adulting successes!

[yasaman]

Last week was a virtuous, satisfying week, for the most part! I felt productive and pleasantly occupied, and it was just nice.

• I wrote 6,463 words! And I wrote every single day. So NaNoWriMo has clearly helped me back into the groove.
• I finished three books!
  
  • [redacted] for potential Yuletide purposes. Alas, I did not actually enjoy this one.
  • My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop: I got this one as a Metafilter Secret Quonsar gift! It's a charming and loving collection of little essays about writers' favorite indie bookstores, complete with little illustrations of each bookstore. It's full of love for books and the people who sell them.
  • Trevor Noah's Born a Crime was my audiobook for listening to while cooking and eating dinner for the week, and it's a great audiobook performance, really engrossing. It's about Trevor Noah's childhood in South Africa at the tail end of apartheid, where he was, as the title says, born a crime thanks to being the son of a white father and black mother. There are funny and charming stories here, sure, but also keen and sharp ones about the social and political realities of Johannesburg and Noah's racial identity. Most of all though, this book is a tribute to Trevor Noah's amazing mother.
• I ate food I cooked myself, mostly vegetables. Go me.
  
  • Last week's work lunches: vegetarian white bean chili.
  • Last week's dinners: frittata with sweet potatoes, sauteed greens, and Brussels sprouts on the side.
• I had the faint tinglings of possibly getting sick? But then I had a lot of vitamin C and tea with honey and the sore throat and funny nose feelings went away. GOOD JOB, IMMUNE SYSTEM.
• I baked so. many. holiday cookies.
  
  • classic chocolate chip cookies
  • madeleines
  • sugar cookies
  • almond crescents
  • chocolate chip and peppermint crunch crackles
  • gingerbread cookies, natch
  • white chocolate and peppermint studded chocolate mountains
  • two different flavors of icebox cookie: rosewater cardamom and chocolate.
• I also made myself food for this week:
  
  • sweet potato chickpea curry for work lunches
  • I roasted potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and carrots, and sauteed some kale, which I will eat for dinner with a fried egg and toast! This is, btw, an excellent low effort dinner. Spend an hour or so chopping and prepping and roasting on Sunday, then spend five minutes each night frying an egg and heating up the veggies, and you've got a perfectly satisfying dinner.
• I did my nightly hygiene etc routine every night, which isn't actually all that notable because I'm on a multi-year streak of doing so, but still, it's my one I Am Still in Control of My Life thing, so I'm counting it. I've only skipped it a couple times in the past like four years I think, and those couple times were because I was sick. Anyway, does my excessive nightly skincare routine actually do anything? Unclear! I mean, a little clear, my skin texture is vastly improved for using AHA and BHA exfoliants and snail mucus serums and lotions are excellent for moisturizing. But all that stuff makes me feel better so, self care, etc. And it's nice to spend 15 minutes winding down with the routine while listening to a funny podcast.
  
  • My pre-sleep podcasts, by the way, are nearly always a McElroy family podcast of some sort. For a while I was listening to Pod Save America, or NPR's Code Switch, or something else more current events oriented, but honestly, that's not the most restful kind of thing to listen to before bed. I'd end up either thinking too much or stewing about our current national nightmare, so I switched to the significantly more funny, kind-hearted McElroy podcast universe.
    
    • My Brother, My Brother, and Me is just goofy, silly fun. Billed as an "advice show for the modern era," it's technically about brothers Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy answering listener questions and/or culling questions from Yahoo Answers, but that's just an excuse for hilarious riffing.
    • Wonderful! which is a podcast where Griffin and his wife Rachel talk about things they love once a week. Sweet and charming and pleasantly positive. Also, Rachel's laugh is the loveliest.
    • I listen to Sawbones less often, mostly just when I'm in the mood, but it's the most informative of the bunch. Justin and his wife Dr. Sydnee McElroy tackle wacky and weird topics in the history of medicine, or debunk and discuss medical fads and myths.
    • The Adventure Zone! I actually listen to this one more often when I can listen all in one go, since it's a D&D and/or RPG podcast. I fucking LOVED the Balance Arc, it ended up being one of the most satisfying narrative fiction experiences I've ever had, and I love the live shows that continue to revisit that campaign. The new Amnesty arc is growing on me more slowly, but I like it.

And now I should go make some final tweaks and beta edits to my Yuletide fic before the deadline.
This entry was originally posted at https://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/477055.html, with
comments there.