Evens and Beginnings

Titled thus due to boredom with using "odds and ends" for posts

Things have slowed a bit on the blog due to my working on a movie review that has a great deal of extras. While I've grown to love seeing all the details of how a production came to be made, it takes a great deal of time to wade through all the content. Looking up a previous review of a connected movie has added more to do, since I realized the old one needs a rewrite to include bonus content too.

Earlier this week I had the chance to eat at a restaurant I'd been wanting to try out for years. Hu Hot is billed as a Mongolian grill, so I was salivating at the opportunity to sample their hot sauces. In the end, I focused exclusively on their second hottest, due to a strong craving for garlic. The food was good though it was something of a learning experience.



Basically, you assemble the ingredients including sauces in a bowl then hand it off to be cooked. If I had only noticed the recipe cards on the table before going up there, my efforts wouldn't have been so mad scientist like. At least it was a good sauce that works for everything, so all worked out.

One thing that did not please was the shoddy chopsticks provided next to the condiments as you exit the cooking area. Short, thin, and blunt they also suffered from having no taper except at the very end. It looked as if they had been inserted into a pencil sharpener but only have way.

Out of frustration I vowed before others at the table I would order traveling chopsticks when I got home later that night. While that was followed through on, it took until almost 1 AM for me to find something that looked sturdy and sanitary enough. Ostensibly made from titanium, they were ordered from Amazon and I'll be trying them out as soon as they arrive. None of the collapsible chopsticks looked worth checking out, so I'll have to find a container for portability.

As much difficulty as that decision was, it is nothing compared to the contemplation being directed toward obtaining a wrist roller. Exploration of old methods of strength training led me to this device, which has made something of a comeback in recent years. Imagine a wood dowel or metal tube with a hole drilled at a center point allowing a cord to go through it and a light weight attached at the end of that. Rolling the cord up around the center and then down again creates quite a workout for the wrists and forearms.

My small wrists have always been an issue in lifting weights, so this got my attention. Unfortunately, I can't figure out what happened to my old dumbbells and small plates other than a vague memory of giving them away to someone. That would have saved me a lot of money, because I could have made my own wrist roller easily.

Now I'm torn by the convenience of spending excessive money to get something online delivered to the house or hunting across multiple stores for what I need. I do not enjoy shopping, however the expense of shipping weights appalls the inner miser. But shopping wears me out... round and round it goes. That decision will have to be made sooner than later.

New lifting gloves are also needed, thanks to my old ones beginning to fall apart under constant abuse. That's a good problem to have. I've only missed two days of weight training since starting the daily regime due to being too weak to workout. Yeah, I'm thinking this routine is a keeper.

That's all for now, things need doing.