Waanie

Mid-week update week 1: Strength training: 2/2 Mobility: 3/4 Outside minutes: 187/250 Coziness: plenty of tea, cats and delicious cooking . This morning during strength training I felt a bit weak, although I do recognize that my form of push ups is improving (especally the last few). I progressed from bulgarian split squats to beginner shrimp squats, and holy moly, they are hard to get "right". I want to get my knee and toes on and off the ground at the same time, and that's apparently harder than it looks. I know that I'll always have good days and bad days, and that my period coming up is not helping my strength, but it's still frustrating .

It is! This afternoon I managed to get inside just before hell broke loose. Nice, I hope you'll enjoy it! I love snacking on raw zuurkool as well, and raw zuurkool with mustard is also amazing on sandwiches. What do you use as cheese-replacement, if I may ask? I usually use margarine instead of butter for this kind of thing, but cheese is one of the dinner-ingredients that I wouldn't know how to replace.

Does it need to be in Canada? Living here in NL seems much cheaper than where you live, and if you're a woman then everyone basically assumes that you won't work more than 32 hours per week (althought that is excluding breaks, so in practice you'd win only 3 hours). With the current pandemic, there's more and more companies that want you to work remotely as well. If you want cheap and great internet, I'd suggest the east of Groningen; there's nothing to do there and you might feel the occasional earthquake, but it's incredibly cheap and is close to many internet hubs. If that's still too expensive for you... have you thought about Romania? /s

This is nice, you're stronger than you thought . I hope they haven't disappeared again, unless you ate them all.

I'm glad that you're managing to do these things in your spare time, even though work is blugh. We're having intense showers here as well, so I totally understand why you wouldn't want to go outside at the moment .

Wow, I've never seen those prices here. In season, fresh vegetables are cheaper here than frozen, and not all vegetables are suitable for freezing. I always have frozen green beans, peas and spinach in the freezer, and someitmes things like cauliflower or broad beans. Other frozen vegetables are just not cost-effective for me (given that I don't like kale), and cutting up vegetables is not that much work either. To be fair, I don't look too closely at the cost of my produce nowadays, it's just that habit that has me automatically buy the cheaper and in-season vegetables.

I moved the cat and started strength training! However, now that I'm sitting down to type again, the cat has found me again as well. My rest-break is almost over though, so I have to disappoint her... AGAIN. It's not so bad for me fortunately, I typically have at least a few days, more often a week or more to plan stuff with it. I do think that the kg of bell peppers I picked up needs to be used soon though, since they were on irregular sale.

Hmm, I realised over the past few days that I'm really eating too little protein. If I'm just counting my typical meals (so no cinnamon rolls or other irregular breakfast/lunch items), I stay around 50-60g of protein per day, which is also all vegetarian. I should either make sure to eat more snacks with protein (I have plenty of calories for snacks), add more toppings to my lunch sandwiches, or start buying protein powder for in my breakfast-oatmeal. I think the powder is the easiest to implement, but I'm not sure what's tasty. I will need to think about this. My cat is again sitting in my lap now that I'm procrastinating from my strength training . This is my last vacation day, so she will have a difficult time getting used to fewer hugs in the next few weeks . I also love being flooded with fresh produce, but it does take a little bit of extra planning and creativity to make sure we don't have to throw anything away. We usually already have plenty of vegetables in our diet, but on the weeks when there's many tasty things on sale, we're eating even more.

Yup, they were . Tuesday I managed to complete my todo list, which turned out to be not so bad after all . 44 minutes of activity in total, and mobility work done. The cats gave me hugs all day, and the cinnamon rolls helped me with autumny coziness. There have been so many autumn vegetables on sale in the past weeks, while summer vegetables are also still cheap, that I'm overflowing in the vegetables a bit. We'll probably manage to eat all of them before they'll go bad, but it means we're having no dinners with under 300g vegetables each at the moment.

Ah, our tastes must differ then. I grew up with plain boiled potatoes with just very watery "gravy" to top it with, and that's the most sure way I'll never cook that again. Adding garlic sounds good, or maybe adding some cheese? I'm starting to see possibilities .

Yes, I loved those books! Fun story, action-packed, and with a tall dark and handsome. It was that series that lead me to reading more space opera, for example the books by David Weber and by Elizabeth Moon. Those are not romantic series, but are space operas with strong women nonetheless. Anyway, I put both of Amanda Bouchet's series on my wish-list now .

Nice! I had never thought about wearing a skirt in winter with leggings, I should check out that style! I hope that your upper back will get un-stuck again soon! And yay for walks with other people .

I like the fresh tomato-idea, I would even take it one step further and make a tomato salsa around it . They would be great as tapas, so maybe adding some more fingerfood and sauces would work? Then it'll become really high calorie though, so I shouldn't do that too often . I don't think I'd like to combine it with rice and an egg.

Congratulations!

Monday was really productive challenge-wise: strength training and mobility work in the morning, then groceries and lunch, and in the afternoon a long walk. I enjoyed the walk more than I'd thought; I've never been to that area before even though it's just a 10 minute drive, but the trail was decent and quiet. I was almost back to the car in time as well, I just had a few minutes of rain. In the evening we had a kahoot-quiz-thingy with the orchestra, which was fun. Dinner was stir fried "fake shawarma" with brussel sprouts, mushrooms, onion and bell pepper, served with sweet potato-fries. It was simple and delicious. I'm glad that the sprouts are in season again, since they're delicious is prepared correctly. It's always more work to clean them than I planned, but that's life . Outdoors minutes: 96. Tuesday morning I feel a bit unproductive, but that might be because my todo list is too long for today. I did buy and install a new headlight for my bike and baced cinnamon rolls from scratch. Otherwise it was a bit of this and a bit of that in the household, and catching up on NF threads. I might be following too many people at the moment .