Happy first Friday Favs of 2019!

 

 

A couple of website update notes! First, I installed a little widget in my sidebar where I can track how many miles I hike this year. (If you missed it, I posted my 2019 goals last week, and hiking 100 miles is one of them.) I’m weirdly motivated by getting to update that kind of tracker! The WordPress plugin I found to track goals only lets you do one, which crushed my vision for having a progress bar for each of my 3 trackable goals. I did finally find the reading goal widget on Goodreads (It’s in the “edit profile” section -there’s a whole tab of widgets), so I added that, too.

Next, I changed the archives section of the sidebar to a drop down menu. Now that I’ve been at this URL for over 3 years, having it in list form was getting stupidly long. My sidebar still doesn’t look very good (I’m still not used to WordPress after using Blogger for like 15 years), but it’s a small improvement!

 

 

1. Last Saturday was 60 degrees with a clear blue sky, so I headed over to the trail that runs between the Dewey Short Visitor’s Center and State Park Marina. If you read my goals post, you know that I had a toe issue going on, so I wanted a fairly easy trail to put as little stress on my foot as possible.

 

No idea who built these rock piles, but they’re cool!

This is the first time I’ve been here since the Duck boat accident, so walking past the Branson Belle dock was sad.

 

 

2. My mom fell and fractured her hip on Sunday, and had to have surgery to repair it on Monday. That happening obviously doesn’t make my list of favorite things, but the awesome nurses she had at the hospital, her great surgeon, and the fact that it was an easy break to fix do. She hit her head pretty hard when she fell, so I’m especially thankful that wasn’t worse! She got a pretty icky bump and bruise on her head, but no concussion or anything.

One of the scariest parts was the hallucinations she had as an after effect of the anesthesia or pain meds. She’s had them before when she had a really bad UTI – it’s really more like she has dreams that she thinks are real. (She called everyone while I was in FL a couple of years ago to tell them I won the lottery and got engaged. This time she thought my neighbor fixed my dryer for me. Kind of a downgrade.) Thankfully, those seem to have faded away!

 

 

Quoth mom, “I got screwed.”

 

3. This month for the Chewy Influencer Program, we were sent some Friskies Lil Soups Lickable Treats to review.

 

 

I first saw these in stores about 3 months ago and I’ve been wanting to try them! The price on Chewy ($7.99 for 8 cups, and actually sale for $7.50 when I ordered) is really good, since they average $1 each at mass merchandisers.

I took a picture of what the actual treat looks like when I opened it, but it basically looks like cream of chicken soup, which isn’t super photogenic, so I’m going to skip posting that.

There are four varieties available (You can check out all four here) – Tuna, Salmon, Chicken, and Shrimp. They’re all in chicken broth except, funny enough, the chicken flavor, which is in butternut squash broth. I went with the tuna – I honestly don’t know why because I almost always pick salmon, but I think it might have to do with ordering right after I woke up one morning and the fact that the blue container was prettier than the pink. Don’t let me make decisions before I’m properly caffeinated.

There is a variety pack available with 8 salmon and 10 tuna. My first thought was being sad that Chewy didn’t offer that as an option for influencers, but my second thought was, “Wait, WHY did Friskies set up the variety pack that way?” Are those the two most popular flavors? Why not do a variety pack with four or five of each of the four flavors? Why are there uneven numbers of tuna and salmon? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS, FRISKIES.

Anyway…

 

I let Tennyson and Hercules Mulligan split one of these, then tossed the little plastic container it came in into the trash and went in the other room for a minute. You know what’s coming. Hercules dug the container out of the trash and took it into my bed (cringe) to lick completely clean.

 

 

I really appreciate that this comes in a little plastic cup that cats can happily lick clean. Pouches are so hard to get all of the food out of, so no matter how hard you try you wind up with funky-smelling trash, but the cups let you (or Hercules Mulligan) be sure nothing goes to waste.

They all love these- I wish they had a larger size available for multi-cat households! There’s enough for two cats to get a satisfying amount (Although I’m pretty sure my cats would tell you that the proper serving size is one full 8-pack per cat) but splitting it between more than two cats feels like they just get a few bites each. To be fair, since I’m such a cat lady, I wish that pretty much everything was available in a larger size so that I can feed everyone without accumulating a bunch of empty containers, but c’est la vie.

 

4. I don’t usually buy Valentine’s Days stuff, but I found a few cute things at Target this week!

 

 

I had to get the black cat socks! And I joked that “The snuggle is real” was going to be the title of my atobiograpy like two years before they started putting that phrase on everything. The universe owes me like a million dollars.

 

 

My cats broke one of my wine glasses and I’ve been on the lookout for a replacement, so I was super excited to find this heart one in the Dollar Spot!

I didn’t buy this little guy but now I really wish I had!

 

5. I subscribe to Netflix for a month about once or twice a year – I don’t spend a lot of time watching TV and movies so I found that if I just maintain a constant subscription, I never watch it, but if I do it this way I just binge watch everything I want to catch up on and then I’m good for awhile. Since January is usually one of the worst weather months where I live, it seemed like a perfect time to watch a bunch of TV in bed since I’m down to two jobs until March and I can’t spend much time outside.

This time around, I’m really enjoying:

*The Marie Kondo tidying up show. It’s a known fact that everyone likes watching other people clean. (WAIT, is Hoarders on Netflix?? Hoarders is the best cleaning motivation ever.) I was kinda surprised that Marie mostly speaks Japanese in this show, but there are subtitles and she has an interpreter with her. My Japanese is terrible, but it’s fun to pick out the occasional word or two that I understand.

*Nailed It – I’ve been listening to Nicole Byer’s “Why Won’t You Date Me” podcast and she mentions the show fairly often (she’s the host), so that made me curious. This show is kind of like the Great British Baking Show’s trainwreck of a little sister. It’s so much fun!

*Seasons 4 & 5 of BoJack Horseman –   I knew there was a new season out that I hadn’t seen yet, but I didn’t realize there were TWO!

You know how Futurama was generally lighthearted, but every now and then they threw an episode at you like that one with Fry’s dog that just punched your right in the gut? BoJack is a lot like that. There was one episode that was entirely a eulogy at a funeral… just one character delivering a monologue, but it’s SO GOOD that you don’t even realize it’s just that for the entire 20-something minutes until it ends. There’s another episode that (spoiler alert) shows what’s going on in the mind of BoJack’s elderly mom, who has dementia. I SOBBED, Y’ALL. I sobbed at the cartoon horsies.

No matter what, always pay attention to the little details in the background. They’re usually equal parts hilarious and totally messed up.

 

 

I also found this Vulture post of 75 hidden jokes in season 4.

 

A last bonus item – because I miss Florida so much ad live for FL headlines like “Spider Monkey Attacks Home Depot Employee After Escaping From Owner’s Car”, here are the Best Florida Headlines of 2018.

This weekend is supposed to be cold AF, so I’m probably spending it reading, working, Netflixing, and cuddling cats! Hope your weekend is awesome!