Saturday, April 28
5:00 am
It is +4 °C, with a high forecast of +10 °C.
From the Environment Canada website:
Today Cloudy. 60 percent chance of showers early this morning. Wind northwest 20 km/h becoming light this afternoon. High 10. UV index 4 or moderate.
Tonight Clearing this evening. Low minus 3.
Cool, dreary, days ahead. A good time to use the fitness center.
5:20 am Musings
There doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day to accomplish all that I want to.
- The weather is the pits. But I will head out to the fitness center this morning to continue my efforts to get in shape.
- Priority two is still to complete the web pages for our Australian trip. I will start on this shortly. I hope to finish the March pages and then add these entries to my Activities summaries.
- Cooking is rapidly becoming a fun activity. I have already tagged a tomato sauce recipe from the Annabel Langbein book for today. This will go well with the chorizo sausages we have on hand.
- Looking at all the pictures I took while in Australia, I see a need to improve my technique for photographing birds. I am seriously thinking of reviewing the specifications of some lenses to see if there is a better solution. It needs to be fast, powerful, and affordable. Affordability is the tough one. I may not need a zoom capability. That can be handled later when I am on the computer.
- I now have "Aptitudes and instructional methods : a handbook for research on interactions / by Lee J. Cronbach and Richard E. Snow. The 2004 article in Educational and Psychological Measurement by Cronbach on coefficient alpha and reliability turned out to be a surprise. It is now possible with a university library card (mine has just been activated) to download copies of many journal articles to my home computer. Done. Excellent. The times they are a changing.
- Plus reading! Eliot Perlman's novel, "The Street Sweeper", is captivating but grim. Definitely more than just a light read.
My efforts at keeping the list to a manageable size are failing miserably. But the list itself is not so miserable. Now to work on the second item.
11:00 am Life
I am back from the fitness center. I pushed myself, ever so little, by adding a 3rd rep to each set. That felt like I was getting close to my level. I still wasn't straining, but I was beginning to feel it near the end of each rep. More importantly, I am staying with it. That was the first of three "free" sessions. Then I have to make a financial commitment to keep using the facilities.
11:00 am Cooking
I had a look at the Annabel Langbein cookbook and decided to try making the Harvest Tomato Sauce [p. 62]. It turned our really well.
(5:00 PM) Now that I had some sauce, what to do with it? I opted for our standard chorizo sausage dinner, but this time using a tomato sauce made from raw ingredients instead of a jar of prepared sauce. We shall see. Basically one adds some bell peppers, onions and the sausage (all lightly sauteed) to the sauce, and let it simmer for about 30 minutes. Serve and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. This tastes even better if there is a fine red wine to go with it. In fact the wine tastes good even if one isn't into the sauce
Raw materials Chopped Raw Materials
Sauteing the sausage Sauteing the onion
Sauteing the peppers (capsicums) Adding the chorizo
Adding the sauce and wait 30 minutes Salivation
C'est bonne!
10:00 PM Technology
I finally found an App that keeps track of the sets, reps and weight for my fitness routines. I began by using keywords like fitness, monitoring, schedule and exercise routine but they returned apps that provided information on various routines. Finally I tried sets, reps & weight and found one called WorkoutCoach that seems to do the job. It is free, but there is a companion app that seems to graph the results which only costs 99 cents. At the moment the app is on the iPad, but there is a version for the iPhone as well. I will play with this tomorrow.