Weekly Round Up: The Days are Long

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This was a week of long but delightful days with our new puppy.  In other news we tried a new stir fry, I've got workout musings, and a read-the-book-or-see-the-movie went down.

Spoiler alert: I will be discussing the book/movie On the Beach.  I can't figure out how to do it without spoilers, but I've kept them as vague as I can manage.  Skip that section if you don't want the deets.

Doggo Report

We are now one week into our new lives with Doggo.  ICYMI from last week, she is a five month old Shepherd mix who has lived in shelters for three months.  In adoption circles, there is the rule of 3-3-3: the first three days dogs are overwhelmed by their new environment, during the next three weeks they settle in, and after three months they feel fully at home.  I'd say that Doggo pretty much cleared the "3 day hump" after two nights with us and is well on her way into the second 3.

I don't have previous puppy experience to compare, but as expected she's pretty much full time hands on.  Having a puppy is not for the faint of heart!  Right now the days are a little long, but they are also delightful and this is temporary.  One day we will have a Grown Up Dog again and we'll look back on the time that Doggo was small enough to curl up in our laps.  

Right now either Hubs or I are always with her during our waking hours, with both of us being there as often as we can.  At night she goes into her crate, and she usually needs a bathroom break sometime in the night.  Hubs takes most of the wake ups.   I take the first outing of the day when I get up so that Hubs can focus on daddy duty, and then I workout while Hubs takes over.  Work is busier for me in the mornings so Hubs takes the first half of the workday and I take the afternoons.  I'm on evening duty so that Hubs can get all of his night things done, and we're both around at the end of the evening for a bit.  This weekend we synced our schedules so that we both had a balance of time out of the house and time with Doggo. 

We met with a trainer.  We've made a lot of progress on the sit command, we're working on crate training, and we'll take it from there.  Eventually she'll get more crate time during the day, though not a lot since we're mostly home, and once she's a big girl she'll have full run of the house.

Again, speaking from my limited experience, I'd say that late January in a mild winter is the perfect time to get a puppy because there's just not a lot going on at this time of year.

Eats

I tried a new recipe on the fam.  The last time that we got Chinese food, the Hubs changed it up from his usual moo goo gai pan to a stir fry with brown sauce.  In an attempt to recreate it at home, I made Recipe Tin Eats Real Chinese All Purpose Stir Fry Sauce, which she nicknamed "Charlie" as in Charlie Brown since the sauce is...very brown.

The only thing that I wasn't sure about was how to scale the sauce to the amount of stir fry that I was making, so I just made a full batch of the sauce.  I also didn't want to dump a quarter cup (!) of corn starch in the sauce and count on it not clumping up, so I simply thickened the sauce on its own with one tablespoon of corn starch.  That gave me the nice thick sauce that I wanted with no surprises.  I grabbed a bunch of Costco stir fry veggies and did chicken for the guys and fried tofu from the Asian market for me.

This was a winner because there's no spice (well at least there isn't if you omit the white pepper as I did) so it was good for the bland palates of the house, but there was still enough complexity that it appealed to me.

Workouts

Wow, having a puppy does put quite a spin on things!  Normally I get up a 6 to start my workouts and the rest of the fam gets up at 6:30.  Well, that doesn't work right now because if I got up at 6 then I'd just be on full Doggo duty until 6:30.  Hey I don't mind sleeping in until 6:30!  Her first visit outside goes pretty quickly.  The only complication is that I had early meetings on Monday and Wednesday and so I only had time for cardio and not strength...yes even though my strength work is only 15 minutes if that.  Chances are good that I'll be able to figure out how to get the 15 minutes in during week 2 of puppydom, and if I can't, well, I'll get back to it after Doggo settles in.

The auxillary strength stuff that I'm doing outside of my normal workouts is going well.  After four solid months of making sure that I'm getting in at least 3 x 10 pushups three times a week pushups are finally starting to not be that big a deal.  As previously recounted after one month I felt stronger, after two months I didn't feel like I'd made much progress, after three months I felt that I was ahead of where I was at month one, and now at the end of month four I feel like I've leveled up again.  Ima keep at it, and if I really feel sassy I'll start doing "push up tricks" like one legged or variations on pushups.

Pull up wise, I've got a month of just hanging on the bar twice a week.  At the beginning I was doing 3 x 10 seconds and now I'm doing 3 x 30 seconds...well let me clarify that "seconds" actually means "counts".  I can't figure out where I would put my phone or a stopwatch where I can see if from the bar, so I just count it out slowly.  Whether my counting to 30 is actually 30 seconds who knows, but it's longer than me counting to 10 seconds.

For Feb my goal is to continue the two days of bar hangs and I'll add a third day of holding myself up at the top of the bar.  Stay turned to see how it turns out or if this ever ends up in me actually being able to do a pull up...a girl can dream.

I had to prioritize my time out of the house this weekend thanks to Doggo but I found time for a social event/Trader Joe's rampage on Saturday and a hike for the hiking challenge on Sunday.  The hike was one of the longer ones at 6.2 miles, which has to be a distance walking record for me.  Back in my running days I loved running 10k, I definitely never thought that I would walk this distance.

Watching

Pro tip: if you and your spouse are spending a lot of time together with a new puppy, it's a great opportunity to rewatch Seinfeld again.

Read-the-Book-or-See-the-Movie

I finished the book On the Beach this week, so naturally my next move was to see the movie.  In case you're not familiar, it's a 1957 novel set in 1963 in the aftermath of a nuclear war where human life has been mostly wiped off the earth, with the spread of the fallout expected to eliminate all life in 9 months plus or minus three months.

The spoilerish part that I will tell you is what I suspected from page one: there is really only one way that an "aftermath of nuclear war" book can end.  I noted that the author seemed somewhat distant from his characters, which is not his typical style, and my best guess is that he did it because, um, well, you know how it ended.  This was an incredible book if you're in the market for an End of the World read, and let's face it, we all need that once in a while.

I was very intrigued by the casting of the movie.  Big Names: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins.  The principle characters of the novel are a young married couple with a baby, a submarine captain, a young woman who's drinking a lot to cope with the whole end of the world thing, and a young scientist.  There was no question that Ava Gardner would be the Woman Who Drinks, and I imagined that Anthony Perkins would be the young scientist.  By process of elimination that meant that Gregory Peck would be the sub captain, but what was Fred Astaire doing there?

I only got Ava and Gregory right.  Anthony Perkins was the young husband.  The role of the scientist was rewritten to be an older man so that was Fred.  But wow, this wasn't the "Fred and Ginger" Fred that I know so well.  This was "Fred Astaire proving that he could do more than everything that Ginger Rogers did but not in high heels or backwards".  Instead of just playing himself like he did in all of his musicals, he was actually acting and playing a character.  And doing an incredibly good job of it!  It was as amazing to watch as any of his dancing.  For the rest of the cast, I don't think that I've seen Anthony Perkins in anything except Psycho and he absolutely did an incredible job here as well.  There's no need to tell you that Gregory and Ava did good work cuz that's what they always do.  I appreciated that her character was older in the movie.

The actors were incredible and the movie was largely faithful to the book, with a few tweaks here and there.  For example, instead of being sent to investigate a mysterious radio signal in Seattle the sub crew went to California.  The movie has great shots of a completely deserted San Francisco, and I'm guessing that's a more familiar sight than Seattle (at least it is to me).

I just have a few quibbles.  At the time it was perfectly legit in movies to have American actors speak in American accents no matter what nationality the character was.  I wish they would have taken that route instead of Anthony using an Australian accent and Fred pretending to be British, but at least they didn't lay on the accents too thick.  The other quibble is with the death of the race car driver. In the book he takes a euthanasia pill, which is the recommended exit method once the radiation poisoning sets in, but in the movie he commits suicide by locking himself in his garage with his car and going the carbon monoxide route because...I can't really figure out why they made that change.

So which is better - book or movie?  I'll go with the book but the movie was worthy and it did a better job of going deeper with the characters.  Meanwhile I've had my fill of End of the World stories, so it's time to move on to something else.

Reading

In Joyce Porter rereading, I'm well into Dover Two.  I read this book for the first time when I was 12, I've read it one million times since, and I'm absolutely gobbling it up and loving it now at the age of 48.  That's serious book staying power.

And in other news...it's time for Round Two of the Cool Bloggers Book Club!!!  I started My Brilliant Friend this weekend.  I read the first week's assignment in less than an hour, so this is very doable.

Peace out!