When’s My Next Long Weekend?

Truth be told, this long weekend was a very relaxing weekend. I feel like I was well-rested and got plenty done. To boot:

• I tried my hand at making pozole and moderately succeeded. I need to adjust my water to chile ration, but the soup turned out pretty good. IP ate it up without hesitation so I figure I approximated my mother’s recipe. There’s some left over and it will be dinner for me tonight. Yum.
• I decided that I really needed to bake a Funfetti cake. My sister baked a Funfetti cake while I was visiting Michigan and I decided that IP and I really needed one in our own apartment. Funfetti cakes: wooooo!
• IP and I were able to hit the gym after an embarrassing one-week streak of missing our gym dates. Call us lazy, but the change in weather left us unmotivated. I feel that I benefited from the time off, though, and look forward to upping my workouts once more. And in July comes marathon training. Yay!
• The apartment’s decorative scheme is nearly complete. After dilemmas with rugs ordered from Home Depot, we ended up switching our dining room rug to our living room, and ordering a new, smaller rug for the dining room (the current living room rug was actually folded to fit into the dining room’s space—I’m very glad we got rid of that problem). Our space now looks much more refined and the living room rug works well with our furniture and wall art. Because our rugs are now all in place, I finally used the bed-in-a-bag I bought last November for our new digs–it looks great and goes very well with our bedroom rug.
• My reading in 2008 has been horrible. This weekend I finished my second book of the year. I obviously need to pick up the pace, and have done so already with Then We Came to the Endby Joshua Ferris. Along with this book, yesterday’s Barnes & Noble delivery contained Lisey’s Story, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, and Women at the Beginning – Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary. I will begin the 2008 book list as soon as I finish Ferris’ novel.
• I’ve gone a long way to completing my Paul Simon collection in recent months, but I took a big leap this weekend by downloading three albums: There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, Still Crazy After All These Years, and Hearts and Bones. All three albums are great, but I wonder how I lived without Hearts and Bones all these years. I did own all three back in my CD days but they didn’t survive the transition to iTunes—let’s just say I’m not that great at taking care of CDs. Hearts and Bones was underappreciated when it was first released in 1983, but I’ve always found it to be an excellent album. From “Allergies” to “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” I’m always in heaven listening to that album. My favorite is “Think Too Much (A)” followed closely by “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War”. The album was supposed to be a new Simon & Garfunkel album, but their falling out again lead to it becoming a Simon solo effort. While it would’ve been great to have another S&G album in my collection, Hearts and Bones kicks all kinds of ass as it stands. The title song is absolutely beautiful—it’s a precursor to “Graceland” in that it deals with his relationship with Carrie Fisher, and the two songs are exquisitely sad if you listen to them one after another.

Now, with the first day of the week not even over and with 13 weeks until we have another three-day weekend, I feel the need for a mini-vacation somewhere in those 13 weeks. I have a visit from my sister and mother to look forward to, but I’ll need time away from the office at some point, if only to do some more cooking (wonders never cease) or baking (yay, baking! I wish I could open my own bakery).