Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Another 15 minutes

I just made two homemade pizzas. Well, homemade to the extent that the dough actually came out of one of those vacuum-sealed cans that pops when you open it. One pizza is barbecue chicken. This is my best pizza. The trick is to use honey barbecue sauce, especially Sweet Baby Ray's, which might only be sold in the Chicago area. Then you add a combo of mozzarella and cheddar cheeses and frozen chicken strips coated with some of the barbecue sauce. After baking, you add some cilantro. You're also supposed to put red onions on it, but I find most people (myself included) don't actually like red onions.

The other pizza is three kinds of cheese with turkey pepperoni. The three cheeses are mozzarella, Parmesan, and Romano. That's right, I had all three of those cheeses, plus the cheddar, just hanging around in my fridge.

Anyway, the pizzas need to sit and cool for 15 minutes so all the cheese doesn't slide off when you cut it. I'm using those 15 minutes for a quick blog update.

Let me start by discussing movies. The last movie I got from Netflix was Up in the Air. It seemed so light and quirky until the end when there was a surprise plot twist that just made me feel bad about the whole world. But then, I guess I should have figured it would end up being heavy, because no light, quirky movies get nominated for Oscars.

I'm doing a little bit better in the book department. I just read Shanghai Girls, which was one of those books that follows a main character and her family through many decades. The family emigrates from China to live in Los Angeles , and the book mostly takes place in the 1930s through the 1950s. I was especially interested in it because I'm from the Los Angeles area, but I think it would be interesting to people from other areas as well, because a lot of it is about the changing attitudes toward Chinese immigrants in the first half of the 20th century.

Following Shanghai Girls, I had a brief flirtation with the newest Jodi Picoult. Let me tell you how every single Jodi Picoult book works. You take a kid with some devastating disease, the kid's martyr mom who has no outside life, neglected sibling who feels torn between wanting to protect the ailing kid but also wanting attention all for him/herself and therefore acts out in socially inappropriate ways, a father who believes the mother's obsession with the sick kid is ruining their marriage, and some random outside character who later becomes integral to the story. You tell each chapter from the point of view of one of these characters, so the reader has no idea what to think or who to side with. There's some kind of legal battle, and the whole thing results in the characters' lives being driven to the brink of disaster on every front, until the court trial comes out favorably for the family and things improve. And then somebody dies at the end, making the whole legal battle and ensuing drama completely pointless.

Deciding I didn't want to put myself through that sort of emotional tedium, I gave up on Jodi. And now I'm reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, which is the story of a curmudgeonly old widower in a small English town. It wouldn't seem like something that would be enjoyable, but somehow that book wormed its way into my heart, and I look forward to reading it every night.

Of course, it has to compete with TV. Glee has been a little bit hit-and-miss since it came back on, mostly because it seems like there is just so much relationship drama going on. But nowhere near as much drama as some of the pointless stuff that happens on Parenthood. Does anybody else feel like Parenthood might be written by 8-year-olds who don't know how to think through logical consequences? Like, for example, on the episode a few shows back, where the cousin Drew gets all upset because Uncle Adam cancels baseball with him because he has to take Max out for frozen yogurt. Wouldn't it have made sense for Uncle Adam to say, "We can't play baseball, but we will come by and pick you up for frozen yogurt with us"? And then last week, when Adam and Haddie argue because Haddie wants to go out wearing a sexy bra? Wouldn't it have made sense for them to just compromise and have Haddie change? But anyway, that show makes no sense, but for some reason I still tune in.

Oh and full confession, most nights I watch DVDs of Seinfeld with the "Notes About Nothing" captions on, which are Pop-Up Video-style notes at the bottom with fun facts. Seinfeld still trumps current TV, even though the last episode aired 12 years ago and I've seen every episode several times.

On the real-life front, I have stopped making Nathan take naps. It's too hard to get him to go to bed at night when he takes a nap, and really every "nap" is just a series of frustrating trips in his room to tell him to get in his bed and go to sleep. But not having him take a nap is challenging on a few different levels. Surprisingly, physical exhaustion on my part is not really a problem, even though I usually took a little nap myself when Nathan used to nap. A bigger problem is the mental exhaustion of not having a nap to break up the day. I enjoyed that time when Nathan was closed up in his room and I was closed up in my room, and then we could be apart for awhile before resuming our day. Now, the days are just long. And yes, I know I could try to institute some kind of "quiet time" during the day to take the place of naps, but I think that will have to wait awhile because (a) right now there's still a chance Nathan will fall asleep, and (b) he's not quite old/mature enough to just stay quietly in his bed.

Another problem is that I had a full schedule of workout-based activities for myself in the evenings, and now that Nathan isn't taking naps he's not quite up to going to the gym after 6 p.m. (Or maybe I'm just projecting and it's just me who isn't up to going to the gym after 6 p.m.) Not a problem, though, because now that I'm becoming an avid runner, I can work out during the daytime. I should go to weight-lifting on Monday nights to help my running/bone density, but right now I'm failing at that. Also I'm failing at Boxing Boot Camp, which I really think does something for my upper-arm toning, and with bathing suit season coming up ... anyway, I'm not going to go on and on about my various workouts and my failures to go to them, because really this paragraph was supposed to be a segue into talking about running.

The running is actually going really great! Everybody told me that if you start out slowly, you will be surprised at how quickly you get to a point where you can run longer distances. A few weeks ago I could not run half a lap around my local park (which has a really weird distance of 4/10 of a mile per lap). And now I can run 4 whole laps, for a total of 20 minutes! My legs are not as sore afterward, and even though I'm pushing myself, I don't feel like I want to die like I did when I first started running. Anyway, the 5K is May 22, and I don't know if I'll be ready, but I have until May 20 to sign up.

So, since I am running, I have promised myself I can't feel bad about skipping other gym workouts. And, dare I say it, am I actually moving toward a point of body acceptance? Okay, no, I'm not, but I think I'm on the right path.

Also the pool opens in a few weeks, so who the hell wants to be spending evenings at the gym?

And the dishwasher finally came, and I'm in love. Because I'm ridiculous like that.

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