The Husband and I are working on improving our health game, trying desperately not to drink alcohol during the week.
With a comfortable income and a climate-controlled cellar, we’ve been amassing quite a wine collection. Rather, we’ve been buying a lot of wine, storing it momentarily and then drinking it. There aren’t many dusty bottles in the cellar and our waistlines are stretching.
So we called a halt to mid-week imbibing and stocked the fridge with sugarless fizzy drinks. Pre-dinners are now a very vanilla affair.
Our current favourite is diet ginger beer. It’s not entirely sugar free and it’s a long cry from a crisp Riesling, but it’s a step in the right direction. Of course, water with a lemon slice would be more virtuous, but life’s short.
Fun Friday
Fun Fridays come in many guises; my favourite involves yoga and lunch with The Bestie. That’s what I did today.
Friday yoga happens in The Valley. The session is a bit too free form for my purist tastes. There’s no attention to alignment or precision. There’s no learning. My brain is in idle for the duration.
But it does stretch and twist me, an antidote to the many hours I spend hunched over a keyboard every week. I feel better at the end of class and I’m grateful to have time to go.
But most of all I’m glad for the “etc.” that comes after yoga. Sometimes it’s coffee and shopping. Sometimes it’s shopping and lunch. And there’s nearly always a wine.
There’s loads of chatter; sometimes sombre, like today when I had so many sad stories to tell, and sometimes not. I talk more with her than anyone else I know, because she asks me questions about myself and what I think about things and how I feel. She’s an uncommonly good listener.
No-cook Fridays
No matter what I’ve done on a Friday, even if it’s not fun, even if it involves a whole lot of bookwork and washing, I never want to cook.
Today was no different.
I had a lump of cheese in the fridge, a King Island blue brie, and two fresh figs. A sneaky bottle of wine begged me to continue the party I started with The Bestie over lunch.
So while the tired teenagers (The Socialite worked from 5am to 9am at the gym then a morning and afternoon shift at the pool under a hot, hot sun) made do with take-away pizza, I snuck away to another room to mop up cheese and fruit with a chilled white wine.
When The Husband arrived home after a 13-hour-day I offered him some re-heated pizza. He washed it down with superb cabernet sauvignon and was quite content.
Which goes to prove the power of a good wine. No cooking is necessary.
For the record
The Athlete missed her scheduled flight from Melbourne to Canberra tonight. She’s meant to be at the Australian Institute of Sport for a training camp. She had to reschedule her flight for tomorrow morning, so she’ll miss the first camp training session. Not a good start to her weekend.
