Do you ever end the weekend more exhausted than you were on Friday? That’s where I am right now on a Sunday night. I’m just exhausted. Okay, this is not totally unexpected. Friday night I stayed up past 2am cutting the fabric for the kids’ Hallowe’en costumes. That was my own bad judgement, but I was in a flow state and didn’t want to stop.
Saturday, I did work from 10:30a to 6:30pm and ended up falling asleep on the couch at 9:30pm after dinner. Today’s flag football game was cancelled, but then we got invited to join some friends at the pool. The pool was fun and the perfect activity for a rainy rainy day, but it was not relaxing.
After the pool there was no small amount of mental and emotional energy expended to get the kids to take showers and then pick up around the house. Then dinner and then the entire day’s worth of dishes to do. And also laundry and prep for the week. And then the rainy rainy weather – so grey and somber. I think all that has contributed to a very low energy feeling. NOT how I want to go into the first week of rehearsal, but… oh well.
But let’s talk about energizing things! Like Elisabeth’s Cool Blogger’s Walking Club. Much as I find that the “Cool” in CBWC giving me imposter syndrome and bad high school flashbacks what with me never having been cool in my life, I do think it’s a lovely movement (pun!), and I’m here for it. I had a whole plan to have “themes” for each week, but October 1st snuck up on me. So I guess the theme for Week 1 is… just life. This is the movement I do without trying too hard, that usually would have happened anyway. Spoiler Alert – there isn’t a lot of walking. Here is my summary of the first week of Cool Blogger’s Walking Club:
Thursday 10/1 –
15 minute yoga
15 minutes of …. something??? All it says in my journal is “15 minutes” That was some bad habit tracking going on there. Wait, maybe this is walking the kids to the bus stop then back?
Friday 10/2:
15 minutes yoga in the morning.
20 min bike to school with the kids in the morning.
45 minute walk with my friend A mid afternoon. It was great to walk and chat and catch up.
45 mins Bike to pick up kids after school, stopping at a park on the way home.
Saturday 10/3:
15 minute yoga.
It was a rainy rainy day, so I didn’t get outside. Though the 14 year old and I did go clothes shopping – so I’m sure there were many steps taken then.
Sunday 10/4:
15 minute yoga.
Otherwise, not a lot of intentional movement today because I worked two job back to back starting at 10am, and I didn’t get home until 7pm. But I did take the Metro to both jobs, so I think all told that was 30 minutes of walking. Maybe it counts as intentional because I took the Metro instead of driving?
Monday 10/5:
15 minute yoga.
Walk to take the kids to the bus – this was probably 20 minutes total.
15 minute walk at lunch around the neighborhood.
Tuesday 10/6:
15 minute yoga in the morning.
20 minute walk – after dropping the 6 year old at school following a Doctor’s appointment, I took the long way back to the car.
15 minute walk at lunch
Wednesday 10/7:
10 minute yoga.
Then I literally wrote, “Lots of little walks” What does that even mean? Oh I remember, I met my friend A at a parking lot that was a little farther from school and we walked up together to pick up our kids from Dungeons and Dragon club. Now that I’m back at work full time, I don’t have much time to see friends, so I texted her an hour before pick up and asked if she wanted to go on a micro walking date with me to pick up our kids. It worked out well.
So that was the first week of Walking Club. I have got to take better notes for the rest of the month….
Grateful For:
-The kids’ bus driver. Okay, I might have a little inappropriate yet innocuous crush on the school bus driver. He’s young, kind of cute, and always patiently waits for the kids. He can pull of a three point turn in the bus! More than once we’ve been at least two blocks from the bus stop when he pulls up, and he always waits because he sees us. And the other day, when we were biking, and the bus drove past us, he gave the kids a little encouraging honk. All to say, I’m grateful that he gets the kids to school and back safely, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s cute.
-A UPS store near work, so I can return packages easily without having to drive somewhere else and park.
-Free Food! So bizarrely, I got free food twice this week. (Well, three times if you count when my boss bought the team lunch.) On Wednesday, I was sitting around waiting for rehearsal to start and a chorister came up to me and said she had ordered the three mushroom soup from the Thai place down the street, but they had misunderstood and gave her three (3) mushroom soups and would I like to have one. I do love mushrooms, so I happily took one off her hands. It was very tasty.
Then on Friday, someone Door Dashed a Subway Tuna fish sandwich to our office for Wanda. Only there is no one in our office called Wanda. The folks at work called around the building to find Wanda, but couldn’t find Wanda. I felt really bad for Wanda. Anyhow, I put the sandwich in the fridge in case Wanda showed up. The next day, the sandwich was still in there and the guy in charge of facilities at work said I should either eat it or throw it out. Well, I wasn’t about to let a perfectly good tuna fish sandwich (with honey mustard sauce and jalapenos) go to waste, so I took option b and brought the sandwich home for dinner. Wanda, if you are reading this – thank you, and let me know your venmo handle.
I love free food.
-Autumn skies in the morning, all pink and orange in the morning as I take my kids to their piano lessons before school.
-The county pool. I had never been to open swim at the county pool before and it was a really good time. The pool is nice and new with a couple different areas for kids to play in. And it was only $17 for me and the kids to go swimming. I mean how many ways can a family have fun for less than $20 these days?
-An inadvertent 45 mins at home. The day I was supposed to pick the 9 year old up from D&D club, I somehow did the time math wrong in my head. D&D pick up was at 5:15pm, which meant I should leave work at 4:45pm. But somehow, I left at 3:50pm, thinking that I was late for D&D pick up. oops. when I discovered I was early for pick up, I went home and had a nice 45 minutes with the 14 year old. Nothing elaborate, we just sat side by side and read/ scrolled. And then the Husband came home with the 7 year old and we all just sat in the living room and chatted until it was time to pick up the 9 year old. It was just so nice to be able to sit and chat during daylight hours. Sure I could have gotten some good work done if I had stayed until 4:45p, but this way, I got to see my family and have a relaxing late afternoon interlude before going back to work.
– My cousin J who was in Baltimore for work and came to visit even though it isn’t terribly convenient. I love that she always has such enthusiasm for the kids’ lives. She even went to Agility class to watch the 7 year old bounce on a trampoline.
-People who put art and beauty into the world. I was taking a walk around the neighborhood and I saw these painted rocks piled around the base of at tree and it really made my day.
Looking Forward To:
-Rehearsals starting, and seeing the director. I first met this director twenty three years ago when I was the intern and she was the Assistant Director at an opera company in San Diego. Now look at us all grown up.
-Speaking of which – I saw the rehearsal schedule and it looks like we are mostly rehearsing afternoons and evenings. So I am looking forward to some mornings free from paid work.
-Hallowe’en Costumes. I’m plugging away. Hopefully they will be done eventually. I suspect this is what I’ll be doing with a lot of those mornings off. I am super excited about how they are going to turn out!
-The Renwick Gallery. The Renwick is maybe my favorite museum in town. Their specialty is the art of craft – you know the kind of stuff people use to make as a hobby but which no one thought to pay them for? Anyhow, there museum is temporarily closed while they put up a new exhibit. The new exhibit, opening in November is called Handwork: Contemporary Craft at the Renwick Gallery.
-The last two weeks in October without piano lessons. Look, I’m very determined that my kids learn piano, but those early morning lessons are HARD. (The two younger kids go at 7:15am on Wednesday, and the 14 year old goes at 6:30am on Thursday.) Their teacher is going away the last two weeks of October and I’m really looking forward to a little reprieve from early morning piano lessons.
-Christmas…? Maybe? At least the kids are looking forward to it. The Amazon toy catalogue came in the mail last week, and the 7 and 9 year old immediately began to pore over it. The 7 year old started making her list. I didn’t know that she could write so much:
-Reading this book for Engie’s Cool Blogger’s Book Club:
What We Ate:
Monday: Some kind of noodle stir fry with eggplant and pork. The 14 year old made it and it was really tasty.
Tuesday: My cousin was in town so we took her to Thai for dinner.
Wednesday: Breakfast sandwiches. Wednesday is always our busiest day activities wise, so we need fast and filling for dinner.
Thursday: Oven baked Chicken drumsticks and broccoli. I prepped the drumsticks ahead of time and the Husband popped them into the oven at the end of his work day.
Friday: Pizza (take out) and The Great British Baking Show, a show that is new to us because we are new to Netflix. (I just discovered that the show is originally titled the Great British Bake Off but we can’t call it that in the United States because Pillsbury has the term “Bake Off” trademarked. What a silly thing!) It was a great show to watch with the family.
Also – after the little kids went to bed, we watched an episode of Worth It, a show produced by Buzzfeed where the hosts compare very cheap versions of food to very expensive versions of food – this episode was the $0.50 dumpling vs. the $29 dumpling. And it was SET IN TAIWAN!!! AND the dumpling that won was from a dumpling place that my father took us to in Taipei. AND the $29 dumpling was from Din Tai Fung, which is this global phenomenon of a dumpling place where there is always a huge line (like sometimes over an hour), but where I feel the food just isn’t so good. So I felt very vindicated that the hosts did not pick the $29 dumpling as “worth it”.
Saturday: Take out Chinese. We had some friends over to hang out. I’m honestly not a huge fan of take out Chinese from most places, but the food was waiting for me when I got home after a long day at work, so I think that counts for something there.
Sunday: Acorn Squash with Black Bean Sauce, and Skillet Gnocchi with Miso Butter from NY Times Cooking. We had some Acorn Squash to use up and I had seen this recipe years a go in one of Hetty Lui McKinnon’s cookbooks, I can’t remember which one. McKinnon does wonderful things with vegetables. Basically the recipe calls for roasting and mashing the squash and then making a sauce from garlic and fermented black beans and soy sauce. It was really delicious. The original recipe calls for kabocha squash, which I think would have been even better. For the squash averse, I made the gnocchi. I added mushrooms and used broccoli instead of asparagus. Some members of the family thought the miso taste was too pronounced, but the other folks liked it. We’ve now filed this recipe under “Make when the oldest goes to college.”
Well that’s it for last week. This week I will be plunging into rehearsals so it will be an adjustment for sure.
Are you participating in Cool Blogger’s Walking Club? How do you track your activity? Do you still get innocuous crushes? Weekends – energy replenisher or energy suck? Any free food in your life lately? have you ever seen a restaurant you’ve been to on TV?
