Weekly Round Up: The Leftovers

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition we revived our leftover Thanksgiving turkey, I tried a book series that I'd previously had on my "no" list, and I found a good podcast.

Eats

A few days after Thanksgiving I parked a mound of leftover turkey in the freezer.  If I'm remembering correctly, I did the same thing last year and tossed it sometime around Easter.

This year had a happier ending.  I brought the leftover turkey back to life in a turkey pot pie - our standard chicken pot pie recipe, just with turkey.  It was a big hit with the fam.

It was a big hit with me because I got the satisfaction of seeing it used up, enjoyed my time playing in the kitchen with the pie, and then had a non-turkey dinner that I enjoyed - airfried chicken sausage, leftover rice that was hanging out in the freezer, and peas.

Workouts

Not much to say this week.  I'm in more of a grove with the pushups again.

Watching

Nada.

Reading

I finished my reread of A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, who is one of my all time favorite authors.  This usually makes the list of his best books, and I do like it and I'd pick it as a great introduction to this author, but it's never been on my Top of the Top list for him.  I've always preferred the kind-of-similar The Far Country.  On this reread I think I know the reason why - there are a couple of details about The Far Country that are more "me" but also the second to last chapter of Alice drags on way too long.  Shute takes a detour in the story that goes on forever and only adds one tiny plot point that was needed to wrap things up.  It kind of felt like his editor took a long lunch that day and just passed that chapter on to the printer without reading it.  Overall it's a minor criticism of an excellent book.

Anyhoo two weeks ago when I asked what everyone's favorite go-to rereads were, Sue Grafton's Alphabet series came up in the discussion quite a lot, and I take notes about things like that.  I have to confess that once upon a time long long ago I dated someone who hated to read but said that the one exception was the Alphabet series, so I filed it under "well if that guy liked it there's no way I'm ever reading these books."  Well guess what, sometimes a blind squirrel finds a nut.  I'm reading A is for Alibi, and the first night it was just OK and every night thereafter I've been looking forward to reading a little more each night.  We've got a winner here.

Podcasting

I don't talk about podcasts much here, because I feel like by the time I get to something it's already yesterday's news.  But for once I'm ahead of the curve.

When you're sitting around with your dad watching NCIS and he mentions that he changed his name a long time ago and that there are probably people still looking for him but asks you not to look into it any further...and yes you google that anyway.  So far I've only listened to the first episode of My Fugitive Dad because that's all that has been released and I can't wait to hear more.  What a wild, wacky story.

So is that it?

Yep that's it for right now.  From here things go one of two ways:

• Ima work on a lil' blog experiment and if it pans out you'll be hearing a lot from me for the next week.  I might need until Wednesday to get a groove worked out but once the train starts rolling it's gonna roll.
  
• If the lil' blog experiment doesn't work out I'll be back next week and explain myself.

Peace out!