Week 21 of 2026: long days

Weird week in between the many holidays of April and May. This time of year always throws me off, which is a shame because I also love it when the days are this long.

Read

• continued in Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

Mild spoilers after my complaints in previous weeks: it finally gets romantic and more (self) accepting, and that made me pick up the pace again. Not finished yet, though.

Watched

• Mulholland Drive (2001)

A classic I had never seen before. Very interesting movie, and I love the fact that it’s not all explained and that we the audience just have to deal with that.

Played

On Tuesday I ran the “semi-finale” of my Brindlewood Bay campaign, the last one where I used a published mystery – the next time we will do a wrap up to figure out who this mysterious cult is that is behind all these murders. For this one I picked Fudge, Jury, Executioner and it was a good step-up to the finale, as the mystery comes with a warning it has many ties to the Midwives of the Fragrant Void.

On Wednesday I played the (delayed) second episode of Pasión de las Pasiones. This one worked better for me than the first one, because we did a lot of smaller scenes, whereas the first one we did was one giant situation. I know myself as someone who is not necessarily good at romance, but what shocked me at this session was that apparently I am completely blind for it. I try to play a character who knows this stuff, but he is becoming this tragic hero who just doesn’t know how to pick up romantic signals. (Why did I pick La Empleada as a playbook? Well, I honestly thought I would do better at this.)

Ran

On Monday I did a 6.8km tempo run home after volleyball training, but I did not hit the pace targets. I think that’s fine, given the half marathon two days before and the volleyball training itself.

On Thursday I ran to volleyball in 8.9km. This was just an easy run. I am very pleased with my new way to bind my volleyball shoes to my (too small) running backpack and I might do this metro + running commute more in the future.

On Saturday I went to the Proud Strides 5k again, but started from Centraal Station and ran back to there after, for a total of 11.4km. This is technically not the 12km long run that was on the planning, but my training for Venloop has been too serious and I just want to approach the Utrecht Half Marathon next week in a bit of a relaxer fashion.