029B9: Inefficient Resting

Cry Havoc

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 428

We stayed up late last night to finally try our copy of Cry Havoc, which is a board game originally published by our much-beloved Portal Games. Their licensing agreement has ended, and thus the game is now considered out of print until a new publisher picks it up. Tobie got very lucky when he found a secondhand copy for sale online because it's quite the clever little strategy game. It's not necessarily a new favorite, but it's definitely a valued addition to our collection.

I went to sleep with the news of the PGH fire being one of the last things I had read on social, which may have made for unusual sleeping. I woke up a few times due to the heat but deliberately tried to stay in bed and sleep in longer save for getting my steps in for the 10am and 11am step intervals. But beyond that point, things started to go a little weird for me and this Sunday has just been rather "off", for lack of a better term. And that feels almost silly to say given we didn't really do anything major and I should have just been grateful for the rest and relaxation.

But allow me to attempt to describe what I've been feeling today. 

First, I had mapped out that I'd jog today and follow that up with some yoga, but I do enjoy including some restorative yoga on Sundays. But today the maintenance finally dropped by to check on the damaged cabinet in the kitchen, so that altered my indoor jogging flow. At first, I tried pacing a bit longer as we waited for them to arrive, but time was running out and so I just started my jog before they arrived. 

The jog wasn't great. Normally I get through a kilometer in about 6 minutes thus making it possible to hit 5km in about 30 minutes. Maybe it was the heat or me feeling tired from yesterday's more intense workout, but I was surprised to see that it took me 10 minutes to finish my first kilometer and I had to push hard to make sure that I finished the second kilometer when I hit the 20-minute mark. That just felt wrong and so I stopped the jog instead of going for my usual 30 minutes because I was feeling quite disappointed in myself.

The maintenance had arrived for an initial inspection and they had to call in another guy to give us a more accurate assessment of the needed repairs. So that still affected my workout plans and I ended up trying to get my yoga done during the narrow space in the bedroom between our bed and, well, the bathroom and cabinets. The yoga mat at least fit, which is fine. But any exercises that wouldn't involve me needed to stretch beyond the limits of the mat didn't really work, and so that left me feeling less than energized by my yoga flow.

We didn't have a scheduled online RPG session today, but we ended up playing board games online with Urim. But since I had to finish my workout first, Tobie and Urim played ahead without me. And by the time I was finished with the workout, we still had to eat the steak brunch that Tobie prepared before I could get around to my weekly keto pandesal preparations, and THEN I could play a game with them. These are all my stupid little rituals on Sundays and I guess the less than ideal workouts had me feeling a little frustrated that I was falling "behind schedule", if that's even a thing, and I was denying myself some game time because I get mentally stuck in the need to finish these things.

I eventually finished up and got to join them online for a round of Dune Imperium via Tabletop Simulator. I had hoped to juggle some comic book reading at the same time, but then Dune does require a bit more focus and I still needed to watch the oven. I was also putting in some extra effort to push my step count for the day to help make up for the crappy workout, but despite those efforts, I somehow missed out on the 250-step minimum for the 5pm interval, so that just added another reason for me to be annoyed at myself for losing focus and not getting my steps in.

I think my frustrations started to affect my game since I really felt off and couldn't figure out a strategy to work with Duke Leto as my leader. I made a number of mistakes with my play and got very close to winning but in the end, Tobie won. It was a good win, but admittedly I was quite happy with the fact that thus far I had won every single Dune Imperium game I had ever played thus far, and so today's defeat didn't have great timing given my mood.

To add insult to injury, it was only past 07:30pm that I realized that I had lost track of the time and should have been juggling dinner preparations sooner despite the online game. So it was a bit of a mad scramble to get something put together while finishing the last few rounds of the game AND keeping the time in mind since we still had a Baduy Pride episode to film and the beginning of our fasting window fast approaching. So that all just added to me feeling that everything today felt late and inefficient and I've been spending a lot of today feeling like I'm struggling to keep up with everything that needs to get done.

Cue my reminders for my daily Elevate and Duolingo drills, because I have no shortage of things I feel obliged to do.

So there, that is what my Sunday has been like. Friday night was fun. Saturday was pretty good, too. But today just felt stupidly wrong even though I really should just let things go and go with the flow because it's not like the things I had to juggle weren't even serious things like work things but just a lot of nice-to-haves if you want to call them that. But I guess I'm wired that way.

I don't know what would have been better. Should I have spent less time in bed this morning and just got started on my routines sooner rather than later? Should I have just pushed through with the jog even though I was slower than my usual and maybe just push longer and hit the 5km regardless of distance? It's not like I had any major "disasters" today - just things being slightly off, which feels like very shallow and "privileged" things to be annoyed about.

It's probably easier (and still sensible) to blame things on the usual stress of the pandemic with the added factor of the blazing heat as of late. Whatever. Hopefully tomorrow starts better.

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