I'll Be Home for Woofmas - Woof of the Week #13

by Frosty the Woofman

Welcome to Woof of the Week!

Dog seen on Thanksgiving Day in Redondo Beach

This is where you’ll be staying… yeah I know right? It’s wild that this one bedroom has a walk in closet! And that it’s just big enough for a twin bed! Look, you can fit a side table, a really small shelf. There’s even outlets in here! It’s basically good enough to be a bedroom… right?

Welcome to Woof of the Week where I write about the things that made me say “Woof” the longest each week. Whether it’s international news, or just something that happened to a friend of a friend - it’ll be featured here.

And don’t forget - you can always submit a Woof!

Woofs are submitted anonymously so even your most secret Woofs are safe to send. And if you’d just like to submit dog pictures you can send those too!

Now without further ado -

Travel Tips

Apologies for this week’s Woof of the Week going out late! I was getting ready to leave for the holidays, which is actually this week’s Woof!

Leaving for any sort of travel is always a bit of an ordeal. Before you leave, there’s lots of things you need to do; arrangements need to be made, things need to be cleaned, etcetera etcetera. Usually at least one of these things is a Woof, but never enough to be THE Woof of the Week, unless of course something really out there happens. Well what happens when you add up a bunch of small Woofs? You get one big Woof!

Let’s break down some of the Woofs that make the Woof that is “Getting your affairs in order before you leave for travel” or in simpler terms, “The Pre-Travel Routine”.

1) Getting Rid of All Your Perishable Food

Even if you’re leaving for a few days, it’s probably best to make sure all your perishable food is either eaten, given to someone else to eat, or thrown away. For me this has mostly been the latter. All last week I dealt with flies in my apartment. No matter what I threw out they kept coming back. Fruit flies: Where did they come from, Where did they go, They’re finally gone, “We did it Joe”.

Anyways.

One area of my kitchen that was safe from the flies was my fridge. So on Wednesday, attempting to make a fly free meal, I combed my fridge to see what was remaining. I had some leftover Trader Joe’s Thai Green Curry sauce and some thinly sliced pork belly. Nice! I threw the pork belly on a pan, poured the sauce in, and served it all on top of some pasta. In theory that sounds appetizing… right? (Feel obliged to disagree to get me to start cooking better meals for myself, please).

So the thing about this dish is that… I’ve never really been great at cooking these thinly sliced pieces of pork belly. It seems like something you can’t mess up, which is why I buy them. Maybe it’s just that I don’t know how to cook pork that’s not bacon, because every time I try to cook & mix these pork belly slices with sauce, it ends up coming out really really bad. Like, knocked out, lie on your stomach for 2-3 hours, your whole night is over, bad.

Now let’s revisit this dish.

• Thin slices of (potentially undercooked) pork belly.

• Trader Joe’s Thai Green Curry (now mixed with the oil from the pork belly, to make a more yellow-y oil instead of sauce).

• Pasta (because I didn’t have noodles)

Mix em all together and you get this:

I didn’t take a picture but honestly this image and description fits it to a T.

Trust me, you don’t want to see a picture.

I stared at this triumph of leftover cooking. My roommate had bought me dinner while I was making this “dish” so at this point I was essentially meal prepping.

I sniffed it.
Smelled… ok?

I looked at it.
Looked… gross.

And I took a bite...
And it tasted… ok…?

It was one of those moments where it looks so so bad that you just know that even if it tastes ok, the visuals of it would make it be bad to you, mentally. (This happens to me a lot by the way, I don’t know about anyone else). I put the pork and noodles in the fridge, hoping to work up the courage to eat it before my trip so the food wouldn’t go to waste.

Cut to - Sunday afternoon. I ate a large chunk of the “dish” for lunch. I was knocked out for 2-3 hours and did not feel very good afterwards. I threw the rest out. Woof.

2) Alerting your hosts of any potential guests

When you travel, especially when traveling to see family, you’ll want to let them know if you’re bringing any unexpected guests ;)

As a single 27 year old I often get asked by my family members if I’ll be bringing back a ~special someone~ for the holidays. It’s always slightly embarrassing to be asked and then more embarrassing to say no.
So this year I beat my family to the punch and let them know that I would be bringing an unexpected guest.

This guest has made my life better in many ways. A lot of stress has been removed from my plate and I can move through my days and nights with ease. Things I didn’t think were possible before are now possible. I’ve never felt more creative than when I’m with this guest. And that guest is my Mac Mini with the M1 chip.

“Ain’t She a Beaut”

I recently got this computer and I stand by everything I described above - it’s super fast (at least faster than my 2012 Macbook Pro) and it’s opened up a world of possibilities when it comes to video editing and color correction. It’s been fun to go on this mini creative journey through “post-production” over the last few months and I was excited to continue it over the holidays, hence why I wanted to bring my Mac Mini to New Jersey.

I made sure to text my Dad ahead of time to alert him that I would be bringing my Mac Mini back with me and to make sure the right accommodations were made for it (monitor, keyboard, 800 thread count sheets).

3) And of course: Packing

The most important thing. The thing that always gets put off until the last minute. The thing that always requires your attention the morning of traveling.

I’ve always had a really tough time with packing. Partially because it’s a tedious drag but also because I always want to bring too much with me. What if I wanted to read this book I haven’t touched in 4 months? Maybe I’ll film something, I should bring my whole camera case. What if I want to journal even though I haven’t ever journaled?

There’s an incredible amount of privilege and luxury that comes with (1) being able to travel at all and (2) having choice in what you can bring. I feel very fortunate that I have had the luxury and opportunities to travel as much as I have and to also learn the lessons of packing too much, packing the wrong things, and packing too late.

One memorable moment was when I went to Florence, Italy by myself. I was staying in a hotel in Venice (not like outside Venice, but IN Venice). I decided the most important thing to take with me was my camera, and every single lens I owned for the maximum amount of coverage. So this did not account for taking a rain jacket when it inevitably rained that day, or packing an extra shirt or extra water after being extremely sweaty from walking around in the humidity. I remember stumbling back into my hotel at 11PM that night and looking at myself in the mirror, my black shirt stained with sweat from my extremely heavy camera bag.

Or another time when I took my whole camera case (a Pelican 1510), a hard shell duffle bag, and a backpack stuffed to the brim from Louisiana to Washington D.C to Boston. Dragging that 80+ pounds of camera equipment and personal belongings across the airport and then across Boston streets was absolute hell. I absolutely did not need all the things that I brought with me.

So this trip, although I still started packing too late (7PM the night before), I played it smart. Less clothes meant more room in my carry on bag for my Mac Mini and other tech accessories. No excess books and notebooks. And definitely no camera case, just my camera floating in my backpack, wrapped in an extra fleece in case the cold was abrasive upon landing.

There was no Woof in packing this year but only because there have been many many Woofs before this one.

If you’re traveling this holiday season, hope you get to avoid as many Woofs as you can!

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Honorable Mentions

Too many things happen in a week to just talk about one Woof! Here are some of the other things that made me say Woof this week:

Spider-Man: No Woof Home

This is part of “Woof of the Week’s” ongoing coverage of “Spider-Man: No Way Home”.

It’s finally here. The biggest movie of the year, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” arrived in theaters on Thursday afternoon, December 16, 2021 and cinema will never be the same. The “second biggest box office opening ever”, fans filled theaters across the world, leading to many near sold out showings.

Here are a few scattered thoughts:

COVID-19: That a movie can create jam packed theaters while a pandemic resurges is an insane feat. As the aggressively contagious Omicron variant begins to overtake New York, I wouldn’t be surprised if many showings ended up becoming tracked down as super spreader events. As someone who is 100% guilty of going to one of the sold out shows, I can attest: these theaters were f u l l. Jam packed seats, and my theater didn’t check vaccinations. People like to eat during movies, and people love to not wear masks at all. We’ll have to see what happens this week as COVID cases continue to rise.

SHOWING SELECTION: At the AMC 18 in the Americana at Brand, a shopping complex in Glendale, California, there were normal digital screenings of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” every 15-30 minutes. That is… so much movie. Forget trying to see it in Dolby or IMAX - those screenings were incredibly sold out when I checked. With this amount of movie, anyone could see Spiderman, and a lot of y’all did. Imagine having just the same movie playing in your theater. Out of 18 screens, you’re relegating all the majority of them to this one movie. Any other movie that comes out that weekend (Nightmare Alley RIP) is up against stiff competition just from the nature of how many times it gets to be shown.

SPOILERS: A YouTuber/Film Critic that I follow on Letterboxd named AmandatheJedi (wow what a sentence) said this about the film:

Imagine how cool this would have been if the internet wasn’t the way it is.

And she’s 100% correct! Being on the internet this past week was like a minefield. Anything Spider-Man related or anything that looked Spider-Man related I swiped right by. I was so afraid of spoilers, so afraid of speculation, that I HAD to see the movie in a sold out opening day showing! I didn’t want to know any more about who might be in the movie or what they might be doing. I just wanted to see it.
I can imagine for folks who are more online than me, that are still spoiler conscious but fan theory obsessed probably had a just alright time with this movie. It’s hard to say. This movie was built up as the movie of the year which meant no one could avoid seeing or posting about it. I just want to watch Spider-Man and know nothing!

Lastly, THE MOVIE: I won’t talk about the movie itself here because I want to avoid spoiling it (obviously). So *shameless plug* I’ll be hopping on the “Show Me the Meaning” podcast this week to talk about the movie! The episode will be public later this week! I’ll try to get into some of my thoughts about IP, fan service, and corporate politics there - that’s just a tease for y’all :)

Hindsight 2020

This week my D&D group played our last session of the year! I was so excited to get to the game that I was late! Somehow a long day at work resulted in a longer post-work tennis practice session, which turned into me gunning up the 5 in my Honda Civic.

I ran into my friend’s house, threw my dinner in the microwave and hastily changed into normal clothes in his bathroom. In the rush I didn’t take off my glasses. They got caught in my shirt and as I flung my shirt off, it flung my glasses, right into the toilet.

I washed my glasses with soap and shamefully put them back on. I wolfed down my dinner and we started the game; Everyone was excited and I was also excited but with my toilet glasses on.

Woof.

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Quote of the Week

Every week I’ll dive back into my Apple Notes where I write down quotes that I’ve heard from friends, Romans, and countrymen in real life, unless otherwise noted.

This week’s quote is from 2020:

Go where the WiFi is Weak

What an apt quote to round out the year! And round out almost 2 years of this pandemic where we definitely spent lots of time with and on WiFi!

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On a Special Note…

This is the LAST Woof of the Week of 2021! What a time it’s been writing this newsletter. Lots of highs and a few lows - all in all, I’ve really loved doing this! It’s been a great exercise in personal writing and I love hearing thoughts on the newsletter from all of you, be it digitally or in person! I truly did not know how this would turn out and it means so much that people read it, and like to talk about it.

I’m looking forward to continuing this in the new year, and working on my writing skills to make sure I’m not scrambling at the last minute to send this out!

Thank you all so so much for reading. It truly means the world to me! Please have a safe and happy holiday season and I’ll see you in twenty-twenty-Woof!

That’s all folks!

Thanks for reading this week’s edition of Woof of the Week! Leave a comment because I’d love to hear your thoughts! Some questions I have for you -

• Did you see Spider-Man: No Way Home?

• What’s your worst leftover meal?

• What’s your hope for the new year?

See you on the next one!

Submit Your Woof!

Got a Woof you want to share? Click below to submit your Woof.

Woofs can be submitted anonymously so even your most secret Woofs are safe to send. And if you’d just like to submit dog pictures you can send those too!

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