just went abroad and lived your life the way you wanted to live it).  The big shocker is how the relationship ended.  My lips are sealed but safe to say that if someone was going to write a novel about a famous architect who ran off with a married woman they would not imagine let alone chose that as an ending.

Well someone wrote that book!  It's called Loving Frank and I am IN TO IT.  Yes I know how it's going to end but I am fully along for the ride.  Right now I've just gotten to the point where spouses have been left and they're having a blast in Europe.

See you next week!