Today is my last day of work for 2024—I restart on January 6th—and I'm looking forward to getting some sleep. I have a fun day planned today, also: I'll be back in the Clawson/Troy area to do some errands, and then will get Pink Garlic takeout for dinner, which is one of my faves.
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| Sidecar Slider Bar, Birmingham |
What I've been up to this week:
- Dining out/getting takeout. Last Friday, I worked in the office—we are required to come in once per month, and it's in Birmingham—and had lunch at Sidecar Slider Bar, one of my favorites, with a coworker friend. My husband and I do DoorDash a lot from their Farmington location, but the cheese curds were *extra* poofy and delicious on Friday since they were nice and fresh. On Saturday, I had Hungry Howie's takeout with my parents, and on Sunday, my husband and I got Portillo's takeout—we both had a free sandwich coupon to use, that we got at a Yelp event at the Sterling Heights location in *January 2023*, which was expiring Dec. 31, so we made a night out of it and visited friends in that area, too.
- Watching movies. I finally got to watch Carry-On, on Netflix, yesterday, and it was as good as everyone has been saying it is: I'd give it 4/5 stars. Yesterday we went to see Mufasa: The Lion King at the theater, and surprisingly I liked it a lot: I'd give it 4-4.5/stars. I say "surprisingly" because I'm not a huge fan of the Disney live-action remakes (exception: Aladdin), and I remember giving the live-action Lion King maybe 3/5 or 3.5/5. This was a prequel story involving Mufasa, though, which was interesting.
- Buying Christmas presents. And also a little something for myself (see below)—I'm somewhat of an UNO game collector, and the UM UNO set, which they last stopped making in 2007, has always been something of a "white whale" for me. I was browsing eBay this week and a few people were selling it, at a somewhat affordable price, so I bought one for myself! My husband thinks I should leave it as-is in the collectible container (plastic-sealed) but I want to actually play with the cards. I will probably get card holders/protectors for it, though.
- Watching TV shows. I started a new one yesterday, called Laid, on Peacock, which has an interesting premise. I was also behind on Matlock (CBS/Paramount+) so I caught up a few days ago, but no new episode of that or George & Mandy's First Marriage today; there IS a new episode of Elsbeth, though, which I enjoy a lot—it reminds me of Monk a bit—and my guess is there's a new episode of Before (AppleTV). I also caught up on Shrinking, The Ultimatum, and Married at First Sight, and there's a new season of Virgin River up on Netflix as of yesterday, too.
- Cooking. We had three HelloFresh recipes this week, all of which were interesting: a smashed dumplings taco thing, which tasted like dumplings but was in a taco, plus two recipes with carrots. For some reason I had selected pork for all three, but the taco recipe included ground pork, and the other two were roasted pork and pork chops. I think my favorite was the one with a dijon cream sauce, but the "trattoria pork chops," with a tomato-based sauce, was also good, and the smashed pork taco DID taste like dumplings in a taco, which was very interesting—I had to cook it with the pork adhered to the tortilla, which I'd never experimented with before.
**There will probably be no Friday Five next Friday due to holiday travel—but I'd like to wish all of my readers a Merry Christmas and/or Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrate, and a happy holiday season. See you in 2025!
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| U of M UNO set |
