A quiet Sunday in August

We were fortunate enough to have almost a full day to ourselves today. My mom had some time to take care of Ethan from the late morning, so we went out for a rare lunch date.

Considering how much of a nightmare parking has become in Ara Damansara after the food scene there exploded, I decided today wasn’t the day to do my usual penny pinching and we hailed a Grab.

Born Butcher has been on our list of restaurants to try for a while, so we decided to finally give it a try. The food was decent, albeit with pricing closer to that in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. I held my tongue on the price of food just to make sure we had a good day. Maybe a part of me is finally maturing. I guess having an additional source of income recently has also made me a little bit more willing to spend, albeit grudgingly.

We had a bit of a coffee and chill time at the maruu coffee after. Felicia spent her time watching some Chinese drama on her phone while I was deploying Uptime Kuma from my iPhone via my Hermes Agent.

Many newer cafés and restaurants seem reluctant to invest in softer surfaces that absorb sound. The result is a much noisier space, which I find mentally exhausting. It’s times like these I really appreciate my AirPods Pro 2 and Sony XM6.

The café uses an analog stamp card system, which they stamp once per transaction. Ever the system thinker, I remarked to the owner that I should have split my order into 3 transactions (but I didn’t), and we had a nice chuckle about it. I paid the bill using the QR instead of a credit card to help the owner reduce the payment processor transaction fees, and she seemed to appreciate that.

It’s too bad that our movie tickets for Spider-Man: One More Day are next Sunday, but that also meant we could have a slower day today.

Days like these don’t come cheap either. Breaking down the cost of today's outing: RM158 for lunch, RM45 for coffee and cakes, and RM22 for transport. RM225 (USD55) for an outing certainly isn’t something we can afford to do too often.

We headed home after the coffee, to chill at home and tidy things a little. As we get older, we tend to appreciate these slow days a little more.