When was the last time you truthfully answered someone who asked you this question? How are you?
Kumusta?
I was asked this very same question this morning. And I was only able to give a perfunctory answer: okay. Am I really okay? I guess I am if that’s what I say right? But how am I really? I haven’t had much time to think about that. To think about how I’m doing. I just do. I mean, I just be. Eng?
I go through each day as it goes, my routine keeps me going. When I have a baking project, I look forward to it. Otherwise, it’s all just the same to me.
And that’s just sad isn’t it?
Let me think of something to actually look forward to each day as I get ready for work. Think of one for yourself 🙂
As I was Entrecard hopping today, I hopped through Pinay Backpacker’s blog about Manila’s Best Kept Restaurant Secrets. It’s a book available at the National BookStore, about the many wonderful places to dine in and around Metro Manila. I was at the NBS Quezon Avenue branch sometime last week and I saw this on the shelves. You see, I love browsing through the baking books section, and it shares the stands with cookbooks and other books on restaurants, wining and dining.
I had been tempted to get tear this book open, and checkout the restaurants they were suggesting. It has a map somewhere there and I checked out their recommendations for QC, my city. There were only two! Is this for real? Maybe I didn’t check hard enough? But it is quite interesting. Go buy the book, then lend it to me, okay? 🙂
But I’m mentioning this today, because seeing Pinay Backpacker’s post reminded me of what was going through my mind while I was browing through that section. I had wanted so badly to learn more about baking. There were so many baking books there that looked so attractive to me. But I could not justify the cost of buying any one of them when I still have not gone through The Art & Soul of Baking, which the boyfriend gave me for Christmas last year. Only when I finish through it, I told myself, would I allow myself the pleasure of another baking book. I also have The Field Guide to Cookies, and Hello! Cupcake.
I saw these two on the racks, and I got even more inspired to devote time for baking:
The second isn’t really just about baking, but a cook book. I don’t cook. But looking at cookbooks just makes me want to start learning. Seriously.
I don’t know if anything will come out of this really, even the boyfriend sorta doubts that I’ll really learn to cook. It might seem easier to build a house, than to get me to cooking. Haha. Yeah, only if you get a manufactured home (something that also always fascinates me, think Brad Pitt and his Make It Right/The Pink Project). But who knows. It’s never too late to learn a new skill.
After installing and tweaking, I’ve gone back to this template. The other, though it was growing me, would not display properly when you click on Comments. I have no time to troubleshoot that at the mo’, so old template it is.
While having a late lunch today, Alfred and I were tuned in to Cinema One anda Vilma Santos-FPJ starrer was showing. It’s a 1974 film entitled Batya’t Palu-Palo.
In one of the scenes, Stella (Vilma’s character) brought a group of her friends home to their hacienda for a vacation. The girls were chatting in the living room, then suddenly there was guitar music and here come the boys, singing. Then one of the girls take up the lead vocals, and eventually everyone just sings. I know it was normal in Philippine movies to have song and dance numbers, but this one didn’t look so contrived. It’s seemed like the most natural type of thing to do. To break out in song with your friends. Jamming. Haha 🙂
I remembered mentioning this to Alfred on Saturday: don’t we have friends anymore who we could just hang out and jam with? I missed that from high school when Jo and I, or some other high school friends, would just hang out with our guitars and songhits. Strumming away and singing. How many hours had we spent doing these?
Lord knows how many times I had thought of stopping and hailing a cab to take me the rest of the way home, but I had to push myself to plod on. That it would be so worth it, in time. It must have taken 3000 steps or so. It doesn’t sound much, I know. But that is a good way to start me off on having any physical activity incorporated into my day.
Why’d I do it?
Because on Saturday morning, Alfred and I walked from ABS-CBN to Morato. That isn’t too far, but we both broke a sweat. For overweight people like us whose physical activity consists only of walking to the cab, from the cab, in and out and up and down the house, that was already a lot of walking. We hadn’t had breakfast when we did that, so we were quite hungry too. We passed by several breakfast places and considered stopping right there but we didn’t. We agreed that we would walk all the way to Kopi Roti, break fast there, then walk the remaining distance home (Kopi Roti was probably half or a third of the way through).
So I had coffee, two slices of french toast and shared a Kopi Bun with the boyfriend, while he ordered hot choco and toast. I’d already consider that light breakfast. It was there that we decided to see a movie, but not after walking a bit more. We left the cafe at around 9AM and walked around the Scout area. I snapped a few photos too, and I even tripped (ouch!). We hailed a cab upon reaching Scout Reyes and went on our way to Greenhills. Yucky right? We didn’t even go back home to change out of our sweaty clothes? To be quite frank, we didn’t sweat all that much, we started very early so there was hardly any sun, and there was a cool wind blowing too. We sweated, but we didn’t stink. Haha.
Besides, to go home would just break the momentum 🙂
Another good thing that came out from Saturday’s walk was that it gave us another way to bond with each other. You can never have too much bonding naman right? Now, if I can just convince the boyfriend on the benefits of doing this more regularly…
Here’s a photo from Google Earth of the route we took from ELJ to Kopi Roti:
Anyhoo, today, I took a slightly different route today. I went through Scout Borromeo, Timog, and then Scout Tobias. I even passed by the intersection where I tripped on Saturday!
My legs weren’t sore when I finally arrived home. But they were too hot, I was wearing jeans see. I don’t think I’d be up to taking a huge bag of clothes to change into everyday. One step at a time.
If I keep up with this, I can lose weight without spending any additional money on weight loss products. I also wouldn’t need to be on the never ending search for diet pills that work. In fact, I can save at least 55 pesos for the fare I would have paid a cabbie to take me home!
