Weekly Round Up: Dark Clock

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition I'm going to tell you about a new lunch obsession, some workout chatter, a 1970s cult TV series that I just learned about, and some book stuff.

The title of this week's post is c/o my boss.  English is not her first language, though she certainly speaks it better than I do.  This year most of the rest of the world changed time a week before the US, and her summary to me on Slack last Monday was: "I hate the dark clock".  Girlfriend, I know exactly how you feel.  I'm here for the extra hour of sleep and the earlier light in the mornings, but grr to the darkness.

I would also like to document that the first Christmas decorations in our neighborhood this year went up on Friday, November 3rd.  In our house we don't put up any Christmas stuff until after my husband's birthday which is sometime in late November/early December but we do enjoy seeing stuff go up on our nightly dog walks - the early decorations help to break up the darkness.

In the meantime I am using my extra hour of sleep to sit down and write a blog post on Sunday instead of waiting until Monday night, which is my target posting time.  I think my schedule has settled down a bit, so with any luck I'll be able to keep this up.  I've got grand plans to do some extra posts this winter with previously untold tales of my travels, so let's see what happens here.  Blogging is somewhat like exercising in that it feels better if you do it regularly.

Eats

My current lunch obsession is (surprise) c/o The Cheap Lazy Vegan and it's a Buddha bowl.  I kept making it until I ran out of the dressing.  If I manage to make more dressing today then this will be my lunch on most days next week, and if I don't...I'll move on to another lunch obsession.  My changes to the posted recipe are:

• I went back and forth between making it with soba noodles and rice noodles, both are good.
• Yes my bowl includes edamame, but you can't see it because it's mixed in with the noodles.  I thaw the frozen beans in the noodle cooking water.
• My dressing is made with peanut butter instead of almond butter b/c that's what I have and also what she used in the Youtube video.
• I skipped adding nuts b/c...I forgot.
• I skipped adding cabbage b/c...there are a ton of other veggies in there.
• Tofu c/o the airfryer so that it could cook hands off while I was chopping veggies.
  

Anyways, this requires a bit of hands on time to make the dressing and prep veggies, but once that's done it just takes a second to cook up the noodles on each successive day.  You can eat this with hot or cold noodles, and because of the weather I went with hot.

In other dinner news, the hubs and I went out to The World's Best Italian Restaurant this weekend, and he had the bright idea to bring home one of their pre-made lasagnas for family dinners.  I can't make anything that's as good as this.  I'm not sure of the exact cost of making our own lasagna that's twice as big vs this one that gave us two nights of dinners for $20...but I'm thinking it's well worth the extra money.

Workouts

I made some noise last week about increasing my running time and but it turns out that my mouth was writing a check that my body didn't want to cash.  For my four indoor weekday workouts, I could only bring myself to add in the run portion of my run/walk cardio hits once.  On Saturday I did an outdoor run walk that was a ladder of 0.25/0.5/0.75/0.5/0.25 mile run with a quarter mile walk in between each running set but ugh everything except the quarter mile runs just felt wrong.  Strangely enough on Sunday I had a bit of extra energy so I did a 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 minute ladder with 2 minutes of walking between each run set.  It was a bit easier but still...it's all hard.  I dunno what to make of this or what my goal is at this point.  Stay tuned.

Watching

A cult 70s TV show that until recently I didn't know existed or that I needed, which consists of two made-for-TV movies and one season.  It was the inspiration for The X Files and stars the actor who played the dad in A Christmas Story(!).  When you're an intrepid reporter and it's obvious to you that there's a vampire loose in Las Vegas but everyone is going all Scully on you and not wanting to print your story...

On Halloween the hubs and I watched the first movie, The Night Stalker and over the weekend we saw the second movie, The Night Strangler.  The next time that we get couple's time in front of the TV, we'll start the regular TV show, which is Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Reading

Last week I told you that I was 50% of the way through a book called Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent and had mixed feelings about it.

This week I'm here to tell you that OMG STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND IS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS THAT I'VE READ THIS YEAR AND I'VE READ A LOT OF GOOD BOOKS THIS YEAR...but also that I would not recommend it for everyone.  Here's how it all shook out:

• I had a quibble that the lead character was nearly identical to Eleanor Oliphant and part of the plot was similar to another book that I can't tell you about because it's a spoiler.  I said that I would have liked to see this author run with an original idea...well, that's exactly what the last half of the book was!  She started in known territory and took it to an entirely new place that was stunning.  Bravo!
• The writing and the readability of this book is off the charts good.
• And I also stand by what I said last week that the mystery part of the book was about a subject that I personally don't like to dwell on (see Mrs. Modern Darcy's You Don't Want to go There).  I skipped/skimmed these parts of the book.  I avoided Going There as much as possible, and as far as I know what I skipped was summarized elsewhere in the book in a more palatable form.

So if this makes sense, I would not recommend this book to my mother but I might recommend it to you if you like well written, highly readable books and have the stomach for some unpleasant subject matter.

No sooner had I finished Sally Diamond than the book that I really wanted to read in the first place came in.  I'm about halfway through Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb.  It took a bit longer to rev up than his previous book, The Violin Conspiracy, but he got there and I'm on board and riding the train.  So far I like Violin much more than Symphony, but that's nothing against Symphony.  It just means that Violin really wowed me.  

Symphony is about two musicians who are working on transcribing a recently discovered lost score by a famous composer of the early 20th century.  The further they get into their research the more evidence they uncover that someone else may have written it.

That's all I've got for now!  Happy Dark Clock everyone;-)