I was 5 or 6 when he read the Hobbit aloud to me. The trilogy is a bit denser so I read that jointly with him I think when I was 10. My daughter and I did all the books as bedtime stories when she was 8, and she liked them all, but the Hobbit is definitely her favorite.

Possibly considered a bit basic or boring, but definitely Tolkien for me. It's a classic for a reason, and personally it is still so special to me

One of my earliest and dearest childhood memories was my dad reading the Hobbit to me when I was quite small. We later read the trilogy books as well. Loved them all. Recently read them all with my daughter, creating a whole new set of precious memories.

The things I appreciate the most about my life, are the ones that took me off plan and by surprise. The unscripted unexpected shit, that’s my real happiness.

You shouldn’t stop. It never makes me uncomfortable when people say anything nice to my dogs, and they always love it too.

Gale disapproves

I am also a terrible cook - but my husband is cooking up a Thai red curry with pork. Super fragrant with galangal, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass and coconut, lots of chili of course. I’m looking forward to it.

Witcher 3 is perhaps a good option. The combat style is relatively complex I’d say, and quite fun. The story is very engaging and super well written. And it’s available on both Steam and in fact on Switch too. I’ve played the whole game on Switch, and it runs well.

In the Voyager app, I can long press on the community name on a post, directly from browsing in All, and select block from a pop up. It’s super quick and easy. Same pop up also has the option to subscribe.

There are many different philosophies on this, and it will depend on your goals (strength, hypertrophy, etc) and also just your own preferences.

My basic strategy is to train something like 3-4 sets of a given exercise, and aim for each set to be in the 8-15 reps range. So I’ll start with a weight where I can do say 4 sets of 8. Next time I do that exercise, I’ll aim to increase reps to 4 sets of 10 or 12. Then when I do maybe 4 sets of 15, the following session i would increase the weight and go back to 4 sets of 8 reps at the now higher weight. And so on.

It’s not exact, I make sure I’m paying attention to form, and listening to feedback from my body, and sometimes I’ll progress faster, other times I plateau for ages in a given exercise.

It’s also not the only way I try to fit in progressive overload. I may add a finisher exercise for the same muscle, or do certain exercises to failure, add another set to an exercise and so on. The overall aim is to keep challenging my body in different ways.

I am not at all from a tech background. I have a humanities/ social science educational background, I work in the organizational management space, for a humanitarian organization.

I do not enjoy a lot of social media, but I had been using Reddit for 8+ years, as my only social media platform really. I enjoyed it for the specialist communities focused on niche interests. I’m hoping to replicate some of that with Lemmy, which is much more aligned with my value set than a large corporate run social platform.

For five days a week, I do an upper-lower split. I tend to do lower body Monday, Thursday and Saturday, and upper body Tuesday and Thursday, taking Wednesday and Sunday off (I may do cardio stuff those days).

My priority at the moment is legs, due to a bad knee which I’m focused on keeping stable and strong. You could switch this to having three upper days per week with two lower, if you’re more focused on upper body growth. Or you could even do a push-pull-legs, but then you’d only maybe hit legs once a week, which I think is too little personally - again, all depends on your goals.

With any split, you can easily find a free starter program if you look around. Then you can tweak it based on your own needs. As an example of the content: for my upper days I focus on hitting upper back, lats, some lower back, chest, front, side, rear delts, as well as biceps and triceps. And I add abs at the end. For lower body days I do glutes, quads, hamstrings, calves, adductors and abductors. Sometime o add abs on leg days too.

Which exercises you specifically want to do for each muscle is really down to preference. If you’re very new to it, you could start off with machines, and over time you can tweak your programme to be more varied e.g. with free weight, cables etc. The main thing at first is to learn the form of each exercise, and to track your reps and weights, so you and progressively increase those over time, for growth.

That you’re never far from the ocean. Also it’s very safe and clean, and highly walkable and cyclable.