March Madness

March was a wonderfully packed month, with a lot of quality time spent with family and friends. For my brother's milestone birthday, I took my family to Mamou. I thought this would be a great place for us to celebrate given that the food here is great and some members of my family had never eaten here before, including my brother. Mamou is well-known for its steak so I ordered two of them for us to share: Porterhouse Steak...

Mamou's Porterhouse Steak

...and Angus Ribeye. Both were good although I do think I liked the porterhouse better (which is surprising because my normal go-to steak cut is the ribeye). My family enjoyed our lunch; in fact, we over-ordered haha. The thing about us though is that we don't mind eating leftovers so anything we didn't fully consume there, we took home.

Mamou's Angus Ribeye

My college friend Maileen was also in town so my college friends and I met up with her while she was here. We decided to have dinner at Tomatito at Estancia Mall. My college friends and I have known each other for more than half our lives so it's always a great and very comfortable time with them. Mai now lives abroad so it's great that she still comes home every so often and that we get to catch up whenever she does.

Tomatito at Estancia Mall

I also met up with some of my ex-teammates from my previous company. We had been talking about a reunion for a while. The original plan was for us to meet in December for the holidays and then in January but both times, we couldn't find a schedule that worked. So thankfully, we got around to meeting up. We decided to have lunch in Watami in Uptown Mall. My friends who are familiar with that area recommended it because it is quite spacious and you can actually also order from Texas Roadhouse which was right next to it. None of us had a Bistro Frequent Foodie Card so I decided to get one. It gives a 20% discount at Bistro restaurants such as Watami and Texas Roadhouse among many others and it's valid for a year. Hopefully I can get a return-on-investment on my new Bistro card before it expires.

My first-ever Bistro Card

As a board game enthusiast, I'm really happy that I continue to find time to play board games with my friends. Sometimes I play with friends who are bigger aficionados than me and sometimes I play games with my more casual gaming friends. I am happy though that I was able to reduce my shelf of shame just a bit this March. (The proverbial shelf of shame is a set of games that one has purchased that just sits on their shelf and hasn't been played yet haha.) I was able to play a new game that I own - Guillotine - which is a relatively quick and easy game. I played it a few times over different weekends and I won one time haha.

Guillotine card game

I'm also quite happy that I was able to watch a couple of movies on HBO Go and Disney+ with my mom. She usually just watches movies and shows on her phone because she finds it too complicated to turn on and launch these apps on our TV so when we're both home and she isn't too tired, I try to play a movie that we can both watch on our living room TV. On separate weekends, we watched Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning on HBO Go and A Haunting in Venice on Disney+. I actually really liked both movies. Dead Reckoning is actually the first of two parts, with the second planned for release in May of next year. A Haunting in Venice may very well be my favorite among the three movies that have come out featuring Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot. My mom also told me that she watched this Korean Drama movie Always on Netflix and suggested that I watch it so I did. It was a nice, chill movie for the most part with a bit of a surprising twist close to the end. There are still a lot of Kdramas in my Watch List so hopefully I can start watching more of them soon.