disdainfully curious

We were, as usual, up quite early this morning and while Don visited the driving range, I started with a run.

I thought it worth mixing up the route to get out of my comfort zone a bit, but had intended to do nothing silly, hoping for over 3km, but under 5km. But it was such a wonderfully lovely day and I felt so fabulous that about 3km in, that I turned left down to blackwattle bay instead of right to home and ran along the foreshore a bit before turning back. After 5.5km I did a 500m walk / run combo back home. Total distance was 7.68km and I ran 6.5km. That’s the longest I have run (outdoors) since April 2014!

But probably not really the best idea because my knee gave me some trouble. Yes, the same trouble I had on that last long run in April 2014. Despite that, it was definitely worth it – I felt so full of energy and all round delightedness for the rest of the day. Last evening I read a quite good article about running and depression and this definitely holds true for me. I am so glad we’re heading into spring so I can get out more – but I really need to take the physio rehab stuff Very seriously.

I was so full of energy that I cleaned the oven (which desperately needed it) afterward and then did a bunch of tidying.

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Don and I then headed out to get provisions for frugal meals to take us to Wednesday. We’re attempting to stick to our monthly food budget as part of ThePlan and had been a bit free and easy with our grocery spending earlier in the month. Lots of chicken legs and chicken wings and vegetables.

Tonight was BBQ chicken legs with Don’s BBQ sauce with Don’s potato salad – completely amazing and total cost was around $8.00 (we already had the mayo; and the BBQ sauce was in the freezer). Don also made chicken stock, which I reckon cost about $4.00 (though we already had carrots and some mangy looking celery). Tomorrow we’re having Nigel Slater’s chicken wings with cracked pepper + spicy potatoes (from marie claire: spicy) – this will be about $7.50(ish).

We’re kind of cheating on Monday with a heavily modified version of Nigella’s pasta risotto with peas + pancetta, because we have all the ingredients already. And a 5:2 roast vegetable frittata + salad on Tuesday – maybe $6.00 (we already have eggs). Then shopping on Wednesday.

I’m pretty pleased with our discipline – it would be really, really easy just to go out and buy $40 steaks.

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We’re having the top balcony re-grouted as a leak mitigation strategy. Before this is done, we need to paint the door frame which was pretty flakey and gross and a possible source of water penetration.

yuck

We were planning to use a professional for painting, but screw that, I can totally do such a small job myself! And I had intended to do the majority of it this afternoon. Unfortunately, despite the decluttering, we appear to have misplaced the paint scraper, so were forced to walk down to the $2 shop to get another – another drive in Saturday traffic to the hardware store being too much to bear.

I really under-estimated how bad the paint was and how much scraping and sanding would be required – it took a good couple of hours, so this will be a two day operation. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the priming and two coats knocked over tomorrow. Thankfully I have a bunch of podcasts already queued up (highly recommend the 12 part charles manson’s hollywood series from the you must remember this podcast, which is a pretty good podcast in general).

After this, there’s a whole lot of other bits of painting in my immediate future – once the balcony is done we can finally tackle Bessie’s room! And there will be much rejoicing.