Madness, Loss, Love and the Second Best Slice of Pizza
Audrey Watters
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A very busy week. A very busy Monday, so a bulleted list to describe said week:
Reading: Finished A Pocketful of Happiness; continuing Filterworld; finished A Feast for Starving Stone; started Every Man for Himself and God Against All; started Be Useful
Cooking: White chili with chicken and quinoa and Mark Bittman’s yogurt biscuits; crispy baked pesto tofu and gnocchi (store bought, but the pesto was homemade) — this did not work out well at all; sweet potato peanut butter brownies; Japanese curry and white rice
Dining Out: Seven Grams Caffe for a coffee and cookie before therapy; Giardino 54 on Friday night; Absolute Bagels on Saturday — as usual; Cheeseboat on Saturday night, with dessert at Oasis Cafe; Bleecker Street Pizza on Sunday night after the play (I'll call this my second favorite slice in NYC). I always review the places we eat at on Yelp; if nothing else it helps me remember where we've actually dined. I was asked to join the "Yelp Elite Squad," but reading Filterworld I'm struck by how much sites like Yelp (and Instagram) are flattening everything into a certain "look"
Watching, Digitally: we finished the first season of Slow Horses
Watching, IRL: we went to see Eddie Izzard's Hamlet. She plays all the parts. It was quite incredible — absolutely hilarious in parts (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, obviously), but deeply moving in others.
To Watch, IRL: I secured tickets to the St. Paddy’s Celebration of Sinead and Shane
Second Breakfast: I wrote about heart rate monitoring and Orange Theory Fitness; I worked on the podcast episode that came out today; I published the weekly "What’s Good"
Productivity: I played around with the "productivity" software Notion — which confirms my suspicioun that any software that's touts "productivity" is just about making you do a lot of cow-clicking and menial tasks to make you feel busy, optimized, organized
Visitors: Our friend Steve visited on Friday and Saturday, so there was much API blah-blah-blah-ing in the apartment
Therapy: I went to therapy — exhausting, so exhausting, but I feel better for having started
Training: the cold snap ended so we could walk Kin to work again. I was back on my own bike again to and from the gym (but I did ride the apartment building's Peloton on Monday to get my "long ride" in). I realized I screwed up the timing of the lifting program I’m doing — it’s a 16 week program for runners, but 4 of those are for post-race. So I started too early. Nonetheless, lifts went well on Wednesday and on Friday, save the stupid Turkish Get Up which I just cannot get a hang of. The training for the April half marathon is proceeding — things will start ramping up this week. I did speed work on Tuesday (60 minutes with 15 minutes at tempo) — outside!; 60 minutes on Thursday; long run on Saturday — 100 minutes; and I ran to and from my volunteer stint in the park on Sunday. I signed up for the Philadelphia Half Marathon, end of November.
Volunteering: I had my first stint as a NYRR Volunteer Leader in Training at the Fred Lebow Half Marathon. The weather was utterly miserable — cold and pouring rain. What's worse? Running two laps of Central Park in that weather or handing out water? It's hard to say. I'll have two more small races to work, then the marquis one in March — the NYC Half. Then I'll be a volunteer leader in training at the marathon in November. And then I'll get to run one small corner of the show at races in the future. Pretty excited to be "giving back" like this and to get to be a part of the running community here