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Gina left to visit her parents Friday evening, so I was left home alone for the weekend. Here's what I did:

1) Played Winning Eleven 2007. I'm using Club Brugge - in tribute to Brugge Brasserie, I guess. That's not very interesting.

2) Watched more of Season 3 of The Wire - I still don't quite get why the show gets such fantastic reviews. It's a good show, it's not a gold wrapped chocolate bar directly from the hands of Jesus*

3) Went to Key Cinemas and watched the 2007 Academy Award nominated short films (live action and animation). A good way to spend 3 or so hours, but the films were disappointing compared to my earlier Academy Award short viewing experience (The 2005 Shorts - available on dvd).

4) I did enough laundry to kill a horse.**

5) I went to spin class Saturday morning. It's fifty minutes of misery - at minute thirty I always feel like I'm going to vomit. And then the feeling passes and I finish up strongly.

Gina has taken the class with me and she did well. This should serve as nice prep before I can get back on the bike - hopefully sometime this week?

6) I cooked - Friday night I prepared a Sea Bass (bought from work) in a bath of whole tomatoes, olives, garlic, white wine, olive oil... I'm forgetting something. The recipe came from a recent issue of Men's Health. This was probably the best thing I've ever made myself. And I'd like to think I make some pretty tasty stuff. Now all I need to do is nail the presentation. The plate was a bit messy.

Sea Bass is incredibly fatty - but it's good fats, I guess. I'm sort of relearning dieting, thanks to a bunch of different resources - this Chris Carmichael book, Men's Health... more focus on whole foods, a divorce from foods with high fructose corn syrup (which is found in EVERYTHING EVER), a return to ice cream, peanut butter made out of just peanuts... as a result of this new strange philosophy we just gave away two bottles of ketchup. And a bunch of Nutrigrain bars.

I'm still eating too much chocolate.

Saturday, inspired by this post on the fat cyclist blog, I decided to use the crockpot to prepare a chicken curry dish that I made off the cuff - chicken breast, chicken broth, whole tomatoes, apples, sweet potato, white wine, an onion, a bunch of curry powder - a sort of cornucopia of things that taste well when roasted... this ended up tasting like nothing, really. Sometimes experiments go nowhere, I guess. Next time I'll try to find some sort of recipe to steal from first.

Sunday I went out to pick up my contact lenses and decided to pick up a Papa Murphy's pizza. If you're a pizza person (and who isn't?), I can't recommend Papa Murphy's enough. Ten bucks gets you a fresh made pizza with real ingredients that you can cook up in 15 minutes at home. I recommend the Cowboy pizza: Pepperoni, Italian sausage, fresh mushrooms, black olives and herb & cheese blend. And enough fat and calories to ruin any exercise you put in at spinning class.

Call me Mr. Excitement, I guess.

Back to spin class tonight.

* * * * *

*assuming this would be a good thing

**I'm well aware that this doesn't make sense.