029F1: Saturday Balancing Act

Saturday Play Time

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 483

My day started with another family reunion Zoom call. This is the second such call I've attended for my mother's side of the family, and for the most part, they've been interesting experiences. It's nice to reconnect with family and it's all sorts of amazing what technology can do now. Just a decade ago regular video calls like this were practically impossible but look at us now. 

I had to leave the call early since I had scheduled time at the gym today. I'm trying to use weekends as actual gym time versus sticking to home workouts during weekdays. Today's gym crowd was relatively bigger than last Sunday but at least well under 10 people including the various personal trainers. I got to do a new weights routine in the Nike Training Club app, and it was nice to be able to put a bit more effort into things. I've mostly stuck to bodyweight exercises across the past year of quarantine and I'm hoping that bringing in some weight training again will help shake me out of my current weight plateau.

After gym, I visited mom since Tobie had gotten her some keto cookies "in exchange" for the various cakes she's been sending over. And those weren't keto cakes mind you - they were legitimate sugary ones that Tobie had to eat alone. I had just seen her last weekend for the monthly medicine refill, but it's nice to find reasons to visit again. I may increase the frequency of said visits once more now that we're both past the 2-weeks-after-vaccination period. 

For the better part of this afternoon, I worked on unboxing several pending Transformers purchases. I'm always grateful that Tobie is such a supportive boyfriend in terms of both (1) the fact that I collect so many Transformers and (2) he allows me the time I need to unbox, photograph, and otherwise celebrate these different figures. Under different circumstances, this could be perceived as wasting the weekend or not paying enough attention to my partner, but we understand one another enough to give space for our respective hobbies. Plus we still sort of share the experience - or at least Tobie has to put up with me showing him each Transformer in each of its modes as I go through the unboxing process. 

I am a very, very lucky man to have him in my life.

I managed to cook adobo for the first time in a long time today after previously consulting with my mom about how she cooks hers. I was generally happy with the result but I wish that I had hard-boiled some eggs ahead of time to help round out the experience. The fact that I was able to do this while in the middle of unboxing a few more Transformers figures was quite the weird geeky achievement.

We also made time to watch the new Black Widow movie while I was working on my Transformers and I think both Tobie and I were pretty surprised at how much we enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't exactly the best thing that Marvel Studios has ever released. But it was a very solid film with pretty good internal consistency and some really great fight scenes. It definitely felt more like an action-packed espionage story than yet another superhero adventure. 

And now we have the rest of the evening open and I've already cleared up both the dinner plates and my Transformers. I definitely owe Tobie some board game time now and we have quite a number of new games that we need to explore and determine if they were truly worth the purchase.

I hope you all enjoy your weekend as well!


Comments