Goal #7

Goal #7: drink one glass of red wine per day.  Yes!  Awesome goal!

Reasons:
1) It's good for your heart (or so they say);
2) After last week, I need something at which I can succeed!

Recap of Goal #6: epic fail!  I have read exactly one (1) magazine this week, and it wasn't even one of the ones that had been in a pile.  Bummer.

Happy Birthday E!

Hope it's a great day!

Salt

So, even though I was in Breck last weekend, I had dinner with Dad again this week!  He was in town for some meetings, so T joined us and we went to Salt. 

It was great!  The plates were reasonably sized, except for Dad's ginormous pile of duck fat frites.  They came with house-made ketchup, but the real winner was the garlic aioli. I started with the pork and fennel meatballs, and had the ribeye, which was delightful with the herbed mustard.  But I didn't stop there!  Dessert was the rustic tart with salted caramel ice cream from Serendipity.

It was a lovely meal!

What I Watched -- The Lincoln Lawyer

I've long known that my "lawyer film" repertoire is somewhat lacking.  I didn't really intend to start catching up with a film like The Lincoln Lawyer, but I do like Matthew McConaughey, so why not?  (He seems to like the lawyer films: see also A Time to Kill.)
A good, twisty lawyer film is like a spy movie: the parts don't fall in place until the end, the players don't all make sense.

To McConaughey's credit, he plays the role of Mick Haller, slick defense attorney, well.  He's a smooth talker who knows his way around the streets as well as (or better than) around the courthouse.  He's hired to defend rich playboy Louis Roulet (played by Ryan Phillipe, who seems a little too much like a genuine sociopath to be acting), who's been accused of attempted rape and assault.

Mick comes to discover that Louis has him in a trap, and it will take all of his brains and grit to get out without getting hurt (or worse), or selling out his own backstabbing client.

Bottom line: much like the Bourne movies, this is not a classic destined to be watched regularly in 50 years.  But it is a fun, fast-paced, twisty ride, so enjoy it.

Breck!, Part 2

Whew, where did I leave off?  That's right, with P's dinner on Friday.  Well, it made excellent leftovers for Saturday lunch as well.  Dad and I took a mid-day break from practicing our mad mogul skillz (that's right, with a z) to come in for some lunch, and caught P just as he was headed out the door to try his hand at cross-country skiing (one event in the nordic skiing family, Wikipedia has told me).

Saturday night we had more fun with the smoke detector while dad made some delicious roast ducks with wild rice and carrots, and we had a dynamo cabernet, much to P's satisfaction.  Great meal, ducks were the perfect size, with some leftovers for Keystone as well.

Sunday brought a slightly shorter day on the slopes, but marked improvement for both of us in our moguls technique.  P had so much fun at his new activity on Saturday that he headed out again on Sunday for the golf course, which they turn into a cross-country track in the winter (how clever!).  We regrouped that afternoon for a soak in the hot tub and some eagerly-awaited Super Bowl snack food: beer, Velveeta cheese dip, and lots of chips.  Ours was something like this, although we were wingin' it at the time.

That was it for the skiing.  We left during the only real snow we had and headed down to the airport Monday morning, and I'm back to the grind in St. Louis now.  Although I did have several good hours with my book - I'm almost finished!

And for everyone's enjoyment, a lovely photo P took of me, attempting to silence the smoke detector.  This continued for entirely too long:

What I'm Reading Now -- The Help

The Help has been out for a while now, and it's gotten rave reviews all along. I never really had any particular desire to read it, nor any particular aversion to it. It just wasn't on my list. But then the movie came out, also to rave reviews, and one of my book clubs decided to do a "book and a movie" event.

It's possible that I already missed the event, but I had gotten the book and am now determined to read it. I'm about three chapters in, and enjoying the narrative so far.

Goal #6

Goal #6: Read one pile of magazines.

I have a collection of magazines that have been building up as I've been quite busy lately.  Right now they're sitting around in three piles, and it's my goal this week to get through just one of those piles.  The easy part of this: as the magazines get older, the less they matter and the less stuff in there I actually need to read.

So, by the end of the week, only two piles shall remain.

Recap of Goal #5: I did it!

Or at least close to it.  In St. Louis, when I was mostly drinking out of a Nalgene bottle, I had a good idea of exactly how much water I was drinking.  Once out in Breck it wasn't quite so clear, but I did my best to eyeball the glass and estimate how much water was contained therein.  And every time: 64 ounces, at least!  That does not, for the record, include coffee, juice, tea, or soda (but it does include tonic water).

Breck!

As you probably gathered from yesterday's post, I am in Breckenridge!

I came out here Wednesday afternoon, and Dad and I headed down to Empire Burger for a quick bite (Western Burger for me, mushroom and Swiss for dad).  We took to the slopes on Thursday to get back into the swing of things, and it actually took less time than I expected.  The snow was thin, but we played on Peak 9, everything from Upper Lehman (ungroomed - oops) to Shock.

After a late lunch, we took Keys on a walk.  It was supposed to be five miles, but the snow made for hard walking.  We limited ourselves to three miles, although Keys probably went twice that far, much of it through deep snow off the trail.

Uncle P arrived to a three-smoke-alarm welcome on Thursday night, just in time for dinner.  (No fires, the smoke alarms are just very sensitive.)  Dinner was a mixed greens salad with quail, and roasted cauliflower on the side (the smoky culprit).

While Dad and I were out having a ski lesson on Friday, P explored some of the art galleries and shops in town, and then headed to the store to get supplies for the dinner he was making us (recipe below).  Dad and I had a pretty good day skiing.  We worked on some of the basics to start out, but then had to forget all that as we started doing bumps in the afternoon.  And G took me on two runs down the slalom race track, which was awesomely fun!

P's dinner was just what we needed when we got back, some good, hearty, stick-to-your-ribs type of food.  It's called taco soup, but really is the consistency of chili, and is delicious.

Taco Soup
Ingredients:
1 onion
2 pounds ground beef
1 can light kidney beans
1 can dark kidney beans
2 cans crushed tomatoes
1 can whole kernel corn
1 can creamed corn
1 package taco seasoning
1 package ranch dressing mix

Brown hamburger and onion, and season with salt and pepper.  Pour all ingredients into a crock pot and cook on low all day.

Doesn't get much easier than that!

What I'm Reading Now -- The Dublin Saga: The Princes of Ireland

I started listening to another audiobook before I left for Breck: The Dublin Saga: The Princes of Ireland.  I'm not very far into it yet, because I spent most of the journey out reading rather than listening.

The Princes of Ireland starts out in ancient Ireland, and so far one man's soon-to-be wife has run off with another and is pregnant with his baby.  Saucy stuff.  The book is technically fiction, but based in fact.  Looking forward to seeing how this one plays out.

There is another book, The Dublin Saga: The Rebels of Ireland, which I might read as a follow-up.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks -- Take 2

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks seems like an odd name for this book.  In a lot of ways, the book really isn't about Henrietta.  Sure, her cells are what got the whole story started, but really the story the author tells is about how her children and other family members responded to the discovery that her cells were still being used for medical research decades after Henrietta's death.  The story is theirs.

It's a sad story, although with a happy-ish ending.  It's sad because her family had so little understanding of what happened to Henrietta's cells, and virtually no control over the process.  At the time, as the author points out, that wasn't unusual.  Doctors didn't have to have every patient sign all the waivers and releases that they do now; it just wasn't standard practice.

The author took a very personal interest in the story and in Henrietta's family, and that gives you the happy-ish ending.  Everything doesn't come up roses, but they are vastly improved.

There is not a lot of hard science in the book.  What is there is mostly general and fairly easy to understand, so don't let that scare you off!

In the end, the author does a good job of telling the story, and of carrying Henrietta's daughter, who goes on a voyage of discovery with the author, as the main character throughout the book.  I think I wasn't quite expecting that though.  I thought there would be more science and more about the cells.  It's not bad that there wasn't more of those things (for a lay person like me, anyway), but I did always feel as though the book was about to change drastically from the biography-style writing to hard science.  Given that, I think I finished it feeling a little unsatisfied, because that change never came about, and even though the book didn't really need to take that turn.

Aside: having nothing to do with the actual book itself, I'm totally loving listening to books on audio now that I'm all caught up on podcasts.  It's so quick and enjoyable!  I get to listen to way more this way than I would actually have time to read.