Weekly Round Up: Vacation Mode

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads or at least as many of the above as I can coherently tell you.  The big news is that Mega Vacay 2024 is underway!  On Friday morning I kissed Hubs and Doggo goodbye, loaded everything and anything that I could possibly need for the next week into my car, and hit the road.

Where in the World is...

I spent the weekend on an FLW rampage in northern Illinois and as I'm writing this I am Somewhere in Wisconsin.  I'll tell you more about that some other time - hopefully I'll start rolling out the story tomorrow.  In the meantime let me catch you up on everything that's gone down in the last week.

Werky Werk

I'm two weeks into the new jobby job and so far everything looks good.  When they hired me, I said that I was taking a long vacation in early June and suggested making my start date after that.  They said, oh no, it's fine, please start right away.

The comical part is that after they had me hurry up to get here, they didn't have anything ready for me.  I've spent two weeks doing close to nothing and got well paid for it.  It took a week and a half for them to get me access to the payroll system, and until Friday for them to give me access to the accounting system.  I didn't put up too much of a fuss since I knew I wouldn't be doing anything until I'm back from vacation.  I had intro meetings with everyone and have notes on what I need to do to hit the ground running once I get back.  The good news is that everyone I talked to was the same as everyone that I interviewed with - very nice, very competent, and they seem happy with their lives in general.  And yay yay yay yay yay I got exactly what I hoped for - no one starts work until after 9!  Ever since I started my old job my mornings were very cramped trying to fit my workouts in and then get presentable looking by 8.

Speaking of the old job...it's not my old job just yet!  I'm not exactly operating at this guy's level, but I am moonlighting until they hire someone new...and yes the new place knows/the old place understands that they are second on my priority list.  My boss and I worked out how to split my workload so that she does the time consuming stuff that I hated which she thinks are easy and I do the things that she hates which I think are easy.  I stayed on full salary until the end of May, and going forward I'll just get paid on an hourly basis.  I think I can keep their trains running on 10-ish hours a week.

Watching

So as you know I like cooking, but I do not enjoy watching cooking shows.  For whatever reason I find them to be stressful.  Double that for cooking reality shows.

So guess what show I just started watching?  The latest season of Top Chef.

 

Lemme 'splain myself.  When I told my SILs that I was going to Wisconsin on an FLW bender, they both said "Top Chef is there this season.  They did a whole episode on FLW".

I immediately watched the FLW episode (season 21, episode 4 if you're playing along at home).  They went to Burnham Block (where I went last month) and a few of the sites that I will be visiting this week.  They didn't go into any great depth on FLW, and their assignment of cooking FLW themed meals was...odd...but...but...but..I caught a glimpse of the cellars at Miller HQ in the promo and a few other shots of Millwaukee, and that was enough of a hook to get me to watch.

Reading

I finished The Women.

• I said before that I hated the title because of the very pukey 1939 movie with the same name.  Because of this book, The Women has been redeemed as a title.  By the end of the book, the words "the women" pack a punch.
• I also said that I was pretty sure I knew how the book would end.  I'm happy to say that I was wrong and I am almost ready to forgive Krisitin Hannah for the ending to The Four Winds...well...maybe someday.  I'm still carrying a bit of a grudge over that one. 

So in summary you can add my name to the billions of people raving about this book.

From there I picked up the next book in the Linda Castillo Amish murder mystery series, Her Last Breath and oh it is good, so good.  My only question is how the story is going to link to the title since so far the murder victims are a father and two children.

There is a mind boggling amount of driving for my trip, so I needed audio books.  I asked for (and received) lots of good recommendations, but I started my trip with previously recommended listens from my favorite readers.

• Living with a Seal: 31 Days of Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet by Jesse Itzler is a long ago recommendation from Jenny that I just never got around to until now.  The author met a former Navy Seal at an ultramarathon and was so taken with the guy that he asked him to move in with him for a month and train him.  The Seal is identified only as "Seal" in the book, but the word on the street is that he is David Goggins.  I've heard a few things about Goggins that have left me squeamish (specifically running with broken bones...what can I say, I'm just not into that), but I am interested in learning more about him, so I figured that Living with a Seal was a good place to start.  When all was said and done, it turns out that I have a new Power Couple crush.  The author is pretty interesting, and he mentions his wife Sara here and there as a tease before doing the Name Drop - his Mrs is Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx.  Anywayz, I would not be down to Live with a Seal (lol I'm thinking that day one with the 100 pull ups would have gone down a bit differently with me than with him) but it was an interesting listen.
• Next up: something completely different via Elisabeth.  I'm a few hours into Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler.  It's a nice tie in to the Linda Castillo books.  I was stunned when he dropped the stats on the Amish population: only 250,000 world wide.  That seems like a very low number and google tells me that it's now 384,000 and that the population doubles every 20 years...but still...it really seems like a small number.  Anyway, it's a very different tone than Living with a Seal but an interesting listen.

Peace out!  I'll start rolling out the story of my epic vacation soon.