we've been eating dinner and then hunkering down in front of the glowy box to watch movies while i knit knit knit away on my niece's knitted bolero. it's going to be pretty cute! i'm making some pattern adjustments to suit my taste and i'm optimistic about how they'll turn out...i had to rip it out at some point and almost ended up having to unravel the whole thing - fixing the mistake has cost me some precious time and meant that it's been consuming my thoughts/leisure time until i got it back on track and right again. the roomie is sick with a head cold so we've been enjoying the quiet comfort of escaping together into random tales from hollywoodland.
i biked to work the past two days and tried going for a run yesterday at lunch. i didn't even make it a 1/4 of the way around the park...but i kept at it...walking in between little bursts of jogging. i'm excited to get good again...the key is making sure i make it a priority to stretch afterwards, lest my already tense hamstrings retract into even tighter coils of petrified muscle.
last night for dinnie i used leftover corned beef to make us reuben sammies. it's my first time making the CLASSIC reuben, complete with sauerkraut (i had been unnecessarily suspicious of its inclusion before) and thousand island dressing (in lieu of the more traditional russian dressing.) reuben sammies are AMAZING! alongside we had a giant salad with more (kraft) thousand island dressing (i was having weird thousand island dressing cravings yesterday - a desire for a creamy salad topper instead of the usual vinaigrette coating i gussy up.) this corned beef is the gift that keeps on giving. i have enough leftovers to turn into a corned beef hash for a future breakfast or breakfast-for-dinner. that's THREE meals out of one 4.25lb corned beef. thrifty thrifty!
tonight we're continuing "irish springs" week and having lamb and guinness stew with carrots, mushrooms, rosemary, and a root vegetable mash (potato, sweet potato, rutabaga, mashed with my roasted garlic-parsley butter and some milk.) i threw in some bits of calf liver too, just to clear out the freezer some. i know that's going to gross some people out but it was really tasty. i'm testing out the new slowcooker. it's okay. i liked the old one because it had a light that turned on when you turned the knob so you knew that it was working...but really, a slow cooker is a slow cooker is a slow cooker - you don't need all the bells and whistles and for it to tweet you when the food's ready. 
on monday night we watched 'little dieter needs to fly,' a documentary by our hero, werner herzog (he turned it into a feature film starring christian bale, called 'rescue dawn' - a way more michael mann-ish hollywood title befitting the fictionalized treatment.) the documentary chronicles the story of dieter dengler, who spent his whole life wanting to be a pilot. he finally gets his wish and enlists in the u.s. navy and is shot down by enemy fire during the vietnam war and captured by the viet cong, held captive, tortured, before making an escape. it's a hellish portrait that leaves you wondering at a person's capacity to endure, process, and exist with such horrific memories and through such limit-defining experiences.
to counterbalance the monday night screening, the dotytron rented 'role models' which stars lagerfeld fan favorites paul rudd (i want to marry him) and jane lynch. this was surprisingly not not bad for a movie featuring the actor most well-known for playing stiffler. it's formulaic, kind of dumb, but not COMPLETELY insulting to the viewer's intelligence, it has a lot of heart, and it champions the causes of the underdog/oddball and LARPers (that's live action role play to you and me.) it got more than a few chuckles out of me and so was worth the rental price (just barely.) i have a book review for you but i'll save it for another day. in the meantime, allow me to just say that while i was amongst the luddites who grumbled about the LAST facebook update and then rapidly forgot what the previous iteration even looked like...this new one is TOTAL balls. it makes everything a lot harder to use/less intuitive and it's super-annoying. almost enough to turn me off using it entirely. not impressed facebook impresarios. and when you lose a member of the creative class (i've taken up richie florida's charge and am self-applying the term) (don't you love how i call him richie florida?) you lose a not-so-valuable-though-no-less-vociferous cog in the great social networking machine.
fin.
