things i love the mostest:
1) the pool!
it's been deadly hot around these parts lately. i think due to budgetary concerns we're going to hold off on the central AC until next summer. i've actually been fine, but the dotytron! oy! what a pile of gripes. we're totally taking advantage of the pool though. it's going to be a bitter pill to swallow when they start charging a dollar a visit (!!!) next summer. zomg, we're so lucky. here are my words of advice for all you prospective home buyers: make sure there's an under-used pool within a 2 minute walk. we totally do the walk of shame back to our house in our dripping suits with just a towel wrapped around us - treating it like a private/backyard pool. the dotytron is all about his mid-day dips. anyway, we've been getting by with the fan circulating on the furnace, dips in the pool, and cold showers before bed, and a spray bottle filled with ice water for a nether regions shpritz followed by a fan blast. we did haul our futon down to the living room yesterday evening and slept there. it was fun! i love wall-to-wall soft smushy spaces. maximum loafage.
today i had work book club. we read carlos ruiz zafón's "the shadow of the wind" which was sold to me (by the other book club members) as a "magic realism" novel (already a genre i'm not super-duper fond of) but actually turned out to be more correctly, gothic. it's about this boy, who is taken by his father to pick a book from the "cemetery of forgotten books" - he picks a title by this obscure spanish writer, julian carax, and then finds out subsequently that a mysterious figure has been systematically destroying all of carax's books in existence. the story is interwoven with scenes from a barcelona still in the grips of franco's fascist dictatorship in the post-war era - it's very removed from the barcelona i know and love, which was all sunshine and life. the book is very grey, misty, shadowy - filled with family secrets, a crumbling mansion, thwarted love and (gothic alert!) incest. i wasn't super into it. maybe it's the season - i didn't feel like reading something so dark and misty in the headiness of summer. i also found it inconsistent and discordant, tonally. it's quite literary, but the narrative elements doesn't uphold that literary quality - instead the story is quite melodramatic and soap opera-y. i'm not sure if that might be a difference dependent on the culture of the audience (it was a new york times' bestseller and is one of the top novels spain has ever produced), but overall, i wasn't feeling it.
last night's semi-low carb dinner was grilled ribeye steak, corn on the cob, potatoes roasted in a foil packet with roasted garlic on the bbq, then tossed with chimichurri, and finally, that bean and grape tomato salad with mustard dill dressing:
then i went decidedly non-low carb and treated us to ice cream at ed's real scoop. so danger having that place close by. i figured it was a reward for doing 8 lazy, preggos laps in the pool and biking to work and back. tonight's semi-low carb dinner was whole wheat pasta with a fresh tomato, red onion, basil, garlic, pickled eggplant, chili oil and balsamic vinegar "sauce" with a baby spinach salad with leftover dressing from that antipasto salad i made ages ago:
no dessert (so far).
fin.
No comments:
Post a Comment