Weekly Round Up: A Brownie Snafu

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, reads, and whatever else comes to mind.  Starting with an absentminded brownie cooking adventure.

But First, A Quick Snapshot

I've been up to a lot of stuff and not keeping up with blogging, so here's a quick rundown to set the context:

Sept 16th to Oct 1st: got back from Portland, hung out of home
Oct 2nd to Oct 4th: long weekend trip with Hubs and Stepson #2
Oct 6th to Oct 13th: whirlwind North East road trip, details to come
Oct 14th-16th: back at home with a houseguest, details to come

Future plans: stay at home for a bit, then figure out where I'm going next.

Eats

Some friends threw a Harvest Moon party back on the Harvest Moon, which fell on September 26th this year.  I've been hearing the phrase "Harvest Moon" all of my life, but until they hosted the party and we went out into their backyard, which happens to be several acres out in the country to look at the moon, it never really clicked.

It was an "everyone bring something" kind of party, and I found two dessert recipes that were calling to me, but I couldn't decide which one to make.  I don't need that kind of conflct in my life, so I simply made both.

First up: these pumpkin oatmeal cookies that Sarah wrote about (I don't remember which post but just go there and I'm sure you'll come away with something good).  My verdict is that there is nothing wrong with these, but I kind of wanted something else...like a pumpkin oatmeal cookie with white chocolate chips and maybe some pecans and no frosting, so that's what's on my baking to-do list.

Second up: frosted brownies.  These are the easiest thing in the world to make, but because my attention was divided between the pumpkin cookies and Life Thoughts, mistakes were made.  (1) I wasn't paying attention, so I dumped the flour and cocoa powder mixture in when I should have added the sugar and (2) the recipe uses an 8"x8" pan, but I couldn't find mine.  All I had was a 9"x13".

My workaround was to pretend that I had the correctly sized pan.  I shaped the parchment paper to approximately the correct size and hoped for the best.

Sure enough, the best happened.  The brownies came out to the correct consistency and thickness, so no one except for you and I are aware of the incorrect order of ingredient addition and the wrong pan size.  Shortly after this I found my 8"x8" pan hiding in plain sight.

Speaking of food, I was amused to see that the Dinner Struggle is not just real, it's making the news.  In the Wall Street Journal no less!  I don't know what the solution is, but I can relate to the problem so well.

Workouts/Wellness

Nothing besides the same-same to report on the workout front.  The Cool Blogger's Walking Club is back in session.  Doggo asked me to remind everyone that you don't need to be a blogger to participate.

Sleep wise, things continue to be good.  I've been tracking my sleep for the past few months by both the sleep time on my Garmin and by my opinion of the quality (my ratings categories from worst to best are: sucked, meh, good, and Yes!). Time wise my average is consistently 6.5 hours per night, but the number of "sucked" nights are down and "Yes!" nights are up.  I only took a melatonin once in all of September and haven't bothered with magnesium since I don't know when.  I took both nearly every night from sometime in January to sometime in August, and I do think they helped and if my sleep gets bad again I would go back to taking them in a heartbeat.  

One tip off that my sleep has changed is that I'm starting to have dreams again, and I'm not sure how to feel about it!  I had a very vivid dream the other night that my undergrad degree was invalid and that I had to drop everything to go back to school to "fix it" even though I never used my undergrad degree for work and, duh, I'm retired.  If it's an option to go back to having no dreams and still get good sleep, can someone sign me up for that?

Watching

Regular TV stuff: mostly Traitors!  I watched the Canadian edition, which was fun because it was a split between reality TV stars and normies.  I didn't like the host as well as the UK one, but the traitors were very good!  In Hot Couple's TV, Hubs and I started UK Celebrity Traitors, which is fun for us since a lot of the same people have been on 8 Out Of 10 Cats.

I finished season 1 of La Casa de Las Flores and started season 2, but I think that the show might have jumped the shark.  I'll keep watching for now since the episodes are short and I can always use the exposure to Spanish.

And finally, cliche though it is, Thelma and Louise has been coming to mind a lot recently thanks to the Birchie and Kyria Road Trip, so I decided to do something about that.  Just because Kyria wasn't around didn't mean that I had to watch it alone!  I saw it with another Cool Blogger, but since I'm behind on blogging, you'll have to wait a post or two to get the deets on that.

Reading

Reading has been slower lately, and yet somehow I still have many bullet points to blog about:

• It is going to be a long, long time before I read another celebrity memoir.  I was left with a sour taste in my mouth after the last one, and I tried another Hot Memoir of the moment and only made it 10 minutes before I bailed.  From what I understand it's hard to be a celebrity, and I'm sorry for that but not sorry enough to listen to someone whine for six hours.  My advice if you're a celebrity is to spend a bit of time reading "normie" memoirs about folks who have lived through difficult situations and see if there is possibly another way to express yourself.
• My next book is most likely going to come from the titles that were discussed on this episode of Sarah's Bookshelves.
• Since the unnamed celebrity memoir didn't work for me and I needed another audio book for my most recent road trip, I picked up Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam, which was a much, much better use of my time.
• Both SHU and Jenny put Fellowship Point on my radar, and I've been reading it...for a while now.  For so long in fact that my Libby loan is about to expire so I've put my Kindle in airplane mode so that I can finish it.  Usually I need a book to fully engage me in order to keep reading, so I can't explain why I'm still here except that I've got low n'slow vibes with this one.  Stay tuned!
• Oops, the next round of CBBC kind of snuck up on me and Convenience Store Woman was only available on audio from Libby, so I started listening last night.  I had sampled the book back when the selections were announced and it didn't really catch my attention back then but now that I started listening "for real" I'm not having that problem.  I don't think that I've read any Japanese fiction until this year, and judging by how I felt about What You Are Looking For Is In The Library and how I feel so far about this book...it seems like I need to read more Japanese fiction.

Listening

For the most part, my podcast listening is in one ear and out the other, so I rarely retain anything long enough to blog about it.  Here are two recent exceptions to the rule:

Kyria and I listened to the first hour of a three part/NINE HOUR series on Berkshire Hathaway on our road trip, but we got distracted and didn't finish it.  I started chipping away at it again, and enjoyed the listen.  Normally I do not prefer podcasts with three hour long episodes, but Acquired uses its time well, so I don't mind too much.  They have episodes on just about every company out there.  So far I've listened to the shows on Costco, Walmart, Berkshire, and Trader Joe's.

And then, Nicole dropped some musings about swingers recently, and both Kyria and Engie chimed in the comments about a podcast about a swinging club from the 1970s.  If you are looking for a wild/sad listen, then this is your show.

Retirement Project Updates!

I've been taking Spanish lessons for a few weeks now.  I do feel that it's helping and that I will continue with them for the foreseeable future BUT I also want to tell you something that may scare you off of ever taking language lessons.

The only way to learn a language is to speak it, and the only way to speak to another person is any language is...SMALL TALK.  That's right, I am paying to do small talk for an entire hour at a time, two times per week.

The second update is that my plan was to do "me stuff" for the first year of retirement and to add in some volunteer work in year two.  Guess what, time flies so it's time to start thinking about year two!

I did my first volunteer gig at the end of September, which was to hand out shirts at my local marathon.  It was a ton of fun, so you can expect more race volunteering in my future.

I've also signed up to start volunteering at an animal shelter, and that could start as early as next week.  The idea here is pay forward what others did for Doggo, and also to hopefully learn a bit more about dogs in the process.

A Quick Trip

Stepson #2 had a Friday off school recently, so Hubs and I took advantage and went to see him and then took him to New River Gorge NP.

You know the beauty of NRG from my previous visits (here and here), but to save you the trouble of clicking the links, let's do a quick review of times past:

This is the view that awaited us on the most recent trip:

The punchline is that my third visit to NRG gave me a view that I had never gotten before, which was no view.  But we had a great time hiking, an epic dinner at Secret Sandwich Society in Fayetteville, and the odds are that the next time that we visit we'll be able to see the scenery.

We were also entertained by the very explicit warnings at a lake/waterfall on the way to NRG.  That's something that you just don't see every day.

Before We Go

Speaking of breaking Wall Street Journal news, I know that in recent years most of my viewing is random stuff on Youtube.  I always knew that I wasn't the only one, and now thanks to the WSJ I can confirm that I am in good company.

I don't think that there are enough dog pictures in this post, so let's drop another just in case.  Someone is judging my brownie baking skills.

Peace out!  Are you behind in blogging?  Have you had a cooking snafu that turned out to be just fine?  How's your sleep?  Are you a Youtube watcher?  Tell me everything!