Weekly Round Up: You Never Forget

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  They say that once you learn to ride a bike that you never forget, and this week I'm here to present my personal 32 year research study on that.

But first, let's talk food!

Eats

Alfalfa sprouts have been on my radar lately.  I finally remembered to get some, and then whipped up yet another batch of chickpea salad (recipe inspo here, though at this point my "recipe" is blending up a can of chickpeas with a dash of mayo, dijon onion, and pickle relish).  I put it in a wrap with avocado, pickled onion, some lettuce, and the sprouts.

Workouts

The boring update: week 4 of 6 of round 2 of Iron is done. 

The more interesting update is one that I never expected to give, which is that I am now a bicycle owner.  From the age of 16 when I started driving until now I had zero reasons to ride a bike, so I didn't.  There was that one time on vacation a few years ago where I wobbled around on a bike for a few minutes to settle an argument about whether I could theoretically ride if I had to but that's been it.  Last summer when I started doing local travel, I found places where I can't take a car but need to cover more ground than I can do by foot, so I started thinking about it.

As with all other life decisions, I waded through a mountain of information and thousand dollar price tags before finally settling on a budget model that fits in my car.  I wasn't going to buy the bike until closer to the summer, but it popped up on Amazon Warehouse for a price that I could not refuse, so I swooped it up.  "Bikie" arrived a few weeks ago.

I took Bikie out on the streets and found that yes I can still ride a bike in spite of a 32 year break.  But wow, it was so much harder that I remembered.  It was a chilly day and a 20 minute ride left me sweating profusely and my speed was 10 minute miles...yes a big improvement over walking but still...given my problems with running in the heat I wondered if I would end up with the same issues with biking.  Oh well, what did I expect from going the budget route?  It was good enough for what I needed.  The weather got miserable again and Bikie sat in the garage until this weekend.

The weather was gorgeous and on Friday night the hubs suggested getting out of the house for a biking date.

Hubs wheeled our bikes out.  "Oh wow, your tires need air" (What can I say?  I rode the crap out of my bike when I was a young 'un with zero maintenance.  I don't know about these things).

Wouldn't you know it, biking is suddenly easy again.  I don't need to huff and puff, my sweat level is down to a "glow", and my speed is magically in the 6 minute mile range without even trying (current PR 5:50!!!).  We had a nice little 6 mile biking date and the next day I took Bikie out to a state park and headed toward the nature preserve.  I put on 10 miles without even trying and got some epic bluebird photos.

I'm not sure how much biking will figure into my regular fitness routine, but the hubs and I will get out for more biking dates and I'll be putting it to good use as I roam around this summer.

Watching

I knocked back a few more episodes of The White Lotus.

For Part II of our Friday date the hubs suggested a rewatch of The Big Sleep, which had come up on his radar recently.  We'd seen it together early in our dating days, so about 10 years ago, and of course I went on a Bogie/Becall bender last fall and reread the book then as well.  It's the tantalizing combination of a great movie with a plot that has a few holes.  It comes so close to making sense and we were getting tripped up on different elements...but when we put it all together we still couldn't quite solve it.

Reading

I'm still on a roll!  I had a lot of driving time this week, which was enough to finish off an audio book and put a dent in the next one.

I finished I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy and it's still a rave.  One way to think of this book is as something of a cousin to Crying in H Mart.

• Both books are "my mom died of cancer".
• Both books have complicated mother/daughter relationships, it's just that H Mart mom is normal, and Glad mom is AWFUL.
• Swap the Korean/American experience in H Mart for Hollywood childhood stardom in Glad. 
• Both books have a food focus.  Korean food in H Mart/eating disorders in Glad.
• Final word on Glad: I'll take the cheap shot and say that yes I'm glad her mom died.  I'm also very glad that she wrote this book and I can't wait to see what she does next.
  

Now let me tell you about the current audio book.  Last year I heard a rave about "that book about the thing" on  Sarah's Bookshelves podcast, which I forgot about until recently when a dim memory came surfacing back...I was meaning to comb through her archives to find it, but the stars aligned so that I didn't have to.  Engie just reviewed "that book" which I now know is Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels by Paul Pringle. 

One thing about audio books is that I don't like them to be too long.  When I saw that I'm Glad My Mom Died was 6 hours, my reaction was "yes!  That's perfect!".

Bad City is 10 hours long, I'm 4 hours in, and I don't want it to end, so that's my way of telling you how I feel about this book.  It's a true story that starts at an upscale LA hotel.  The hotel manager gets a call that a guest has overdosed, and when he goes to the room to check it out, he finds a young woman passed out, drugs everywhere, and a creepy old man who doesn't want him to call an ambulance.  That's just the first few pages.

But wait there's more!  I've got a non-audio, fiction read.  Jackie and Maria: A Novel of Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas is, duh, about Jackie Kennedy, Maria Callas, and what they had in common, which was Ari Onassis.  It's a nice juicy, gossipy novel about two people that I'm fascinated by.  I started like I always do, slow and controlled and taking my time to enjoy the story and then suddenly I gulped the final half of the book down on Sunday.

That's a wrap for this week!  Has anyone else taken a big long break from biking?