Weekly Round Up: New Digs!

A belated weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Plus an abbreviated house tour!

ICYMI, I announced that Hubs and I have separated and that I moved to a rental house.  I won't be spilling any tea on that, so instead let's take a look at my new digs.

Where Is It?

Close to home, but not too close.  It's in another town and the location is "the wrong side of the tracks".  I'm not very close to them, but when the train is coming through it backs up traffic for a bit.  Other than that, the neighborhood is very walkable, and provides easy access to a walking path and biking trail.

What Is It?

A four bedroom, one bathroom house.  The one bathroom plus the train drives the rent down quite a bit.  Score!

Let's See It!

Sure!  If you came over, the living room is the room that you would see first.  It is also the room with the least amount of furniture, and it's going to stay that way for a while.  The main use of the room is to get to the rest of the house.

Here is the downstairs bedroom that I'm using as an office.  Doggo asked me to remind you to check your form on your downward dog.

Let's go into the kitchen.

Wait, something is missing...let's try that again.

The dinning area.

Laundry area.  This is the first time in my life that I have had first floor laundry, and now that I have it, I can’t go back.

The back room is the star of the show.

Last but not least, there is a large fenced back yard and a patio.  If the patio set looks familiar, it’s because I took inspo from Stephany.

So anyways, Doggo and I are settling in.  I don’t want to give the impression that it was NBD to move, because it wasn’t, but it was doable.  I have a decent amount of pre-martial furniture, and we had a lot of duplicates for kitchen stuff, so I didn’t have to start from square one.  Originally I was planning to drag the furniture buying process out over a few months, but then I realized that it wasn’t that much, so I went ahead and got most of it now.

Um Wanna Talk About Money?

Sure!  This is an example of a personal question that I think is fair and that I don’t mind addressing.  A few people have asked me if I will need to go back to work.

The answer is: not as far as I can tell and not for a long time if so.  I worked for longer than I needed to, I have a huge pile up of cash, and the market has done well, so even with the separation the money stuff is still on track.

Okey dokey smokey, that’s the new house, let’s get into our normal round up stuff!

Eats

In the chaos of moving I have not been planning epic meals, but I did take a minute to experiment with recreating a “Taco Bell but better” number.

I don’t know the proper name for their creation that is a hard taco on the inside with a soft taco on the outside and a layer of cheese in between, but when I had the real thing, the cheese was barely melted so the layers didn’t stick together.  I felt that I could do better.

And I did!  I fancied things up with nacho flavored hard shells, and it just took a thin layer of cheese and a very short time in the skillet to get everything to adhere.

Workouts/Wellness

I have not done a formal cardio workout since I moved.  Between you and me, cardio was starting to feel not quite right.

For the past few weeks I have not been short on physical activity, since, you know, I was moving.  I don’t know how other folks do local moves, but my method is to pack up all of the non-furniture stuff and take it over carload by carload.  Movers charge by the hour, so I prefer to use their time for the stuff that I’m not physically able to move.

As soon as I feel like doing something besides walking the dog and hiking, it will most likely be power walking or run/walk outside, and I also have a stadium nearby where I can hit the stairs.  Once the weather turns bad this fall, I will most likely join a gym.

Lest you think that I’m being a total slug, I’ve been keeping up with my self-created body weight strength routine.

On the sleep front, things are going well.  My routine used to be to take a magnesium tablet before bed and then take a melatonin only if I couldn’t fall asleep, but I’ve started being proactive and taking the melatonin whether I think I need it or not.  I still wake up frequently during the night, but I’m able to get back to sleep pretty quickly.

Watching

Just because we’re separated doesn’t mean that Hot Couples TV is going anywhere.  Hubs and I have been watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

On my own, I’ve been watching Friends.  I've seen episodes here and there, but I never watched it regularly.  It’s no Seinfeld, and I’m not sure if I’ll watch it all the way to the end, but its amusing enough.  

Back in the day, I made many attempts at trying to get my hair to Rachel, but luckily none of those photos exist today to my knowledge.  Just in case you ever need to know this, the Rachel hairstyle first shows up in episode four.  It looks fabulous on Jennifer Anniston and on no one else.

Reading

Buckle in, let’s catch up!

Strangers by Belle Burden.  Not related to my personal situation, and I wasn’t going to read it since I had burned out on divorce memoirs, but the hype got to me and it just so happened that the Libby hold came in right before my last road trip, so I listened to the audio book on the way.

I heard a fair amount of “oh she’s so privileged” and “oh how dumb she was to agree to a bad prenup and then to extend herself financially in the marriage”.

Point One: yeah she has more money than me or anyone reading this, but I did not get a privileged vibe at all.  To me she came off as regular folk, just with more homes and more zeros than the rest of us.

Point Two: duh, that’s why she wrote the book!  And also, excuse me but do you split everything exactly 50/50 with your boo?  No one that I know does this.  Most of us don't have a family trust that we're buying our houses out of, but I'd argue that most folks step it up for their partners on the scale that they are able to.

Anyhoo, IMO the hype is justified and the writing is excellent.

More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen.  It was no Every Last One, but I liked it a lot, and I plan to keep reading her.

Follow the River by James Alexander Thom.  This is the book that is not like the other books!  When I did the bridge walk at New River Gorge, the guide told us about this book.  It’s fiction, but based on real people and true events that happened in 1755.  Mary Draper Ingles was a young wife and mother living in Virginia, and her settlement was attacked by the Shawnee.  Mary, her two young sons, and a handful of other people were taken captive and marched from their home through the New River Gorge all the way to what is now Chillicothe, Ohio.  Just in case you’re not familiar with those places, that is a looooooong, loooooong way.

There were two tellings of the story that were recorded in Mary’s lifetime, and in one of the versions she was very pregnant at the time of her capture and in the other version she was not.  From the research that I did, it is known that Mary got special treatment and was allowed to ride a horse instead of having to walk like the other prisoners, so that lends support to the pregnancy theory.

Anyhoo, Mary didn’t like the captive life and she missed her husband, so after a few months she and another woman escaped and made their way back home, largely by following the New River.  It was not a journey for the feint of heart.  I won’t say what happened next, but someone wrote a book and we’re still talking about her.

IMO the book is not particularly well written, and Mary is portrayed as being an absolute saint as opposed to everyone else who just couldn’t get it together to up and walk hundreds of miles home.  And it doesn’t matter, because Follow the River is such an excellent story that it overcomes its writing.  It’s worth reading, or worth putting in the 16 hours of listening time to get through the audiobook, which is what I did.  If you’re looking for an audio book for your next road trip, you just found it.

In An Instant by Suzanne Redfearn is a book that I read for my IRL book club.  It’s about a family who is in a car accident on an isolated mountain road in a snow storm, and is told from the POV of a teenage girl who dies in the accident.  Nothing particularly profound happens, but it was a good read.

Yesteryear by Clair Caro Burke.  You want hype, I got yer hype right here!  This is the one about the trad wife influencer who wakes up in 1855 and gets to live the real trad wife life.  Chef's kiss on this one.

Currently

I’m on a train!!!  I’m on a train!!!  

This is my home for the next 30 hours.  She's tiny.

I dipped into my stash of Amtrak points and made it happen.  So far so good, but everything hinges on if I’m able to sleep tonight.  Stay tuned!!!

Peace out!  Ever done a local move?  Have you read any of these books?  Taken Amtrak overnight?