Things continue to be busy - in a good way - for me this year. A big highlight was a family reunion with my mom's side of the family. Many of her cousins who are now based abroad were in town. It was good to have this celebration shortly after Auntie Isabel passed away so that we could all be with each other and be there for Uncle Albert. After lunch, Uncle Albert asked me to sing some songs while he played the piano. We ran through several songs until Uncle Albert said he wanted to rest and my Tita Eileen told me after that I just made Uncle Albert very happy. Before we called it a day, Manang Neneng gave each family a box of chocolates and because she had extra, she gave me my own box when Tita Pinky reminded her that I don't live with my mom. Cool! The Lindt chocolates she gave me were very good and it was hard not to eat more than a few pieces each time.
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| Lindt chocolates I got as pasalubong |
There were more get-together. My really good friend Mike celebrated his birthday recently and we met up at Grace Park in Rockwell. I ended up ordering the Caesar salad, which was really good...
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| Grace Park Caesar Salad |
...and the Spinach Fettuccine Veal and Beef Bolognese, which was really good too. (My friend ordered the Pappardelle Al Telefono and couldn't finish it so I tried some of it and it was also delicious. Maybe I will try that dish next time.)
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| Grace Park Spinach Fettuccine Veal and Beef Bolognese |
I also had dinner at Nono's with my colleagues and we were also joined by an ex-colleague. I had one of my favorite Non's desserts that night, the Lemon Torte.
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| Nono's Lemon Torte |
I met with another set of friends for lunch. Eliza requested the Ortigas area while Meg requested Shangri-La mall so that it was easily accessible via MRT. I told them I had a BFF card so we had lunch at Modern Shangai before moving to Secret Recipe for dessert.
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| Visually stunning floral ceiling at Secret Recipe |
Of course, I can't really go an entire month now without having at least one board game night, and I've already had three in just the first month of the year. In one of these game nights, I also finally got to play a game that I owned that I still hadn't previously played up until that night: Coimbra. I've had this game for a while now but I only got to play it now. It's an interesting game and I really enjoyed playing it, although I don't know if that was in part due to the fact that I won this game by a pretty large margin.
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| Coimbra board game |
While my social life has been quite jam-packed, I have also been really busy at work. My work highlight in just the first 37 days of the year was giving a presentation to almost 300 leaders of our company. I had to discuss a relatively complicated topic which was becoming more and more important for us and I had only 25 minutes to do it. It was difficult to prepare for, in terms of trying to make it easy enough for hundreds of people to digest and understand so that they can take immediate action and to articulate everything in as concise a way as possible since I only had limited time (and I wouldn't be able to hold people's attention span if it was longer than 25 minutes anyway). Thankfully, the feedback was generally positive. I was really proud that I was able to give my entire talk without any cue cards or presentation notes. It took a lot of practice to do that and it's been a really long time since I last gave a talk to a huge crowd so I'm glad I was able to pull it off somehow.
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