Word of the week: ban - house/home
In my life: It's been a hot weekend here in Sydney. Where did the relatively cooler weather from the last few weeks go? It's Autumn and we're still running the aircon to get relief from the heat.
On the exercise front, I've been doing the new program from this week and the weights have increased quite a bit. I've also graduated to incline pushups on the barbell instead of the box ones but boy is it incredibly hard to do. I want to add in some home workouts to improve upper body strength because the pushups, ring rows & dead hangs are still some of the most difficult exercises for me.
Running continues as usual but seeing my trainer suffer from a running induced injury (stress hip fracture) only makes it more apparent to me that we need to be really careful while working out. I do try to warm up and cool down appropriately and am being more careful with my stance.
We'd bought some marinated lamb from the butcher at the produce market and finally made it this week. I've never really cooked much red meat before, so I just popped it into the air fryer. It took about 30 minutes, and we used the meat thermometer to check if it was done (honestly one of the best things to buy for a kitchen if you aren't vegetarian). We had it as a main one day and had the leftovers the next day in a wrap with a Tzatziki dip. I also bought some zucchini and made Parmesan Zucchini fries to go with that in the quest to eat lower carbs.
At work, the hotfix from last week finally went live this week, which means no more early morning monitoring. I also took some time off in lieu of all the time spent on this and logged off early on Friday afternoon.
After I logged off early, we popped into the library for a bit. I grabbed some magazines, a low carb cookbook and saw that Ice Station by Mathew Reilly was also there, so I picked that up for a re-read. We went to Twilight Food Fair, but none of the stalls really interested me, so we went to Sakura for dinner instead and then came back to the market for some gelato to finish off our meal.
On Saturday, we had our usual guitar class. We're learning to play Smile which has the chords as well as the melody in the tabs together. I was excited to see this because the song I've wanted to learn to play is also similar to this. It's pretty hard to play like this when your chord changes are not fast and instinctive though, so lots of practice will be required.
Post guitar class, we did a produce market run and then met a friend from college for brunch. It was good to spend some time catching up and to meet her mother. Came home after that and spent most of the afternoon trying to get the song right again while watching some of the races from Melbourne and some Wheel of Time episodes. Closed the evening by reading a little bit of Ice Station.
Today (Sunday), we went to our nearby cafe for some brekkie, I had a large flat white and the buttermilk pancakes which came as a set of 4. If this was a year ago, I probably would have eaten all of it, but the medication I'm now on really makes so it much easier to know when I'm full and takes away much of the food noise.
People talk about CICO all the time and are almost militant about it, but I wish more people were aware that while 'calories in' is always in our control, not everyone starts the same for 'calories out'. I'm eternally grateful that I have doctors who actually listen and give good advice beyond just "lose wight and you'll get better".
We popped into the nearby op shop after breakfast - I'd seen a keyboard there before and wanted to see if I could use that to learn. It was very old so decided against getting it, but I did pick up two books and Sathya picked up a Foo Fighters t-shirt.
Came home and watched the main race for a bit before heading to the park for the first of this year's Sunset Series events. This first one was by the North Sydney Symphony orchestra - it's a community orchestra supported by the North Sydney council and they perform about 5 concerts a year. I heard some new to me pieces by some new/known to me composers. The turnout was pretty decent, especially considering the weather, with lots of families there. We popped down our picnic rug, grabbed some pork and chive dumplings from one of the food trucks to munch on and spent a pleasant 2 hours there.
On my screens:
- Wheel of Time (S3, Prime, Ongoing): I saw some of the book vloggers I follow mention that season 3 was out. After some confusion over whether we had watched S2 or not (we had), we finally started S3. I have to say I still have the biggest girl crush on Natasha O'Keeffe who plays Lanfear, she's so perfect for that role.
In S3, we're seeing more of the world in the story beyond what we have seen before, and the group is getting split into different storylines again. It's a bit hard to keep track of everything with how limited shows tend to be compared to books. It makes me want to read the novels because the stories are so intriguing but the last time, I tried to read book 1, I was just so bored. Jordan describes everything in excruciating detail, and I just don't have the patience for it. Maybe someday I'll give it another try though. - My Golden Blood (Thai, Queer, Supernatural, Ongoing): Gawin is back on my screens. I loved him in Be My Favorite and I'm glad to have him back, this time as a naive twenty-year-old.
I can best describe this show as gay Twilight. Orphan with special, powerful blood meets immortal vampire and they fall in love. The reviews have been mixed and so far, the plot, CGI and the audio quality leave much to be desired. But I'm actually having a lot of fun watching this while trying to find all the references to Twilight. It's campy (like almost all vampire shows) but not so much that I cringe while watching it. - The Good Detective (Korean, Crime, Netflix, Ongoing watch): Slowly watching this with Sathya but we still haven't caught up to where I watched by myself.
On my bookshelf:
- Ice Station by Matthew Reilly (re-read): I think I've mentioned before that I like Reilly's Scarecrow series. Saw that it was in the library this time, so picked it up for a re-read and boy had I forgotten how creepy some of his scenes are. I've asked Sathya also to read this if he has the time, as it's fairly past faced and I think he'd enjoy it.
On my playlist:
Gawin is not only a good actor but also has an incredible voice and he's sung the title tracks for many shows. The OST for My Golden Blood was also released this week and I've heard it at least ten times so far.
On my camera:
Wanted to go on a photo walk this weekend but the weather made that impossible. So, I'm leaving you with a candid shot of Sathya in our local library.
Thanks for tagging along!
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