Weekly Round Up: Let's Not Go Places

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This week a winter storm meant giving up the weekend that I planned for the weekend that I was meant to have.

We have quite a bit to talk about just for the normal "weekly round up" and I've got at least two posts' worth of other stuff to dish on, so I think we're looking at a Monday - Wednesday - Friday posting schedule this week.  The extra topics are planners and cleaning.  Hey come back!  I'll do my best to make the cleaning one interesting.

Today let's talk about my winter weekend at home, epic food, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the hot new documentary that rubbed me the wrong way, and books books books books books books books.

Heads up: I will be discussing (and dissing) a show called You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment so skip the watching section if you don't want the spoilers.

This was Boy Scout camp weekend.  When the rest of my family takes to the woods I look at the calendar.  If it's March through November, I go somewhere fun.  If it's December through February I stay home.  The weather is likely to be bad in these months, and a lot of the tourist attractions up here are closed in the winter.

However, there are exceptions to the "everything is closed in winter" rule and wow Indianapolis you have got it going on!  I went down the google rabbit hole and came up with a long list of things to do...so much that I think I will need more than one visit to get through it all.  And oh my, Airbnb prices were super sweet and there were lots of fun places to stay.  Granted it was going to be extremely cold, but also granted that as long as cold was the only weather issue, it looked like a fun weekend.

On Tuesday the weekend forecast was no drama except for cold.  The places that I had tagged on my Airbnb wish list were starting to get snapped up, so I made my move and booked an apartment.  I felt pretty smug that I was going to squeak in a fun getaway in the dead of winter instead of sitting around at home.

The reality is that with each passing day the forecast got worse.  School was cancelled and there was a travel advisory for Friday.  The Airbnb wasn't refundable, but (1) it wasn't a lot of money so I didn't have a lot to lose to start with and (2) I've been dabbling in the world of credit card travel rewards and one of the perks of the card that I used is travel insurance.

Current status: I filed a claim with the credit card which will take a few weeks to settle, and then the Airbnb host unexpectedly refunded the cleaning fee, so even if the claim gets rejected, I have less cash out of pocket.  Indianapolis will still be there when the weather is better, and I feel pretty smug that I had a cozy weekend at home instead of hassling with a long drive in winter.  Lesson learned, I will never book another Dec-Feb trip any further in advance than the day of.

Eats

One of the items on my Goalz list for 2024 was to make 20 new recipes for my my own (non-family) meals, with the specific note that I've been craving Indian food forever.  Well, well, now that I was going to be Home Alone on Friday and Saturday it was time to do something about that.  I hit the internets in search of a butter chicken recipe (without chicken of course since I hate chicken).  Google hooked me up with Nora Cooks.  I was browsing before lunch on Friday, and her recipe for curry chickpea salad also caught my eye.  (1) it looked good, (2) it gave me a chance to use up another stalk of the celery that I'd gotten for the beef stew that we had last week that was most likely headed for the trash, (3) I'd just come across a jar of chutney that I'd gotten from Trader Joe's a while ago and had never gotten around to using, and finally (4) it fits in with my Currypalooza theme.  (1) was enough of a reason and everything else was gravy.  I headed to the kitchen ASAP.

The only downside is that of course beans are very filling, and the amount of the salad that I needed to fill out a wrap kept me full long past dinner time.  Or maybe it's an upside that it ended up being both lunch and dinner?  The solution is that next time I will have this as a sandwich and not a wrap.  But it was quite delicious and I do believe this will be part of my regular lunch rotation.

Now about that butter not-chicken...I made it on Saturday night.  It was good but not amazing on Saturday but when I heated up the leftovers for lunch today...oooooooooooooooh.  We've just made the leap to food porn up in here.  The flavors did not "marry", they had a full on orgy.  My recommendation is to make this a day ahead so that you get the full party effect.

Speaking of porn, Costco had a wicked looking chocolate mousse cake so I snagged that for the fam, but of course I had a slice on Saturday just to make sure that it was good enough for them.  It was.

 

Workouts

The usual, nothing notable to report.  Originally I was planning to do zero hikes for the hiking challenge due to travel and the cold but by Sunday it warmed up enough to get out there.  Here's a picture of the tree trunk that I climbed over on this week's hike.

Watching

Let's talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Now look there are only so many action movies that I can take, politically speaking I would not have voted for him, and I wouldn't care to be married to him, but otherwise I'm a fan.  The Unspooled podcast did an episode on Terminator 2, and as soon as I started listening I found myself with a craving.  We've seen both Terminator 2 and True Lies within the past few years so what else was there to get into for my single girl weekend?

Friday night: the insanity that is Twins.

Saturday night: as of 1994 men were officially able to do everything that women can in Junior.

Any rate, both of these movies were delightful and I do believe that Kindergarten Cop is next on my list.

Speaking of Twins, I was hearing a lot of chatter about a Netflix documentary called You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment.  The premise is that 22 sets of identical twins were given either a high quality omnivore diet or a plant based diet to follow and then had a bunch of health assessments done before and after.  Between hearing about this show and the fact that Netflix had the movie Twins, it was enough to get me to sign up for them again.

The entire run time of the show was 3 hours and 18 minutes so it was a quick watch for my hibernation weekend.  

TL&DR: I have serious "beef" with this show.  If you don't want spoilers, this is to place to skip ahead to the books section.

Nice things to say: the premise of the show was really interesting.  It focused on only four of the 22 sets of twins, so I assumed it was going to be a reality show type of deal.  It was an eight week program, and for each of the twin sets, one person was assigned a plant based diet and the other a high quality omnivore diet.  For the first four weeks everyone had pre-prepared meals so there was no guess work or effort required, and everyone worked with a fitness trainer.  For the second four weeks everyone was on their own.  The end results were that the plant based folks had better health improvement overall, but the omnivores gained more muscle.

So what wasn't to love about this show?  Um, quite a lot.  The show set up such an interesting premise and then BARELY FOCUSED ON THE TWINS AT ALL.  Did any of the plant based crowd have trouble following the diet?  Was the omnivore food radically different from what the other folks were eating?  How did everyone adjust to their new fitness routines?  So much stuff that my enquiring mind wanted to know and the show barely addressed any of it.

Most of the runtime focused on the environmental damage caused by meat farming, cruelty to animals, and a lawsuit filed by residents of North Carolina over a Big Corporate Pig Farm that was spraying farm waste over their neighborhood.  I'm not saying that these aren't important issues, but it had nothing to do with the twins or whether eating plant based vs omnivore is better for personal health.  My gut feeling is that this was the show that the producers wanted to make, but someone said "yeah no one's going to watch a show about Big Corporate spraying pig feces on poor people in North Carolina so ya gotta put another spin on it".

The show also spent quite a bit of time talking about a big fancy restaurant in NYC that rebranded itself with a vegan menu and focused on a few plant based food companies - again there's nothing "wrong" with this but it didn't have anything to do with the twins and at times I felt like I was watching an ad for these companies.

Back to the health study aspect.  I missed the point of doing four weeks in controlled conditions and four weeks of "follow the plan as best as you can" conditions.  At the end it was revealed that one of the sets of twins strayed from the the eating and fitness plans for the final four weeks so what was the point again?  Also since one of the findings was that the omnivores put on more muscle, is it asking to much to tell us the calorie and macro differences in the two diets?

Anywayz...big thumbs down.  This was such wasted opportunity to have made a really good show and such a poor way to bring light to important issues.  Just so you know where I'm coming from, my parents have followed a low fat vegan/gym rat lifestyle for many years and the quality of life and health that they have at 80 compared to their parents is remarkable.  Just sayin' that I'm pretty sure that there is a lot of evidence in favor of plant based eating==>but you'd never know it from this show's junk science approach.

If you're interested in these issues I'd recommend getting the "damage" stuff from anywhere else and watching the Cheap Lazy Vegan and Sarah's Vegan Kitchen Youtube channels for the "how" of going plant based.

Reading

In this phase of my life reading is about quality and not quantity, so I am stunned to see the number of books that I've put away only halfway through January.  Some of the audio books that I've listened to were that good that I listened to them on my hikes, so that accounts for the hours there, and a lot of the books that I've read are mysteries that are quick reads, but still...I swear I'm only getting about half an hour at most at bedtime.

Here are this weeks updates:

• Overall I really liked Pete and Alice in Maine and I do like an "open to interpretation" ending BUT...I think I would have liked the book better if I had skipped the last chapter.  Still, I'm giving this a thumbs up and I'm going to be thinking about it for a while longer.
• Overall Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life gets a huge thumbs up.  I'm in a situation where I've realized that I have enough money and can stop working but I'm staying in the game for another year and a half (1) because it's a huge decision, (2) to shore up my post-work plans, and (3) because duh people in my situation have a hard time walking away from work so I'm really just stalling.
• One quibble I have is that early in the book the author told a story about the time that he was young and broke and slaved to save $1,000 and his boss made fun of him for it because apparently putting short term effort into building an emergency fund means that you don't have faith in your future earnings ability.  Hi, just speaking as someone who was once young and broke, having extra cash in the bank was a life saver many times.  The premise of the book isn't that you should risk everything to Live Now, so it was odd that he chose to include this story and came back to it so many times.
• Other than that, I'm on board.  Lots of food for though with this one.
• I started listening to Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman on Saturday.  Between time in the car for errands, a walk, and puttering around the kitchen I was surprised that I ended up listening to over two hours of the six hour book.  Unfortunately after being a third of the way in...I can't really tell you what this book is about and I haven't really gleamed anything that's useful to my own life so....I would actually still be listening to it but my hold for a Hot Book on Libby came in so I've set it aside for the time being.
  
• What book did I set Four Thousand Weeks aside for?  Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is Matthew Perry's memoir.  To understand why I chose this book, you need to know that the Hubs bears a passing resemblance to MP and my MIL was very taken with Friends for this reason.  We heard about MP's death at my niece's wedding this fall and that's when I put my Libby hold in.
  
• For before-bed reading I started C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton and so far it's my favorite book in the alphabet series.  Bravo!  I'm already 75% of the way through.
• I really don't need anything else to read but...Jenny got me!  She read the first three books of the Dover series by Joyce Porter, which is one of my all time favorites.  I'm not going to let her have all the fun!  I've been reading 1-2 chapters of Dover One and then switching over to Sue Grafton for my bedtime reading.  According to the blog, the last time that I read the series was in 2018, so I guess I am due for a reread.

 Peace out!  Have you seen You Are What You Eat?  Folks who've read the Alphabet series, which were your favorites?