Greetings from outside! It’s been a beautiful day and I’ve been able to spend a couple of hours in the outdoors today. The sun has long left our front door, but it’s still shining bright. All the more reason to keep enjoying it.
We planned on going to the park today. Sometimes it seems that even when my husband is home for the weekend, we don’t get to really do much together. Those plans were nixed yesterday when a client decided they wanted to launch their website today. Who launches on a Saturday? Really. He broke the news to me on the way to dinner with some friends of ours to celebrate a birthday. It really could have soured the mood at dinner, but once we were with our friends, all that went out the window.
We tried a new restaurant, La Catalana, a few doors down from the restaurant we planned on, Havana Rumba. The wait was an hour, which is to be expected of the popular places on a Friday night. I was supposed to do call ahead seating for the dinner so we didn’t have to wait that long, but we didn’t have the needed 8 people to do that. Plans change for a reason and we enjoyed the food and the live music, flamenco guitar, played by a man who was born and grew up in Russia. It was quite beautiful and my friends decided to mistake my closing of my eyes to picture a scene to go along with the music with being drunk. It was only my second glass of sangria and one of them knows it takes more than that to get me drunk. Then one of them kept bringing up Quentin Tarantino and I swear I played out a Mexican bar slaughter scene in my head during one of the songs. The nice part of it all is I came up with a couple of lines for a poem that I still need to work on – it’s been a busy day. Who knows, maybe I’ll go back to that Mexican bar slaughter scene and write about that, too.
I woke up bright and early to my husband’s alarm and fixed us some breakfast as he still laid in bed. It was about 10am when I finally got out of the apartment, camera in hand, to head to the park. It’s amazing how close I am to one of our state parks and I’ve never been until today. It actually took me three times to get into an area of the park I wanted. There are several entrances and the first two weren’t that excited to me. Once I was finally parked and out of the car, the sweet smell of jasmine beckoned me. So close to pikake that I didn’t want to leave it. But, leave it I did to see some of the rest of the park. I did say goodbye to it on my way out though.
I spent a lot of time around the gym and the fitness trail. After I felt like I had gotten all the pictures I could, I sat down on a bench and just enjoyed the sunshine. I would have loved to have had my book with me, but I didn’t think I’d be sitting at all. Lesson learned. I did sit out here and read when I got home though. 🙂
It took me a while to get motivated to fix lunch because I knew it was going to take a long time as there was a lot of prep for it and I didn’t get to do any food prep yesterday. Once I got to it, it slowly started to come together. I made something called Palm Oil Chop that I found on the Tropical Traditions recipe blog. It comes from Western Africa and is made for big family dinners. The only thing I didn’t do for it was the boiled egg that I just didn’t have space for on the stove. Then while cleaning up I realized I forgot to add the shredded coconut. All the garnishes are supposed to be laid out for diners to choose what they want to add to their chop. Well, I wanted my husband to not have to worry about it so I laid out the various garnishes around the plate with the chop in the center. I have to say that it was well worth the time and effort to fix. I have leftovers in the fridge which will no doubt be consumed tomorrow and I plan on having it for breakfast Monday. It makes a great lunch or dinner, but with the fruit, I think it would make a great breakfast, too. I took the picture on my phone so I could upload easier to Facebook. Also, this was my husband’s plate. There were no chili peppers on my plate other than the chopped ones that were in the Palm Oil Chop.
Palm Oil Chop with sliced tomato, sliced chili peppers, sliced boiled sweet potatoes, pineapple, mango, lettuce, parsley, and sautéed onions as garnishes.
I debated all day on whether or not to do my interval training today. I did the 6 minute NEWO yesterday and by the time I went to bed last night, my glutes were already hurting. They still hurt, but not as bad. I think the walking around the park and the standing in the kitchen helped work all that out. I wound up going out at about 5pm for the interval training. I could feel my TMJ acting up so I thought it might loosen me up all over like it did Thursday. Several hours after I did it on Thursday, my jaw popped several times. It worked once, it has to work again, right? No such luck yet.
I do have a lot of links to share with everyone, but I know this is getting long. Hopefully, I’ll have time to blog tomorrow after I get back from the Board Meeting. Or maybe even in the morning if I can manage to pull myself out of bed. I plan on getting as much sleep as I can tonight because I’ll be in Conference Hell on Monday all day. I haven’t even watched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution yet! We got home in time to see the last 15 minutes last night, but I was hoping we’d be able to watch the entire show after my husband is done working, but not sure that’ll happen any time soon.
To quote R.E.M. “Ohhh life.”
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