Weekly Round Up: I Wanted More

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  A theme of this week is that I tried some things on the food and book front that left me...well, see title of post.  But I also found some goodies to make up for it.

Food

Last Sunday I made a chicken stir fry for the fam and this veg stir fry from Sarah's Vegan Kitchen for me.  The veg stir fry was excellent but...I wanted more sauce!  It was barely adequate the first night and the noodles sucked up all the sauce into the leftovers.  I'm noting that for next time.  Stepson #1 asked to try them and liked everything except the spice so I can see making this for the boys (with 2x mild sauce) some time.

Oddly enough this Sunday's dinner was also inspired by Sarah's Vegan Kitchen, though you'd never know it.  In this video she made Salisbury Steak, which I remember as that weird stuff they used to serve in my grade school cafeteria that actually wasn't that bad.  It's actually possible that I haven't had it since grade school?

Anyways, I made a non vegan version c/o Recipe Tin Eats.  What can I say, everyone liked it, and it made me feel fancy without being fancy.  I stole the potatoes from Sarah's video (well my riff on her idea - thin slices with a light coating of butter and a sprinkle of seasoned salt baked at 400 on parchment paper until brown and crispy.  I tossed some frozen broccoli in the air fryer to round out the meal.  The only thing that went wrong is that I didn't pat the "steaks" together firmly enough so they broke apart a little bit.  I also wasn't patient enough to brown them like the photos in the source recipe which would have made a better look.  Notes for next time.

Workouts

After cutting back on cardio last week, I was ready to take it on again this week.  Suddenly the thought of doing 2 minute running intervals on the treadmill is manageable.

My current plan is:

M: weights and 20 minute treadmill walk

T: 20 minute treadmill run

W: weights and 20 minute treadmill walk

H: off

F: weights and cardio of my choice.  I have more time on Friday mornings so this is more likely to be some kind of run and more likely to be outside if weather allows.

S: some kind of longer run but not that long.

Su: off

For this Saturday's run I returned to my running roots.  Way back when I first started running I mapped out a two mile out and back route.  I always ran the first mile, and then I let myself take walking breaks in the second mile as needed/wanted.   That defies every running plan out there since you're supposed to start slow and then speed up and finish strong, but it was what I did back then, and actually I kinda liked it.  I only walked very briefly in the second mile up a bridge.  Again, I'm not 100% sure what my game plan with running is.

Watching

Friday was a really tough day (more details to come - still processing).  The hubs and I had a consolation dinner and settled in front of the TV.  We needed laughs and lots of them.

That is why God made the wonder that is Airplane II.  Is it better than Airplane!?  Of course not, it's just a recycled story with recycled jokes and some one ups on the original.  It's a perfect "I need a laugh movie".

 

Reading

I hit a DNF streak and broke it by going back to an old favorite.  Let's dish:

Happiness Falls was a DNF at 30%.  There is something about this author that just doesn't work for me.  I couldn't get into the characters and found myself not caring one way or the other what happened to the dad.  Right after the DNF I heard the Sarah's Bookshelf Podcast episode where she and Catherine reviewed their fall book picks.  Sarah loved Happiness Falls, but Catherine also said that she DNF'd...at 96%.  Now look, there have been times when a book isn't doing it for me so I'll speed-skim to the end to find out what happened but reading a book and walking away at 96%???????

Next up was a Dick Pic novel.  The Art of Scandal is about a politician's wife who gets a dick pic from her husband at a party...and instantly knows that she was not the intended recipient.  I liked the setup and I liked the bit of the first chapter that I sampled on Libby before checking it out, but by chapter three I found myself needing more than a dick pic.

In the meantime an old favorite popped into my head.  If you've heard of the author Nevil Shute at all, it's probably for his books A Town Like Alice, No Highway, or On the Beach.  He wrote a lot of books from the 30's to the 60's, and while of course some are better than others, I've liked pretty much everything I've read and a handful of his novels are on my all time favorites list.  He was an engineer and his wife was a doctor, and he wrote what he knew.  His writing style is very direct and technical on the surface, but underneath there's a serious emotional pull that you wouldn't expect from an engineer.

The book of his that I picked up from my shelves is The Chequer Board, which is set in post WWII England.  It's about a man who learns that he has less than a year to live as a result of complications from a head injury that he sustained in the war.  His life is empty and his marriage is miserable.  He decides that there's no reason to keep working and starts thinking of things that he can do with his remaining time.  One of those things is finding out what happened to the other patients who were with him in the hospital when he got his injury.  I won't say any more, but what he finds solves the problem of the empty life and miserable marriage (spoiler?).  This is one of those books where the last sentence PACKS A PUNCH.

While I know the last line of the book and know the story, I had forgotten so many of the details which makes it such a pleasure to come back to this book.  One thing that I've been reflecting on lately is that our reading tastes change, and some of the All Time Beloved Favorites of my youth don't cut it any more (lookin' at you Ayn Rand).  But Shute is an author who's stood the test of time for me.  I started reading him in middle school so that's a lot of time for an author to hold up.

What's the furtherest you've ever read in a book before DNF'ing?  I think I've gotten past 50% and every once in a while I'll skim to the end.  Did you love or hate or have you not read Happiness Falls.  When was the last time you read Ayn Rand?