Weekly Round Up: March!!!

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Since we last talked:

• February is finally over!!!
• I've been in a food slump
• We had an epic family party
  
• I did the Fight for Air Climb
• I watched more Seinfeld
• I read a bunch of books

Let's catch up!

Eats

Man, February was a loooong month considered that I spent a week of it in Florida.

In lieu of having cooked anything worth talking about,  I would like to give you the happy news that my Adult Nephew the Rocket Scientist got engaged!  We love his fiancee, and were all too happy to get together for a family party.

My assignment for the party was to bring a mountain of guac.   This was a somewhat high pressure assignment, since I needed a lot of perfectly ripe avocados.  I bought a bag of rock hard avocados at Costco the Saturday before, thinking that it would take most of the week for them to soften.  Much to my dismay they were pretty soft by Tuesday.  I put them in the fridge, and as the week went on I found myself really starting to sweat.  But against all odds all six avocados were perfection at the party.

 

Workouts

The first thing to tell you is that right before the time change I was living large.  The end of February meant that sweet spot where the weather was decent and there was daylight in the morning.  I abandoned the treadmill and went back to the world of outdoor run/walk.

The next thing to tell you is that I did the American Lung Association's Fight for Air Climb with mixed results.  As a reminder, this is an event that is held throughout the country where participants get to raise money for the American Lung Association and then get to experience first hand what it's like to have breathing problems by climbing up the stairs in very tall buildings.

This is one of the 50-ish floors:

Good things to say:

• It's a very moving event
• It's fun to take on the challenge of climbing a bunch of stairs 
• I can't say if it's the same for every climb, but ours was the tallest building in the city, and the views from the top floor were everything
• I also can't say if this is the same for every climb, but the event included very cheap registration for next year's climb, so I'll be doing it again in next year.
• Google tells me that the ALA is a top rated charity, with low overhead and a high percentage of their dollars going to the cause.
  

Bad things to say:

• This is a chance to support and to experience a cause.  I took the first few flights a little too fast, and before you know it, I started coughing and I couldn't stop.  I took a break after flight 40 to try to get it under control.  I was stuck with the cough for the rest of the day.*  Physically it was a rough experience.
• The ALA is a little spamy.  It took a lot of unsubscribing to get my inbox under control again.
  

*I'm starting to wonder if I have asthma?  I don't wheeze but this isn't the first time that I've gotten an uncontrollable cough from exertion.  That would explain why the running thing never really took off for me.

It was fun to talk to people after the event, because there are a lot of ex-runners out there.

Since then I've been out and about hiking up a storm.

 

Watching

We are now in season seven of Seinfeld.

And I started watching two other shows!  This is huge because I'm very picky about TV and I've been though the longest dry spell where nothing has really clicked.

First up: a recommendation from Rainbow Plant Life.   Mo is about a Palestinian refugee family living in Houston who has been trying to get asylum for 20 years.  It's a light take on a serious subject (which is usually my favorite way to approach a serious subject).

Next up: a recommendation from SHU: Apple Cider Vinegar is a fictional show about real events.  Belle Gibson was an influencer who built a massive following after claiming that she was able to cure her brain cancer though clean living.  A few people said otherwise.  I'm not even through the first episode yet but I'm hooked and will be eating it up as soon as I get some spare time.

 

Reading

Since we last talked I finished an absolutely wonderful book, and chomped down a bunch of OK books.

The absolutely wonderful books gets the first 😻😻😻 rating of 2025.  That would be The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery, which was the CBBC pick.  I don't know what I can say about it other than if you pick it up you will be transported to another world, and the Kindle version was thirty nine cents so if you haven't gotten it already I don't know what you are even doing with your life.

I made two calls about the plot from the get-go which turned out to be correct - you can read it all in the CBBC comments, but there were a hundred other things that happened which were delightful surprises.  

Now let's run through the OK books.  These all fell into the uncanny valley of not really grabbing my attention while steering clear of my DNF threshhold.

First: Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney.  This one is about a writer who calls his wife while she is driving home from picking up a takeout dinner to give her the news that his latest book has just hit the best seller list.  She tells him that there is a woman lying in the road, puts down the phone, and disappears.  One year later with his life in shambles, his agent asks him to spend some time in a cabin on a island to buckle down and just write something already.  The island is weird, he keeps seeing a woman who looks like his wife, and finds a lost manuscript by a famous author and before you can say "I'm getting Yellowface vibes" he starts rewriting it as his own work.

So...there was a lot going on with this one.  I stayed in it for the island and for the Yellowface thing.  Speaking as someone who likes to write and who doesn't have the chops to do anything with it, I can only imagine the temptation if I found a great manuscript with no author to claim it.  As far as the rest of the plot(s) and the mystery, well, whatever it was has been done before as well.

Next: I like books and I like podcasts but I do not like books about podcasts until now.  When you blacked out at a wedding five years ago and woke up covered in your friend's blood but there wasn't enough evidence to charge you so you went on with your life and wrote a slew of successful romance novels under a pen name but then some darned podcaster decided to do a podcast on your case...that would be Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera.  I adored the main character, liked the story well enough though I had to skim the podcast transcript sections because for whatever reason those are like nails on a chalkboard to me, and then did a big shrug when the mystery was solved. 

And the one after that: I don't usually read romance but everyone loves Funny Story by Emily Henry so I decided to join in on the fun.  This is the one about a woman whose Perfect Fiance decides that he has always been in love with his Perfect Life Long Best [Girl] Friend and right before the wedding is the perfect time to break up so that he can live his dream.  The woman now needs a place to live on short notice while she wraps up her life in the small town that she moved to be with Prince Charming.  Lucky for her, the Perfect Life Long Best Friend left a boyfriend who is now without a roommate, so that solves the problem of finding a place to live, as well as giving her a breakup buddy who knows exactly what she's going through.  Spoiler: everyone gets exactly what they deserve.  This was a cute book with characters that I loved.  My only complaint it that it felt a touch too long.

Currently: I've got a book that I have high hopes for on my Kindle and a few mysteries that I want to read, but I wanted a palate cleanser first.  I'm getting it with the next book in the Alphabet series, L is for Lawless.

Peace out!