Aussie Expat Update – An Unforeseen Injury, Stranger Things and Homemade Nachos

Hello again world!

Welcome back to the thrilling weekly recount of what your favourite Aussie expats have been getting up to in the sweaty state of Oklahoma. I know this one is a bit late today: I got distracted by an online quiz for psychology and finally getting back into our home gym for a barbell rehab session. James suffered an unforeseen injury on Tuesday afternoon at the gym when he pulled a rib while training. It’s not serious, but relatively incapacitating, so we’ve had the past few days off. Unfortunately, taking a few days off tends to make my back hurt (weird, right?), so I got back in there today to just get some moving done. Now we can happily sit ourselves down for homemade nachos and maybe, if we’re very lucky and it fits into my macros, some gelato tonight. Happy weekend!

I have bad news for us all. Though I have the best of intentions and I know everyone has been rooting for me… Pascoe strikes again for cooking catastrophes. Twice in one week people. TWICE. I’m so ashamed. The first was Monday night, the second on Wednesday. I decided that since we couldn’t be bothered to cook the roast on Sunday night, we could do so on Monday night. We left for the gym earlier than normal, so I figured we would have plenty of time to get home and put the roast on without eating dinner at midnight… Oh when will I learn? The meat browned up nicely, but I was (yet again!) too impatient: there aren’t enough ‘o’s in that world to indicate just how overly impatient I was.

It was completely raw on the inside.

I’ve been getting up at 5:30 most mornings when James does in order to write before breakfast. Being an 8-hour-a-night kinda girl, this generally means I need to nap during the day and since I didn’t on Monday, I had a bit of a minor breakdown about it. Of course, James came to the rescue! We sliced up the roast, braised the crap out of it and ate a pretty tasty dinner anyway. Then on Wednesday I decided to do meatballs. Seems fairly simple. Somehow almost all of my cooking endeavours start out that way, but end up being complex. That’s something I still haven’t figured out. Long story short, I put almost an entire onion field in the meatballs. They were good, but there was a lot of onion. SO MUCH ONION. It’s good for detoxing right? I had onion application regrets 🙁

On a happier note, I started a new book this week, after finally finishing Robert K. Massie’s The Romanovs – The Final Chapter. It was truly harrowing stuff, and if you’ve never done any reading on the Romanovs, Massie is an excellent historian to start with; in fact I’m strongly considering going back and reading some of his earlier stuff on them… Once I’ve recovered from the grief of this book. Like most historical books, it was heavy at times, so I’ve moved on to something a little lighter. I’ve owned a Somerset Maugham biography for probably eight years or so now, but haven’t read it, or any of Maugham’s work, so I’ve started reading Of Human Bondage. Seems pretty good so far and it’s a useful way to detox my brain from the terrors of Stranger Things before sleep.

Incidentally, that’s what we’ve just gotten into. After finishing Parks and Recreation, we’ve been languishing in the need of a new show and despite the handiness of Archer for short entertainment, after having our neighbours recommend Stranger Things, we decided to give it a go. I’ve mentioned before the fact that I suffer from an over-endowment of imagination, which always seems to crop up at the most inconvenient times. Hardly surprisingly, scary shows, movies, books (Stephen King’s It? Terrifying) affect me quite a lot. For me, Stranger Things falls into that category… James, unfortunately, enjoys scaring me when I’m already hyper-alert, so he got some laughs out of me losing my mind! That being said, if you’ve got a stronger stomach than I do (not hard) and you don’t live alone, check it out. It’s an interesting idea and it’s already hooked us!

In other words, we’re heading out for a hike on Sunday to the Wichita Wildlife Reserve again: we’ve been slack in getting out there, but hopefully I’ll have some great new photos to upload next week. We’re also going to get Froyo afterwards… Could life get any better?

I think not. I’m so excited about Froyo.

Have a great weekend everyone and I’ll see you next week 🙂

— Ana.