Weekly Round Up: A Family Shenanigan

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  We have A LOT of stuff to talk about: I'll start with our family shenanigan, then talk a little food and workout stuff, and then I HAVE A BOOK THAT I NEED TO TALK ABOUT - for both good reasons and bad.

This weekend my family went to Chicago to attend the Wedding of the Century.  Between my husband and his four sisters there are 12 children, and as of Saturday, SIL#2's kids are all married off.  BIL#2 quipped "Two down and 10 to go".  The age range is 15 to early 30s with everyone too young and/or single so it's going to be a while until we have another big family wedding.

I was going to take my family on a Frank Lloyd Wright bender while we were there, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that we just wanted to hang out with fam and enjoy the wedding.  We passed the time as follows:

• Friday: drive to CHI, stay in a hotel within walking distance of the wedding.  This wasn't planned but all of the other relatives chose the same hotel for the convenience of the location.
  
• Friday night: pre-wedding party not in walking distance of the hotel, which everyone ubered to.  The amazing part of having teenagers is that when you're in a Big City and they want to hang out with their adult cousins and you want to go home ==> you can just up and leave them with their adult cousins.  It's a very different stage of life than the last time a cousin got married when the boys were in grade school.
  
• Saturday morning: have a lazy breakfast at the hotel.  By coincidence most of the family was eating at that time.
• Saturday mid day: the hubs and the stepsons and I started wandering around and ended up on the riverwalk.
  

• It turns out that there is another city down there.  We got gorgeous views, found a museum, and made use of the playgrounds (yes all four of us were up in this thing).

• When it was time for lunch, we took our pick of the many restaurants on the riverwalk and ate at Beat Kitchen.  I had a thai chicken peanut pizza - I mean of course I picked a lot of the chicken off but the pizza was really good.  The rest of the family was equally delighted with their meals.
  

• Saturday afternoon: chill out at hotel
• Saturday evening: as mentioned, it was the Wedding of the Century!  Congrats and love to K & N <3. We made merry and danced our hearts out before staggering to bed at midnight.
• Sunday morning: by coincidence the whole family wandered into the hotel breakfast room at the same time for one last get together.  Checkout time finally came and we drove home.

The End.

Eats

In non wedding news, I've been crushing on a new breakfast.  I know this isn't exactly revolutionary, but it's what I'm into now.  I was watching a Sarah's Vegan Kitchen video on Youtube and she had a scramble with a vegan eggs, spinach, mushrooms, pico de gallo, avocado, and toast.  I thought "I'll have what she's having".

Well...my version of what she's having.  I take a few mushrooms and spinach out of the freezer and microwave them right quick, add them to two eggs (non-vegan), and scramble them.  I haven't been able to get my hands on a ripe avocado to save my life so that part got left out, and after the first time that I had it I became indifferent to adding salsa.

In family dinner news, our first meal back from CHI was brinner.

Workouts

A month ago I told you that I was taking the last 100 days of the year to focus on pushups - meaning that I committed to doing pushups three times a week (specifically Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) for the last 100 days of the year.  My goal was to do 3 sets of 10 but I had to relearn to crawl before I could relearn to walk, so it started with 5 sets of 6 pushups, then once in a while I could do a set of 8 here and there and then a set of 10.  For a while I could do one set of 10 and then a set of 9 good pushups and one dud pushup, followed by shorter sets to get to my goal of 30.  Sometimes I would just drop down to sets of 6 pushups so that I could focus more on form.

Guess what?  In the last week or so pushups have gotten a lot easier.  I can consistently do them in sets of 10 which shorter rests (a couple of minutes) between sets.  I've also been "messy" with counting the number of sets so that I'm doing more than my goal of 30 pushups==>the reason that I'm messy once I've hit my goal is that I don't want to get caught up in whether I did 36 or 42 pushups in a day, I just want to do a lot of pushups.

There's a problem with pushups being easier though.  Easy pushups = easy to be sloppier with my form so I need to pay even more attention to that then ever.  I think that's where I've gone wrong with pushups in the past - I got to the point where I could do them, and then did them with poor form which is kind of the same as not doing pushups to start with.

So that's where I am 1/3 of the way into the experiment.  My goal is to (1) keep doing 'em, (2) be strict on my form, and (3) continue to be messy about counting my sets so that I'm getting more than the goal.  I think at a point I'll be able to progress to fancy stuff like triceps pushups and diamond pushups but that's for the future.  Right now I just need to keep doing what I'm doing.

There's nothing new to say about the rest of my strength training, I'm still doing Caroline Girvan full body workouts 3x per week.  I feel like I want to stick with that for a while, but I also think about doing the Iron 2 program on the app.  Part of the answer is going to be when she announces what's next after Iron 2, which has to be soon since I think it's in week 8 of 10.

On the cardio side, the later sunrise and dropping temperatures have put me back indoors for the 20 minute run/walks that I do after strength.  I had to swallow my pride and go back to one minute run/two minute walk for the treadmill.  Lordy, there's nothing like giving up running and then going back to make you realize how long a minute is on the treadmill.  Yesterday was the first day that I felt kinda sassy on the mill so maybe I'll attempt 90 second running intervals tomorrow.  I said maybe.

Watching

Not much to report.

Reading

Alrighty, when we left off I'd just read and adored The Violin Conspiracy.  I had just started reading it when my hold for his next book, Symphony of Secrets came in on Libby.  I pushed it back a week so that I could finish Violin, and lately when I push things back they've been coming up again right on schedule.  But sigh my luck ran out and Secrets didn't come through.  Finally I got to the point where I wanted something anything to read...which is how I came to my current book.

I have mixed feelings.  There are things that I love and things that I hate about this book.  I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT!

The book is Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent.  She was a guest on the Sarah's Bookshelf podcast a few weeks ago.  I'll share what they shared about the plot, and what you learn from the first few sentences of the book: it's about a 40 something year old woman with some kind of neurodivergent condition - she lives with her adoptive father and pretends to be deaf so that she doesn't have to talk to people.  Her earliest memory is her 7th birthday.

The book starts with her dad dying at home in his 80s.  He made a quip to her about putting him out with the trash when he dies and she takes everything literally so...she ends up getting a lot of attention.

When they started describing the plot on the podcast, I said (to myself): "Wait a minute I've read this book before and it's called Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine".  As you know, I had kind of an issue when I read The Maid last year and felt that it was a bit of a carbon copy of Eleanor.  The Maid was a good book and now obviously I have some good things to say about Sally but Eleanor hit it first, you know?

Later on in the episode the author mentioned that she knows Nita Prose, the author of The Maid.  In some way Nita was involved with the writing on Sally.  I forget the exact title, it wasn't editor but it was some kind of literary coaching.  Huh.

I also picked up that there was something very dark in Sally and that a "happier" ending was written for the US version.  That left me on the fence whether I wanted to read it or not.

Fast forward to a few days ago when I'm looking for something to read and Sally is available on Libby so here we go.

What I want to tell you is that I got way stronger Eleanor vibes from Sally than I did from The Maid, but also the story started out so readable and so excellent that I quickly got to the same place that I got to with The Maid - it made me raise my eyebrows and made me say hmm but a good book is a good book and I was enjoying it.

And then we got to the dark stuff.  Which is a carbon copy of another book that I read last year.  I won't say which book is to save the spoiler, and also it is not the only book in the world on this topic.  I'm seriously wondering if Nugent read Eleanor and the mystery book and said "I wonder what would happen if these two books had a baby?"  Because that's literally what Sally is.  I mean, it's fine, it's not plagiarism, but also...I would like to see this author run with an original idea.

Modern Mrs. Darcy wrote an excellent post called You Don't Want to go There that I've cited before.  Her point is that we all have our "stuff" that we don't like to dwell on and especially don't like to read about.  I like a little dark and a little suspense but I have a line and the dark stuff in Sally is crossing it.  So I've settled for skipping the dark part and drinking in the present day Sally story, which is enjoyable - so basically I'm reading every other chapter.

So here's what I'm saying 50% of the way in about Strange Sally Diamond:

• Great writing
• Compelling main character
• But compelling main character that's way too close to Eleanor Oliphant
• The dark part of the story that's way too close to this other book/s
• My You Don't Want to Go There line has been crossed
• A few quibbles with plot points that push the realms of believability.
  
• And yet I'm still reading

TBD how the final 50% shakes out - if it gets dark to the point where I'm skipping everything then it could still be a DNF.  Or I could end up loving it. 

One More Thing Before We Go

Yay Team NaBloPo!  I'm not doing it this year because I don't have the bandwidth but I am (selfishly) enjoying the goodies.  Hit up my girl San to see what it's all about.

What do think about books that have close plot points/characters to other books?  What about a book that has close plot points/characters to TWO other books?