fresh pasta friday, and the sunday night drinks

all in all, this was a good weekend, in my opinion.

friday conlin and dena came over, and we made fresh pasta with my pasta machine that i bought myself for my birthday last month but haven't had opportunity to use yet. it came out spectacularly, and they raved about my cheese sauce. i enjoyed it heartily as well, but it was far from on my diet, so i'm a little irritated with myself after the fact. anyway, hadn't seen them since their big trip back to boston, so we had a very nice evening talking about nothing in particular, but just "stuff."

saturday was spent mostly bumming around, some apartment cleaning (dug through one of the closets in anticipation of moving out soon), and a decent jog. did my 9k course, but with a different mindset this time. pretty much everything i'm reading seems to tell me that calories burned aren't really dependant on speed, but almost entirely only on distance. then there's also that the heartrate charts mention that while working at a higher HR for the same about of time may burn more calories, it only burns the same amount of calories from fat as working at a lower HR (just at the lower HR, a higher percentage comes from fat). so, given that last time i went out i nearly keeled over when my HR spiked around 210, i thought it might be worth a try to take it a little easier. i strapped on my little gps-o-meter gadget, and instead of watching the pace screen, like i usually do, i switched it to monitor my heartrate, and tried to keep it around 180 (random guess that didn't feel too painful). looking back, i guess i'm not sure what i hoped to learn from it, since i don't really have any way of determining how effective it was, but it was less debilitating, so i suppose that's probably a good sign.

i also listened to a significant portion of the second audiobook in the series i started last week, philip pullman's "his dark materials." the first one, "the golden compass," was pretty much your standard faire adolescent fantasy, where some kid or kids sets out to save the world, probably unwittingly or even unawares, but nonetheless has a pivotal role to play, including the apparition of uncanny abilities or aptitudes. as deroggatory as that sounds, i ate it up, because i love that shit for some incomprehensible and deeply shameful reason. though i was reasonably pissed about the fact that it didn't really end so much as slap you upside the head with the back cover, laughing at you that you thought you might have actually gotten some resolution to the story in the first book of a trilogy. this upsets me greatly, not even so much because it's unabashedly commercial in nature, but more because it's just lazy and irresponsible writing. any idiot can write a cliffhanger just by witholding important details, but it takes real skill to leave just the right amount of hidden unanswered questions to justify a sequel while making the reader believe that the story had actually come to a satisfying conclusion. for example, with the exception of the very last 30 seconds, i'd say the first season of veronica mars did a decent job of this (said last 30 seconds were downright in-your-face despicable and unforgivable, but up until that moment, i really felt like the story was over and i was happy about it, even if there were still a few unanswered questions).

right, well, back to the pullman books, the ending was abrupt, but i'm reading the second one now, "the subtle knife," so i guess that's gotta say something in his favor, if i'm still interested in the story. this one, though, i think is a little weaker in development. specifically, i'm having a huge problem suspending disbelief of the whole "murderer" thread, which is completely illogical/unrealistic and unsupported, and only exacerbated by the fact that he seems to be using this as an undercurrent/catalyst for the rest of the second book. but we'll have to wait and see how it turns out, i guess.

sunday was some more cleaning, some laundry, and then in the evening fabius, jim, and jim's visiting friend john came over, and we played settlers, along with assorted drinks (fabius made mango lassies, jim made caphirenas, and we tasted the absinthe i brought back from rhodes) and a chocolate cake i had made that morning. nothing too earth-shattering, just a low-key pleasant evening.

and, naturally, i'm still waiting on news regarding the new apartment...