Weekend accomplishments: post-surgical edition
I think I went a little too hard on Saturday. About an hour before I went to bed I reached over to grab something and felt an abdominal muscle pull and cramp. It felt like a sharp rebuke, like it was saying "I know laparoscopic gallbladder removal is not a big deal in the scheme of things, but you had your abdomen open in 4 different places and an organ removed a week ago, you need to calm the fuck down". Okay, listening.
Saturday I made breakfast, then went to the grocery store. I have 2 big re-usable grocery bags, and using those instead of letting them use the plastic bags in the usual wasteful way (like 2 items per bag) was my first mistake, because those bags are heavy. Normally it's not a problem, but I probably shouldn't have been lifting heavy loads just yet.
I vacuumed the downstairs rugs when I got home, which was probably another mistake. But of course I didn't do it last weekend, and they really needed it. In my bedroom decluttering rotation I got to "clean around/under my bed", which wasn't too much work but still involved getting down on the floor and crawling around, reaching under the bed for stuff, dragging a heavy bag of trash downstairs and heaving it into the garbage can, then bringing the vacuum cleaner upstairs to get under the bed.
I needed a rest by then, so I put on a yacht rock playlist (getting hyped for the HBO documentary later this month) and finished Wolf Hall. I was wondering where Mantel would leave it; I thought it might cover Anne's downfall, but she left it at the moment of Cromwell's height, after Thomas More has been executed and before Anne's 2nd miscarriage, which was really the thing that doomed her. I think I'll leave him there, people always say the sequels weren't as good--not that they're bad, just that the writing doesn't achieve the same kind of perfection--plus, I know Tudor history pretty well. If you're going to make Cromwell your hero, I don't really want to follow that through to his end.
David made quiche for supper, and afterwards I decided to re-watch Dune. I hadn't watched it since 2021 and I wanted to see it again before watching the second part.
Sunday I made pancakes and bacon for breakfast, watched Dateline, then decided to start part 2 of Dune. I figured it was going to be long (2 hours, 43 minutes) and I didn't want to be up until midnight watching it. I watched about an hour, then took a shower and changed the bedsheets.
I made white chocolate brownies with cream cheese frosting, a batch of tonkatsu sauce, boiled some hot dog octopuses for my lunches, did some dinner prep, and started Just A Shot Away, Saul Austerlitz's history of the Altamont Speedway Rolling Stones' concert, one of the things (along with the Manson Family murders and the Kent State shooting) often cited as "the end of the '60s".
It's a surprisingly moving book, not a just a "then this happened, then that happened" recitation of events but one that seeks to make Meredith Hunter more than "the answer to a trivia question" and to put him in his proper context, which was as a young Black man in a place that wasn't always welcome to them; the counter-culture had its own forms of segregation.
It's so weird to think that happened in Livermore. Even in my day, Livermore was the most rural part of Alameda County, and the Altamont Pass was the most rural part of Livermore, an eerie landscape of parched brown hills sprouting groves of enormous wind turbines. It wasn't a place anyone I knew ever went on purpose, just someplace you went through on the way to somewhere more interesting.
I was coming back from taking Penny for a short walk in the afternoon when the Amazon driver met me in the driveway to drop off some bento accessories I'd ordered. I seem to have a smaller appetite since the surgery, but not in a problematic way so I'm not concerned about it. There's no nausea or anything, I just seem to be satisfied with less. So I've been a little more purposeful about my work lunches and actually using all my bento stuff, and it seemed like a good idea to re-stock all the little picks and cups and bottles.
This is today's lunch: carrot sticks, grape tomatoes, and some mixed greens with blue cheese, hot dog octopuses (yes the picks make them look like they have eyes) and a Babybel cheese, and the little container has some tomato bouillon powder which will make a cup of broth. The other layer of the bento is vanilla yogurt with a handful of blueberries, a few white chocolate chips, and some shredded coconut.
I made tonkatsu for supper; that, and the white chocolate brownies, were meant to be for David's birthday, which was 2 weeks ago. But the first the downstairs a/c broke, then I was recovering from surgery. Better late than never.
After supper I finished part 2 of Dune. I wonder how far Villeneuve is going to adapt the series? I've never read any of the sequels but I know about a lot of the super weird shit that happens in them, culminating with (spoilers for a book published before I was born) [Spoiler (click to open)] Paul's son turning into some kind of immortal human/worm hybrid god. Hard to imagine that in a movie, but I guess if it was gonna be anyone it would be Villeneuve. (Or Guillermo del Toro.)
Saturday I made breakfast, then went to the grocery store. I have 2 big re-usable grocery bags, and using those instead of letting them use the plastic bags in the usual wasteful way (like 2 items per bag) was my first mistake, because those bags are heavy. Normally it's not a problem, but I probably shouldn't have been lifting heavy loads just yet.
I vacuumed the downstairs rugs when I got home, which was probably another mistake. But of course I didn't do it last weekend, and they really needed it. In my bedroom decluttering rotation I got to "clean around/under my bed", which wasn't too much work but still involved getting down on the floor and crawling around, reaching under the bed for stuff, dragging a heavy bag of trash downstairs and heaving it into the garbage can, then bringing the vacuum cleaner upstairs to get under the bed.
I needed a rest by then, so I put on a yacht rock playlist (getting hyped for the HBO documentary later this month) and finished Wolf Hall. I was wondering where Mantel would leave it; I thought it might cover Anne's downfall, but she left it at the moment of Cromwell's height, after Thomas More has been executed and before Anne's 2nd miscarriage, which was really the thing that doomed her. I think I'll leave him there, people always say the sequels weren't as good--not that they're bad, just that the writing doesn't achieve the same kind of perfection--plus, I know Tudor history pretty well. If you're going to make Cromwell your hero, I don't really want to follow that through to his end.
David made quiche for supper, and afterwards I decided to re-watch Dune. I hadn't watched it since 2021 and I wanted to see it again before watching the second part.
Sunday I made pancakes and bacon for breakfast, watched Dateline, then decided to start part 2 of Dune. I figured it was going to be long (2 hours, 43 minutes) and I didn't want to be up until midnight watching it. I watched about an hour, then took a shower and changed the bedsheets.
I made white chocolate brownies with cream cheese frosting, a batch of tonkatsu sauce, boiled some hot dog octopuses for my lunches, did some dinner prep, and started Just A Shot Away, Saul Austerlitz's history of the Altamont Speedway Rolling Stones' concert, one of the things (along with the Manson Family murders and the Kent State shooting) often cited as "the end of the '60s".
It's a surprisingly moving book, not a just a "then this happened, then that happened" recitation of events but one that seeks to make Meredith Hunter more than "the answer to a trivia question" and to put him in his proper context, which was as a young Black man in a place that wasn't always welcome to them; the counter-culture had its own forms of segregation.
It's so weird to think that happened in Livermore. Even in my day, Livermore was the most rural part of Alameda County, and the Altamont Pass was the most rural part of Livermore, an eerie landscape of parched brown hills sprouting groves of enormous wind turbines. It wasn't a place anyone I knew ever went on purpose, just someplace you went through on the way to somewhere more interesting.
I was coming back from taking Penny for a short walk in the afternoon when the Amazon driver met me in the driveway to drop off some bento accessories I'd ordered. I seem to have a smaller appetite since the surgery, but not in a problematic way so I'm not concerned about it. There's no nausea or anything, I just seem to be satisfied with less. So I've been a little more purposeful about my work lunches and actually using all my bento stuff, and it seemed like a good idea to re-stock all the little picks and cups and bottles.
This is today's lunch: carrot sticks, grape tomatoes, and some mixed greens with blue cheese, hot dog octopuses (yes the picks make them look like they have eyes) and a Babybel cheese, and the little container has some tomato bouillon powder which will make a cup of broth. The other layer of the bento is vanilla yogurt with a handful of blueberries, a few white chocolate chips, and some shredded coconut.
I made tonkatsu for supper; that, and the white chocolate brownies, were meant to be for David's birthday, which was 2 weeks ago. But the first the downstairs a/c broke, then I was recovering from surgery. Better late than never.
After supper I finished part 2 of Dune. I wonder how far Villeneuve is going to adapt the series? I've never read any of the sequels but I know about a lot of the super weird shit that happens in them, culminating with (spoilers for a book published before I was born) [Spoiler (click to open)] Paul's son turning into some kind of immortal human/worm hybrid god. Hard to imagine that in a movie, but I guess if it was gonna be anyone it would be Villeneuve. (Or Guillermo del Toro.)