Beowabbit

A weekend of documentaries and food with my honeywuzzle. First the documentaries:

Last night we watched Life Beyond Earth. We didn’t learn a whole lot we didn’t already know, but it was fun to see all the interviews (including Stephen Jay Gould — who at one point said something [I forget what] that made me say “That’s silly!” aloud before realizing with amusement that I was talking to Stephen Jay Gould — and Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler), and the CGI was pretty, if overused.

Today we watched another episode of Ken Burns’ The Civil War. This episode centered on Gettysburg, and also on the first African American regiments (and was predictably heartwrenching). We’re really appreciating this series. (And we can’t wait for the Prohibition series to be available for streaming.)

Now the noms: The plan for this weekend was to make lots of food, so that we could each have leftovers for lots and lots of meals (as well as sharing deliciousness this weekend). Last night was meatloaf (more or less according to cathijosephine’s super-easy recipe), corn on the cob, and beets. After dinner, we put corned beef (with carrots, potatoes, onions, and artichoke hearts) into the larger crockpot and left it cooking overnight (and into today). This morning we had a store-bought quiche for breakfast and then after The Civil War had some of the corned beef and veggies as a late lunch before parcelling out and packing up the rest of it. I just had quiche and meatloaf for dinner, and I’ve easily got enough leftovers in the fridge for another ten meals; maybe more. plumtreeblossom took home about half as much (which is probably ten meals for her, too). Yay for lunches I don’t have to buy at work, and yay for excellent cooking company!

PS — And last night I noticed that Mars was out,¹ so I got out the telescope, and we looked at Mars (basically a featureless orange disk in that telescope under the somewhat hazy seeing conditions, but still a disk), the moon, and the Pleiades. I would have looked at Jupiter, but it was very low on the horizon, and (1) it would have been tricky to catch it between the tree branches, and (2) I didn’t want my neighbours to think I was looking into their windows, since Jupiter was about even with them.

If we’d been out earlier I think we could have seen Mars, Jupiter, and Venus in the sky all at once. That would have been a nifty telescopic jaunt across the sky.

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¹ by which I mean I noticed something bright, reddish, and not twinkly, and my phone told me “Yup, that’s Mars, all right.”