The Friday Five, 8/31/18: 5 things I've been up to this week

This has been kind of a weird week—on Tuesday, I lost power for about 3.5 hours, from 6:30pm to 10pm, which screwed up my plans for cooking my last Blue Apron meal. Today, I am driving to Knoxville with my boyfriend for Labor Day weekend, and we will be staying with his cousins; I've never been to Knoxville before (only Nashville), so I'm excited to visit.

Kroger Prep+Pared - Vietnamese Inspired Spicy Lemongrass Pork
Kroger Prep+Pared - Vietnamese Inspired Spicy Lemongrass Pork

What I've been up to this week:
  1. Eating good food, both at home and in restaurants. On Saturday, I had Buddy's Pizza in Auburn Hills for dinner, before GetBack! BeatleMania at Meadow Brook, and on Tuesday night, I attended a Yelp Detroit event at Garrido's, which was fantastic. I had been wanting to try Garrido's for a while now—their frozen hot chocolates are famous on Instagram and social media—and it definitely did not disappoint. My favorite menu items were the lomo saltado, which is steak and rice, the plantain nachos, and, of course, the hot chocolate.
    I've also been cooking a lot this week: I had a Blue Apron box to cook, and I received a coupon from Kroger to try out their Prep+Pared meals. When I arrived at my local Kroger, a lot of them were half off that day, which is awesome—instead of $14-18 for a gourmet meal (2 portions), they would have been $8-9. The Vietnamese Inspired Spicy Lemongrass Pork that we tried was quite good, also. I received a Dinnerly delivery on Tuesday, too, so will be cooking some of that this week.
  2. Living without power (for a short time). I wasn't pleased when my power went out around 6:30pm on Tuesday. I had been planning on doing zumba at 7pm, so I went and did that—lucky me, there was no A/C in the zumba room at my gym, either, though the rest of the gym had it—and then came home, to find the power was still out; initially, DTE had estimated an 8pm return time. Later they switched that to 11:45pm, so at that point, I decided to try out Uber Eats for the first time; I probably haven't done delivery in 10+ years so that was a nice treat. (and to get $5 off your first Uber Eats order: click here and put in code eats-92e4i.)
  3. Seeing movies ... but not as many. I saw Puzzle with my first MoviePass movie of the month (I now get 3 movies per billing period). I liked it—I'd give it 4/5 stars—but my boyfriend said he'd only give it 2.5/5. I also saw Papillon with my parents, but they bought me a ticket; their MoviePass doesn't reset until September 5th. (lucky ducks)
  4. Seeing GetBack! Beatlemania at Meadow Brook. So back at the end of April, I saw RAIN: A Tribute to the Beatles, at the Fox Theatre, and that was very good; it had a lot of multimedia and the band had us dancing in the aisles. GetBack! Beatlemania was a similar concept (Beatles tribute band) but the acoustics or something were off, so it wasn't quite as good. It was still fun though and a pleasant way to spend a Saturday night, as we had pavilion seats ... they actually weren't using the lawn at all for that concert, which was good because it was raining for a bit.
  5. Writing a "How to start a blog" piece for an alumni site. My orchestra from UM, Michigan Pops, has an alumni site, and the founder of Pops has been working hard on it. They are going to have a "Pops Professional" portion of the site and I was asked to write about my experiences with either blogging or journalism. I decided to write a "How to start a blog" piece, for any current or graduating Pops members who are thinking about doing that.
Frozen hot chocolate, Garrido's, Grosse Pointe Woods, MI
Look at that beauty! OREO frozen hot chocolate, from Garrido's (Grosse Pointe Woods, MI)



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