Friday, October 9, 2020

TGIF

Happy Friday! It's going to be summer-like here this weekend so I am looking forward to the weekend ahead!

The book I'm reading is Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. It's 600+ pages so it will take me while to get through it but I am enjoying it. He's a very quiet, thoughtful writer so it's a slower paced novel. The protagonist in the novel is writing about his grandparents settlement in the west in the late 1800s. His grandfather worked for mines so they lived in some remote places. I'm not sure if any of this is autobiographical - it kind of reads like it is, though! 

The high of my week was getting together with a friend I hadn't seen in 2 years (!!!) for a walk. She has a 7 and 10 yo so it's been hard to plan get togethers in the past with all the activities her kids are in. I reached out to her this fall to see if she wanted to get together for a walk and we made it work. It was great to catch up! We met back in 2004 at my first job out of college and she sang in our wedding in 2017. It's one of those friendships where you can go a long time without talking and you just pick up where you left off!

The low of my week was RA flares. Oof, I am in a really bad stretch. I've had 4 flares in the last week - 2 in my feet, one in my left pointer finger and then both hips are flaring right now. I've never had a flare in my hip joints before and wow it is painful. I am hobbling around like a 90yo woman and sleeping is really tough as you need to sleep on your side when pregnant. I've increased the dose of my steroids so hopefully they do the trick soon. If this keeps up, these last 8 weeks of pregnancy are going to be looooong. I went off my weekly RA injections at 28 weeks so I had a feeling things might get worse but I didn't imagine this many flares. :( 

This is what an RA flare looks like - the impacted joint is the pointer finger.



A recipe I made was Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas with Homemade GF Enchilada Sauce. I made these on Thursday, but made the enchiladas sauce and poached/shredded the chicken on Wednesday to make enchilada assembly faster. The enchilada sauce is very easy to make and requires staple pantry ingredients/spices - at least for us. Everybody liked this, including picky Pablo. Because of spanish immersion daycare, he tends to love/eat Mexican food!

I forgot to take a pic before Phil and Paul had dished up! I added olives since we love them. 



A show we are watching is nothing at the moment... We watched the Epstein documentary series and the American Murder documentary series which is about the Denver-area husband who killed his wife and 2 daughters. Both were horrifying and I wondered why we watched such grim shows?? Phil and I have very different tastes in tv, though, so we tend to watch documentaries and most of what caught our eye was sad/dark stuff. We definitely need something lighter! We also watched "The World's Toughest Race" on Prime which we both enjoyed. We had fun talking about who we would have on our teams. Our number one pick for both of us was our friend Kyria! She's the toughest, most fit person we both know. We met through blogging but now we have joint custody of her as a friend as Phil and her get along super well - they are both frugal, and love hiking/the outdoors and beer!

The best money spent was on some LS shirts from Target for Paul. We mostly rely on hand-me-down clothes but he was in need of some warmer clothes for fall/winter. Target had a bunch for $5 which you really can't beat so I bought 8 shirts!

My plans this weekend include getting together tonight with 2 former coworkers for an outdoor take-out meal. The high will be 82 so it should be a really pleasant evening to be outside! Tomorrow we are doing a post-nap play date with my friend whose kids go to the same daycare. I told Paul about the play date on Wednesday night and he keeps asking if today is the day we go to their house? I'm also planning on baking these pumpkin oatmeal cups with Paul. They have too many carbs for me to eat but I think Paul and Phil will enjoy them and they are fairly healthy. And then on Sunday after Paul's nap we are going out to Phil's HS friend's house for a bday get together for one of his friends. This is the group we got together with for Phil's bday in August. The couple that hosts us has a huge house on a lake with a huge outdoor table. So we can all safely spread out. So it's kind of a 'busyish' weekend, but the right amount of activity for me and it's all outdoors so very covid-safe!

Bonus Paul photo!

My only Paul photo from the week is the one I took on Tuesday when we went to the creek to throw rocks. It was 80 degrees that day so very summer-like! 



How was your week? Any shows you'd recommend for a documentary-loving couple?

11 comments:

  1. I do love beer! <3 I watched the first episode of the World's Toughest Race and I do think I could do that! In fact, I had a great chat with my running buddy about who we would have on our team. It would be hard to pick, as some friends who I communicate really well with are afraid of water, and others have a tendency to go out too fast and bonk early (like the guy on the Bend team!) and so I would want to avoid those situations! Of course, I am not really sure what all the stages entail, so my team may change as I watch more episodes!

    This weekend I am doing a little road trip to the mountains. At work, we have use it or lose it vacation and it's been hard to use it, believe it or not! Just when I was about to use it and go out hiking etc, fires took over the state. So I may drive to Idaho, but all plans are subject to change, as it is supposed to snow there. That is 2020, I guess. "Subject to Change"

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  2. Apart from the flares, it sounds like a good week and a good weekend to come. The enchiladas sound really good!

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  3. Do those enchiladas do well as leftovers? They look so good!

    All the documentary-style shows I've watched recently are stuff that I don't think Phil would be into, like competitive cheerleading and home organization, ha. I'm no help there ;)

    I hope your flares have gotten better. It sucks that this is such a big part of your pregnancy journey, especially since you already have to deal with GD. <3

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  4. Those enchiladas look great, and I am also an olive lover, but sadly my boyfriend is not. While the flares aren't good, I hope these last few weeks pass quickly enough, and then you can get back on the good meds with a healthy newborn!

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  5. I love when you can get together with someone what you haven't seen in a long time and just pick up where you left off! So fun.

    I am sorry about the RA flare. It looks painful.

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  6. Yum, I love olives too. Those look so good! I love enchiladas but very rarely make them. Truly "traditional" enchiladas are made slightly different- they actually dip the tortillas in the salsa, fold them on the plate and then TOP them with the meat and cheese. Also, they use the crumbly white cheese which I'm not a big fan of. This is one Mexican meal that I prefer the more Americanized version with the melted cheese! :)

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  7. Great reminder to read some Wallace Stegner. Crossing to Safety is one of my favorite books. In fact, Sidney was on my list of boy names I liked that book so much.

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  8. I’m late to read your blog, and the mention of 80 degree days seems sons ago, but once the weather changed it went fast! I could go for some 60 degree days, that’s for sure! It has been a beautiful fall for color, that’s for sure. The last two fals have not been that way, so really enjoyed it!
    I feel so bad about your flares, as I know they are miserable.

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  9. We started watching the World's Toughest Race and we were enjoying it but then switched over to Brooklyn 99 which I am absolutely loving so we fell off watching WTR. I do think Kyria would rock at that race! I would never be able to do it haha. The mountain biking in all the thick tough mud just looked so awful. We have such a hard time finding shows to watch too so I'm glad you recommended Brooklyn 99. Eric had actually watched most of it a few years ago but he tends to binge watch / have on in the background shows more than I do so he doesn't even remember all of it so it's been fun to rewatch together and a funny light show is just what I need these days.

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  10. Just looking at that picture of your hand, I can imagine how much that would hurt :-( Yikes! Just doing every day things would be so hard.

    Oh my goodness, we are obsessed with documentaries. If you want something true and intense, but not grim, I highly recommend NOVA: Thai Cave Rescue, about that soccer team that was trapped in the flooded cave for a very long time. It had us on the edge of our seats the entire time. We are obsessed with all the NOVA documentaries on Netflix/TV. There was one about slime recently that was absolutely fascinating, and last night we watched one called "NOVA: Can We Cool the Planet?" and it was amazing! We were blown away by the technologies that people are coming up with, and we learned a tonne from it. We love,love, love the Cosmos docuseries (National Geographic) and One Strange Rock (also NG), and keep re-watching them to cram it all into our brains. Lol. #nerdalert. "Origins" is really good too (docuseries). On Netflix the "Explained" shows are so good, because they are short (20 minutes or so) and I feel like we learn a lot from them, and they touch on so many different topics. I also love all the food/diet documentaries on Netflix. I think we watch every documentary on there, other than the true crime ones because I get scared 😨

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  11. We've been watching Matlock and Perry Mason hahahahaha

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