TL; DR: I had another mostly chill weekend! I was purposefully preparing for two upcoming busy weekends by being as lazy as possible this weekend and last weekend. I still did a long run, walked with a friend, did a long ride, and a few chores, but I sat around a lot. Yay!

Friday

I ran 13.1 miles before work. I like doing my long runs on Fridays because it gives me Saturday as an active recovery day before I do a long bike ride on Sunday (my watch told me I needed 45 hours of recovery after I finished that run!).

I’ve been behind on podcasts so I decided to catch up on my run, but wasn’t feeling it after I finished with The Popcast. I haven’t been very podcasty lately! Maybe it’s an end of summer thing? So I started a new book, Thank You for Listening, which I loved! I switched from that to music for the last 2.5 miles to try to speed up my legs (it works for me!).

During my lunch break I worked on finishing up resining rocks I’d been working on a small bit at a time during the week. I was trying to resin too many at once, and in hot conditions that made the resin super thin, and was dreading using my lunch break to touch up/re-resin all of them, but I only had to re-resin one side of 6 of them and sand/file down spots on about 10. I called that a success!

After work I put all my new Shitterfly magnets up, then took the nap I’d been thinking about all week, after reading part of Practice Makes Perfect. The nap wasn’t nearly long enough, but I’ll take what I can get!

Ha! About half of those are gifts. 

The BIG Friday night news is I actually made dinner! I messed it up, but I actually made it! Go, me!

In our house, Steven typically cooks and I shop/prep/sous chef/clean, but he was working in the yard and asked if I could make dinner. I’d just received two vegan cookbooks for my birthday, so I made the fried rice recipe from The Six Vegan Sisters Everyday Cookbook. I thought it was calling for WAY too much rice and cut some out, then realized after talking to Anne (and later Steven), it likely meant cooked rice. Oops.

During dinner we finished watching Liar, Liar then watched I, Tonya. Lately we’ve been rewatching a lot of stuff we’ve seen before. Usually I paint and listen, but I watched and mindlessly scrolled on my phone. I felt like I hadn’t done that in ages. That was enough for a while; it’s so unfulfilling.

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Saturday

On Saturday morning I had a lovely walk with Anne at Half Day Forest Preserve. We hadn’t seen each other in person since May of 2021, or talked that much, but like many old friends do, we picked it right back up, and it was so fulfilling to connect in person. It made me miss when she lived here and we saw each other weekly! There’s just nothing like the in-person connection. I’m so grateful she fit me into her trip out here.

I stopped at my PO box on the way home and had a surprise package from @michaelas_rocks, who sent me the Hello Kitty Jack & Sally rocks I saw on her account and absolutely LOVED. That was so sweet of her (and I adore the koozie she sent)!

When I got home I did a chore I’ve been wanting to do for weeks – cutting the flower stems off of our hostas. They drive me bonkers, sticking out of the hostas all bare and stupid-looking! It felt amazing to get that done (and to listen to more of my audiobook during it).

Then it was relaxation time! I ate lunch and watched Red, White & Royal Blue, and painted. I have to say, the movie adaptation was hella cheesy and felt Hallmark movie-esque but… I did have a stupid grin on my face and cry during certain parts of it, so it obviously got to me.

The rest of my day was so chill! It was amazing! When Steven got home from work he joined me in watching Twister,

then we got produce from the garden (with help from Tywin),

and made BLTs for dinner (Black Krim tomatoes are SO GOOD! We definitely have to plant those next year.) and watched Signs. I painted through all the movies we watched and got 8 rocks done. Woo hoo!

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Sunday

I did a long bike ride (48.99 miles) Sunday morning and finished Thank You for Listening. That book made me dumb smile so much, and I loved the characters and story!

I enjoyed my ride. I didn’t have superstar energy levels but felt good, and have been thinking about doing an organized ride in the fall. I found a ride out of Evanston on September 10th that offers 25, 50, 62, and 100 miles. I’ve never done a century before! That could be fun… hmm…

Then I had another chill day, yay! I took a bath, worked on making vegan chicken salad for a Fake Meats reel (then edited the reel and caption), read in bed, then worked on blog posts.

In at attempt to watch something new, we tried to watch the horrible new Gal Gadot movie on Netflix – Heart of Stone. Yikes. And by tried to watch it, I mean worked on this blog post.