Weekly Round Up: a Birthday and a Kitchen Mystery

 

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This week we celebrated a Very Special Birthday with a tiny cake and solved a kitchen mystery.  In my downtime, I hit the Christmas movies.  I predicted a wow, a dud, and a huh, and ended up with a wow, a WOWWWWW WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS WAS SUCH A GOOD MOVIE, and as predicted, a huh.

Eats

We have a very precise schedule this time of year:  Thanksgiving, Hubs's Birthday, and Christmas Decorations.  Last week was Thanksgiving, and this week was the Hubs's birthday, and this weekend was Scout Camp/Christmas decorations.

We'd had a lot of goodies with Thanksgiving, so I decided to make Hubs a tiny cake.  My favorite source for such things is the blog Homemade in the Kitchen (yeah yeah I know the url says something else but Homemade in the Kitchen is the blog header).  I made a yellow cake with chocolate frosting.  The recipe is designed to be made in a 6" cake pan, which I do not have, but I've learned from past experiments that a 4" x 8" loaf pan also works.  IMO the recipe yields 6 pieces of cake.

I don't know how you're "supposed" to do a sprinkle border, but here's how I did mine.  

Step 1: cover everything that you don't want sprinkles on with waxed paper.

Step 2: cover everything on the cake that doesn't have waxed paper with sprinkles and then remove waxed paper.  The sides were pretty bald, so the solution for that is to angle the camera away from them.

Step 3: stick a candle on top, sing Happy Birthday, and then eat a slice of tiny cake.

The Great Kitchen Mystery of 2023

As you may be aware, my husband and stepsons go to Boy Scout camp once a month, which means that once a month the kitchen gets littered with odds and ends after they return.  One such odd that showed up around the time of last month's trip was this oval gasket thingy.

After they unpack and clean, most but not all of the odds and ends get packed up again.  The oval oddity lingered in the kitchen.  I took the high road and ignored it for a few weeks...no I don't love having my kitchen trashed with Boy Scout debris but it's the reality of our lives right now.  So I was shocked, shocked when Hubs asked me what it was.  I mean clearly it's a piece of Boy Scout debris.  But hubs denied ever seeing it before in his life.

We laughed about it and made a pact to throw it away, which according to Murphy's Law was the key to finding out the purpose of the oval thingy.

In seemingly unrelated news, Stepson #2 is on a special engineering track at high school which means that he leaves the house at 7 each morning and rides to an out of town school with another student.  He's started drinking tea, which he takes with him in a travel mug.  A few days after Hubs and I made the pact to throw out the oval thingamajig, #2 mentioned that the gasket from his travel mug was missing.

Look (1) I have never thought to take the gasket off the mug on those times when I end up cleaning it and (2)...these two shapes are not the same.

But by some miracle neither Hubs nor I had followed through on our plan to trash the gasket so the two were reunited and are living happily ever after.

Workouts

Strength stuff: I'm back to Youtube for my Caroline Girvan fix for the next few weeks.  I'm working my way through the full body workouts from Epic Endgame.  This is the one that ends each workout with 100 reps of an exercise, which is something that I have mixed feelings about.  The execution so far is much better than it sounds: the first workout was 2 x 50 bodyweight squats (yay!) and the second was 4 x 25 of various ab exercises (did not do because...oh yes I don't do ab exercises but if it were anything else 4 x 25 sounds achieveable).

She has a new Advent program on the CGX app, so after Endgame I'll probably pair up an upper and a lower body workout from the new series.  I really like just doing 3x per week full body instead of doing body splits more days a week.

Strength stuff, Pushup Edition: taking last week off did me no favors.  I did pushups twice this week and I'll jump back into the full swing of things next week.  It's just very hard to keep my full body engaged instead of just bumbling through.  I'm down but I'm not out.  Hey fitness Gods, I need a little more flexibility from y'all.

Running stuff: more 2 mile runs have gone down since we last talked.  Given that the weather will not be doing me any favors soon, the question is if I will move the 2 mile gig to the treadmill or go back to power walking and pick up the running on non-icy days/next spring.

Watching

I saw three movies this week: one during the week, one on Friday, and one on Saturday.  It just so happens that they were all Christmas movies, which was not planned.

The first one is familiar territory, though I had non-Christmas reasons for watching it.  It's a movie that I couldn't stand as a kid but have come to appreciate as an adult: A Christmas Story.

My reason for rewatching it was that the Hubs and I have been watching a 70's TV one season wonder called Kolchak: The Night Stalker which was the inspiration for The X-Files and stars the same actor who plays the dad in A Christmas Story.  Sure enough, he had the range to play pre-Mulder and the ultimate dad.

BTW I guess it's kinda a spoiler, but when I was a young 'un my memory was that Ralphie DID shoot his eye out, so the first time that I saw it as an adult I was very surprised to see that this was not the case.

Let's move on to our next movie.  I'd seen it a long, long time ago and if I'm being honest the only reason that I watched it is because the movie that I really wanted to see wasn't available online so I had to hunt down a physical copy and in the meantime I settled for another Christmas themed movie with the same actor.  I kind of remembered Christmas in Connecticut as being a sappy mess, though I couldn't exactly remember what it was about.

Expectation: a sappy, dated 1940s movie.

Reality: OMG what a gem this was!  We're in WWII and a ship is torpedoed, leaving two sailors adrift for 18 days.  One of the sailors is a total foodie (note: offhand I can't remember another 1940's movie about a foodie) and in his delirium he starts daydreaming about his favorite food columnist who he imagines is kind of a Martha Stewart type.  The sailors get rescued, and through a series of events the sailor is given his dream wish to spend Christmas with his favorite food columnist at her home in Connecticut.

Except that his favorite food columnist is a single lady who doesn't cook but is good friends with a restaurant owner who is the one coming up with the food ideas for her column.  So how is she going to pull off posing as a married mom food columnist for the holiday?

The next night after a trip to the library I saw the movie that I'd really wanted to see instead of Christmas in Connecticut.  I guess we can call these two movies "The Barbara Stanwyck Christmas Collection".  Remember the Night is a bit of a rarity, and as best I can remember I saw it in junior high.  The only reason that it got back on my radar was that it was featured in a Youtube movie channel that I watch in the video "5 Moody, Sad, and Deadly Christmas Movies".  Spoiler that it's merely moody and a little sad, but not deadly.  Here's the link to that video cued up to 3:38 which is where they start taking about the movie (about two minutes of chatter).

I feel like the screenwriters dreamed up the most improbable plot that they could come up with, turned to the censorship code that was in place at the time to give them their ending, and then brought in two great movie stars to work their magic.  Barbara Stanwyck is a shoplifter who is arrested right before Christmas.  Fred MacMurray is the prosecuting DA who strategically gets the trial delayed until after New Years because he knows that otherwise the jury will acquit her just to get a head start on their Christmas break.  A series of highly improbable events ensue that result in him taking Stanwyck home to Indiana for the holidays, you know, as all DA and defendant duos usually do.  They have a lovely holiday season, but hey that censorship code of the time that said that if someone committed a crime in a movie it's not enough for them to feel bad, they have to pay for it because otherwise folks would think that it's possible to just commit crimes with no penalty because they saw it in a movie.  The ending is open to interpretation.  In the Youtube video they take the position that it's not a happy ending.  I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I will say that it's not your typical Hollywood ending. 

The pros of this movie are:

• Two HUUUGE stars that I'd watch in anything.  Stanwyck and MacMurray are better remembered as the murderous duo in Double Indemnity, and here they're just normal folks with problems.
• This movie gets you on an emotional level.  It's moody but sweet.
• Improbable story or no, points #1 and #2 are so well done that you're willing to roll with it.
  
• We get to see the joys of driving from NYC to Indiana in the days before the highway system.
  
• They go back to NYC via Canada and they have a way easier time crossing the Detroit/Windsor border than I did this summer.
  

So I'd say it's a movie worth watching twice in your life.  But maybe put it on your list for after you've seen Christmas in Connecticut.

Reading

Still happily chugging away on A Town Like Alice.

Something Fun

Puzzle season has started, with a different twist.

I love doing puzzles and Hubs loves doing puzzles, but we don't have a lot of time to do puzzles together.  But when your puzzle is an advent calendar that comes in increments of 48 pieces, suddenly we have time to do a puzzle together.  Thanks for the idea Stephany (link to the puzzle on her site).