1) I was a bit surprised to find a paper on my door last week about renewing my lease. I can’t believe I have been in this apartment for two years already! I was also surprised to find out that my rent will be increasing by $300 per month. !!! They have never increased my rent that much and it’s a staggering number. I started looking around at rental prices, though, and even with this massive increase, I will still pay $300+ less than anywhere else for the same amount of space. Ugh. So I’m going to renew my lease for one year and start making plans to move out at the end of that lease (November 2023). I’m just not in the financial place to move (nor in the financial place to see a $800 increase in rent!), but if I have 14 months to prepare, I know I can make it happen. I’m already looking forward to the packing/unpacking process! (Not sarcasm; I genuinely enjoy this process.)
2) My big toe that got injured during my tumble down the stairs on my vacation is healing nicely. It’s still a little sore from time to time, but I can walk normally now and I’ve been able to work out again, although I’m trying to take it easy with low-impact workouts. I’m guessing I just bruised the toe; I thought I had broken it because there was a bruise right above the toenail and that’s usually an indication of a fracture, but I think it just got a bit pummeled in my fall and bruised up. I’m just really glad I didn’t have to go to urgent care! There’s not much that can be done for a broken toe anyway, but I would have gone if I was still in great pain/unable to walk after a week. Hooray for saving a few hundred dollars on an urgent care visit. 🙂
3) I had a big dinner failure this week, when I tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich for the first time ever. Can you believe I’ve never had a grilled cheese sandwich? I didn’t love cheese when I was growing up, so it was never something my mom made for me. And most grilled cheese sandwiches use yellow American cheese, which is my least-favorite cheese. But I decided to attempt an elevated version of this recipe, using sourdough bread, sharp cheddar cheese, and this delicious butter spread, cooked in my air fryer. Unfortunately, my grilled cheese sandwich turned out incredibly burnt and disgusting-looking. AND I picked up an unsliced loaf of sourdough bread at the grocery store this week, and trying to slice it up on my own was way harder than I expected. Womp! It was not a good time. I’m going to attempt to make it again tonight, using pre-sliced sourdough bread and bringing down the cook time in my air fryer by two minutes on each side. Fingers crossed!
4) I always listen to audiobooks on 1.75x speed, although I will sometimes bring it down to 1.5x speed, depending on the narrator or book topic. I know people who listen to audiobooks on 2.5x or 3x speed, which seems crazy to me. I’m kinda skeptical that you can really take in a book’s contents when you’re listening that fast, but I digress. I do not, however, listen to podcasts on faster speeds. For some reason, it just felt wrong to listen to podcasts on faster speeds but I’ve gotten woefully behind on my podcast queue so I decided to try speeding up my podcast speed to help me knock out more podcast episodes in less time. I don’t do this for all podcasts, especially ones that are history-based or educational, but the ones that just have people chatting about everyday life? Hey, why not? I’ve been listening on 1.25-1.5x speed for those (and finally utilizing Overcast’s Smart Speed feature to shorten silences). It’s been great! There are a few podcasts that I think sound better on a faster speed, haha.
5) It will be a busy weekend around here! Today, Gladys (my beloved Kia Soul) has her first doctor’s appointment! Last weekend, I got an alert that her tire pressure was low and while I was able to go to one of those drive-up oil change places to get her tires pumped up quickly, I also decided it was time for a service check. (I’ve been waiting until she needed an oil change, but then I found out that I was supposed to schedule a service check after 6 months, which was in May. Oops.) I’m going to do that this morning, since I can work while I wait. I’m also going to retry my grilled cheese sandwich recipe while I watch a comedy special tonight! Tomorrow, it’s another podcast recording day with Bri! We plan on recording two more episodes of season 2. I also have a writing date with Mikaela in the late afternoon. And Sunday is, of course, football! It was so nice having football Sundays back in my life last week. My brother, my nephew, and I spend all day at my mom’s watching the games, and it’s a delight!
Do you speed up podcasts/audiobooks? What are your weekend plans?