Weekly Round Up: It Really is Weekly for a Change!

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  

The last time that we talked, I had just gotten on a train, so I have epic travel stories to tell you.  But we can't be on vacation everyday, so look at me finally dropping a weekly round up on a weekly basis!  Truth in advertising right here!

I firmly believe that everyone needs to have PTO from the internet, and real life takes precedence over blogging, but if I don't keep up a somewhat regular "normie" posting schedule, then I end up forgetting to tell you things and it makes for too much of a backup on books, so let's get into it.

Eats

When I got home from my trip on Saturday, I challenged myself to a "shop your pantry dinner" and a "trust but verify a Youtube cooking video" session.

The video claimed to be a new technique for stir frying frozen vegetables, which is an area that I need help with.  

I eyeballed two servings of veggies from my giant bag of Costco frozen stir fry veggies and played along at home.

To finish off the meal, I grabbed a serving of rice (which I always have because I freeze leftover rice in single serving portions) and a Costco shaved beef kit that I've had in the freezer for a while.  I cooked up the beef in the same pan after I cooked the veggies and casually tossed in a little soy sauce and sesame oil to season it.

Verdict: the veggie cooking technique is a winner!  The second portion made for a good lunch the next day.  I will be making up quickie stir fries often in my new solo cooking life.

Workouts/Wellness

Lol, even though I am not really formally working out, for some reason I just can't quit this section.  My big fitness accomplishments of the week were keeping up with my 3x per week body weight strength workouts on the road AND getting 10,000 steps in on an all train day.

Normally I don't care how many steps I get because I have a dog so 10k steps is pretty much a guarantee.  But on a day that was going to be 90% sitting I knew that I would feel better if I moved around.

When I got to the train station on Thursday for my return trip, I was at 1,000 steps.  Since there weren't very many people in my section of the train, I did laps up and down the corridor while I was waiting for the train to start.  As you can see, it is a narrow space and I had to hunch my shoulders in a little bit to avoid swinging my arms into the wall.  It took kind of a long time to get another thousand steps.

I made good use of the fresh air breaks (longer stops at stations where the passengers are allowed to get off the train for a few minutes) and found myself with 9k steps after the final break.  That was really enough to achieve the goal of getting in movement on a non movement day, but I felt like I needed to get the final thousand steps just for bragging rights.  The problem is that there were now more people on board and the train was moving, which made pacing up and down the corridor more difficult/impractical/obnoxious.

Walking in an Amtrak roomette is not really an option.  I took this picture while standing in the corridor.  All that you can really do is to take two steps, and the movement wasn't registering on my Garmin.

In the end I found that taking the two steps plus pumping my arms was the magic to getting the steps to register AND I was able to do it at a decent pace so it felt pretty good.  By close of business I had my 10k steps.

I'm going to write a detailed post about the train trip, but a quick preview is to tell you that no one rides Amtrak to get a great night's sleep.  I got mediocre sleep, and I talked to a few regular riders who told me that they used Benadryl for train nights.  For my non-train nights, sleep was pretty good this week.

Watching

I finished the final season of Outlander, which is a show that I started watching more than 10 years ago.  The ending was a long time coming!  I liked the final season but disliked the final episode.  I feel like it was just a slow montage of all of the characters + final event + a teaser to either do more episodes later and/or to confuse everyone.  Sigh.

On a much funnier note, someone tipped Hubs off to a BBC show with an interpretive dance segment.

Reading

If sleeping on a train was not all that, reading on a train made up for it.  Here's what went down:

First: a recommendation that delivered!  SHU wrote about a book with an awkward title that she said was tied with Sky Daddy for her favorite book of the year, and also said that favorite book contender was where the similarity ended.

The book is What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama.  This book is so perfect that I don't want to tell you what it is about.  Yes it's about a library and reading, but that's just the surface.  The book is comprised of separate stories with a few connecting threads.  The first story was my favorite, and also I think somewhat Sky Daddy adjacent, though without any plane fetishes and with a very different ending.

I always say that I don't like to tell other people what to do, so let's just say that I strongly recommend dropping everything to get your hands on a copy of this book.

Second: a "good enough to keep reading" story, which is The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives by Elizabeth Arnott.  It's the 60s and three women who either are or used to be married to convicted serial killers have struck up a friendship over their shared pasts.  When a new string of murders starts up, the wives see a connection long before the police do, and since they police don't want to hear from ladies in general and ladies who were married to serial killers in particular, they start investigating on their own.  My biggest beef is that I felt that the root cause of the crimes was a bit of a cliche, but the story kept me engaged up until it got to that point, so I have no cause for complaint.

Currently: the book that everyone else is reading except that I can't remember who.  This is Lake Effect by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney.  It's the 70s and the cracks in the marriages of the neighborhood friends group are starting to show.  So far I like it.

I had a little help in getting misled on where I heard about Lake Effect.  Back when Engie and I met up two years ago, we met at a coffee shop called Lake Effect Coffee in Milwaukee, so naturally I assumed that this was an Engie recommendation.  But when we talked last week (spoiler!), she said it wasn't her.

Peace Out!  I'll be back soon to tell you about the big trip and the train ride.  Who's read any of the books?