The Weekly Wrap: September 17, 2023

I love it when I discover that I don't have to do something anymore. Cancelled meetings? I'm a fan. Can skip an errand? Awesome. A work project is no longer a thing? Great! Husband takes care of something? Fantastic! I always have plenty to do, so when something gets knocked off my to do list, it's a plus.

One nagging item on my to do list was to figure out why we were paying for two condo insurance policies. About two years ago (that's how long I've been procrastinating this), I discovered a weird charge in our mortgage account. Through a chat with our bank, I learned that it was for insurance. That insurance name did not match the name of the policy I knew we had. So, I put "figure condo insurance out" on my to do list. 

All I would need to do is find both policies, compare them, decide which one to keep, and then cancel the extra one. But, I didn't want to. It just felt like too much adulting.

This week, while reviewing documents with my husband, we realized that the insurance charges in the mortgage account exactly matched the insurance we originally thought we had. The dates were the same; the charges were the same. The only thing that was different was the name. A quick dash to our insurance provider's website showed that the policy was "paid in full." A few more detective clicks and we realized that the "second" insurance we thought we were paying was actually just our only insurance which was directly paid out of our mortgage account. The way our mortgage account named it was different and that's why we thought we had two policies.

So, two years of procrastination and 15 minutes of work yielded a scary item getting knocked off my task list. Love it.

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• The real man in the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin. [The Atlantic - may be paywalled]
• Why modern furniture doesn't last. [WaPo - gift link]
• How to hold a knife. [Serious Eats]
• I have *thoughts* about "gender parity initiatives" in colleges. [NYT Magazine - may be paywalled] 
• An artist is making sidewalk repair beautiful. [Colossal]

• What retail stores are doing about "shrink." [The Indicator]
• How heat and climate change are impacting parenting in the summer. [Radio Atlantic] 
• Lots of labor rumbling in the auto industry. [The Daily]
• The keepers of time. [Atlas Obscura]
• Do you know about the massive squishing? [Short Wave]
• On lacrosse and indigenous sovereignty. [Atlas Obscura]

• For our Friday night flick, we watched Last Days of American Crime. It was definitely a "guy" movie. There was a lot of violence, nudity, and "dude stuff" all for the sake of just padding the hyper-masculine drive of the film. The narrative of the story played second fiddle. I did not really care for the movie, but it did leave me intrigued enough to track down the graphic novel. [Netflix]
• A few weeks back, we put The Darkest Hour on our watch list. The plot, where invisible aliens chaos havoc on earth, was intriguing. It was a great idea but lacked in execution. The dialogue was wooden and the acting was run of the mill. The special effects were middling at best. It was fun to see all the old tech. Gotta love a good Blackberry spotting. [Amazon Prime]
• For our weekday watch, we decided to binge Only Murders in the Building. It is just as good as the hype. The overall plot it interesting, the storytelling is innovative and a little daring (a whole episode without spoken dialogue!), and the comedy is phenomenal. It's been a while since I watch a half-hour long show, so I will be sad when we catch up faster than expected. [Hulu]

• For my lunch meal prep, I made four-can pantry salad. This dish has more than four ingredients so it's a bit more involved than the name implies but not by much. The hardest part is making the dressing. I skipped the radicchio and used kalamata olives instead of black. This one holds up fairly well in fridge but the greens do wilt from the dressing. [The Kitchn]
• We haven't had fish in awhile so I put oven baked fish with tomatoes on our menu. I forgot to put canned tomatoes on our shopping list. Luckily, I had a pint of grape tomatoes from our farm share hanging about. They worked just as well. I kind of wish I had added a dash of balsamic to the tomato mixture before I used it to top the fish. We served this with garlic bread and salad. [Budget Bytes]