Pie for days

I spent most of the weekend eating slice after slice of my boyfriend's homemade strawberry pie. I'm a big fan of strawberry pie, as it turns out.

Let's see ... we went out to our favorite Asian restaurant on Friday night. He had honey wasabi shrimp, and I had shrimp with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and pineapple. For dessert, we had strawberry pie and pistachio ice cream. We started The Illusionist.

On Saturday morning, we had cereal for breakfast, stopped at the coffee shop for a granita, and headed out to a festival. This was our first visit to this festival. It's a lot smaller than Jazz Fest, and it was fun to walk around downtown, check out musical acts from Belgium, Finland, and Mexico, and eat festival food like a pink lemonade snowball and crawfish maque choux.

We got back to town, went to a backpacking store, and went home, where I made chicken stroganoff for dinner, inspired by this post of Jackie's. I liked it, but I thought it could have used some cayenne pepper or something to make it a little more fiery. We had more pie and more pistachio ice cream for dessert. Also, we finished The Illusionist, which I definitely do not recommend. It was terrible. Maybe not quite as terrible as The Holiday, but close. It was boring and ridiculous, and I felt embarrassed for all of the actors. Except for Jessica Biel because I don't expect anything better from her. But Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti are really good actors! How are they not mortified to have appeared in this nonsense? Argh. And we also watched Hollywoodland, which I liked but did not love, while playing a game of Scrabble. I thought everyone in this one did a great job, especially Adrian Brody and Ben Affleck, and I thought my beloved Diane Lane was a little over the top, but I still liked her performance.

On Sunday morning, we went to the coffee shop, sat outside, ate a white chocolate raspberry scone and a whole wheat bagel with veggie cream cheese, and read the paper. Soon it was time for him to go home. I did some chores like hedge trimming, went grocery shopping, lay around watching episodes of How I Met Your Mother online, and so forth. I took the dogs on a walk that went awry when Daisy got out of her collar and took off like a rocket after a cat and I ended up trespassing in someone's backyard and ultimately cornering her, which was not an easy task. It's always an odd moment when Zuko's the dog that comes out like the angel of the situation.

Last night, I was watching The Riches, and I had a flashback to when Minnie Driver was on The Rosie O'Donnell Show and she and Rosie sang "Truly Scrumptious" in harmony. It made me really like Minnie Driver from that moment on. I wasn't sure about this show at first, but I've decided that I like it. And I really wish I could find a clip online of them singing, because it was adorable. Truly, I probably still have it on tape somewhere, so maybe I'll dig it out.

I am trying to turn over a healthy new leaf this week. I've been packing on the pounds since finishing the half-marathon training and skipping my crazy exercise class for a few weeks, and I've also been eating like an out-of-control lunatic. It really has to stop. It was almost exactly a year ago that I started Couch to 5K, and I somehow completed that (9 weeks), One Hour Runner (10 weeks), and training for the half-marathon (16 weeks), but I find myself floundering when it comes to health and fitness right now. After missing class for a couple of weeks, getting back into it has been so difficult. It might be because the temperature has been pushing 90 lately, and it feels like it's about 190 in the class. I was doing some move with an exercise bar where you lie on your back and hold it over your head and then do a sit-up with it and on the bar's way back over my head, I hit myself in the nose. Dazed, I reached for my nose and thought it was gushing blood, but the dripping liquid was just a river of sweat! Delightful. I really want to commit to doing the class three times a week and throwing in a day or two of running in there for good measure. And start eating more healthy foods. Just as soon as I finish this strawberry pie.