First off, Merry Christmas to you. 
But this post isn’t about the holidays where people are rushing to buy gifts nor is it a scrooge post saying how Christmas makes us melancholy. Nope. This post is about how prevalent the web is in our lives that some of us, present company not excluded, are spending some precious time online during the eve where we should be spending it with family.
One family in our clan tonight had to rush home to Skype with a family member from abroad. Of course this is still time spent with other family, albeit through a screen. Even my mother recently joined Facebook, I caught her changing her profile picture while preparing dinner. We are not absolved from this either, upon coming home, we automatically sit down in front of our PCs and “facebook” to check photos of the parties we’ve missed tonight. Yup, gone are the days where you have to wait for the line at the local photo store to have your film developed. Gone are the times where we pass around sheets of pictures and make remarks… now we just comment on a photo posted on facebook or flickr. You even see a friend logged in facebook and start chatting, sending Christmas cheer.
Blogging, twitting, plurking is no exception.. I am doing it now. Has it improved communication between families and friends? Or has it replaced valuable face time with virtual time?
If you love grilled food, Nanbantei is always a yummy, healthy choice. My family loves coming here. It used to be open somewhere near Burgos, but it’s so much easier to get to now that it’s in Greenbelt 3. The appetizers start out with raw, crunchy vegetables: carrot sticks, cabbage and green veggie sticks. (not sure what they are, but they’re definitely not celery)
Then we had a variety of skewered meat: chicken with leeks, chicken heart, chicken liver (I didn’t try them but my family said they were good), beef and teeny tiny quail eggs.
My all time faves were the skewered shiitake mushrooms and yaki onigiri. (This is a salty grilled triangle of Japanese rice, wrapped in Nori)
I like to wash everything down with green tea and cold tea. We skipped dessert as we still had 2 more meriendas to get to that day. And as you can see, we were already quite satisfied.
*(the red dots on my arms are the aftermath of my saga with rabies shots)
1. this yummy pink popsicle Coolpix S60 from Nikon
2. Meteorites in Pink Fresh 02 shade
20% off in Rustan's till Dec. 31!!!!
3. Meteorites Poudre de Perles, Illuminating Perfecting Pressed Powder
01 Mythic Parfait
4. Meteorites adorable pink brush
fluffy like cotton candy
I can’t believe Noel got me to watch this movie! I was closing my eyes most of the time (and covering my ears) but I could not block the hilarious comments of our fellow movie watchers: “Ano ba ito, hindi naman ako makakatulog.” (Damn, I won’t be able to sleep again.) One viewer shouted to a bunch of noisy kids: “Shut up!” He was responded with: “What’s up?”
I lost count of the number of times I screamed, sometimes just hearing the noises was even more frightening than seeing the actual images. The movie did a really good job of keeping you at the edge of your seat. Pacing was good and acting was just as convincing. It was funny because what seemed like zombies attacking the people in the creepy apartment complex was actually a kind of mutated form of rabies that would show symptoms much faster than the typical kind, making its victims highly aggressive and crazed to kill. (Of course they were also afraid of the light) This was extra meaningful for me as I recently had a rabies scare last week when I attempted to save a tiny kitten from my folks’ hunter Jack Russells. Ipsy, Lemon and Chulo all escaped from the garage and were going to kill a defenseless kitty that was balled up inside a car’s hubcap. The whole house was in an uproar and my Dud yelled: “Someone save the cat!” Stupid me, feeling sorry for the little thing that was crying and had no Mama, I picked it up and tried to inspect it for wounds saying: “You’re all right. You’re ok.” (Ok, I had a Steve Irwin moment- and I don’t even like cats!) Then I noticed one eye was a totally different color from the other and was kind of hypnotized by that for a moment, and that’s when the kitty turned and bit my finger. That landed me in Medical City last, last Sunday, Dec. 7 and got me 6 shots! I had 4 more the following week. And two more to go. Sigh. I thought I had it bad, one guy in front of me had 15 shots in his ear! When I initially asked if I really needed the shots, the doctor told me “Ma’am, rabies is fatal.” (And they reiterated this in the movie) What was even more hilarious was the vaccination schedule card they gave me. The back read something like: “When symptoms start to show, treatment will no longer be effective. Death will always be unavoidable.”
So the prospect of being rabid was all the more real to me during the movie and was truly horiffic. This is a flick that is not for the faint of heart. But if I can survive it. So can you.
One of our favorite haunts where you can eat well for cheap. Featured in this photo is a plate of buttered rice with 3 sticks of chicken kebab and sidings of tomato salsa. Noel and I never tire of this place, and we even recently discovered that they serve crispy, spicy papadums too. (which they spell as “papad” in their menu)
Crowd is mostly made up of young people- students and yuppies. You can find Uncle Moe’s at the ground floor of City Golf Plaza along Julia Vargas. Too bad they’re closed on Sundays.
Hazelnut Kitkat from Israel and Macha Green Tea from Japan
I am a Kitkat lover. I thought I had tried some pretty exotic flavors till Noel’s officemate brought back this hazelnut one from Israel and my sweet student Yuko had her husband buy me some Macha Green Tea Kitkat. I’ve also tried (and loved!) Kitkat Orange and Kitkat Cappuccino. (both limited ed flavors here in Manila) I thought those were a lot of flavors till I found this on Wikipedia. OMG! I gotta try Kitkat Strawberry and Kitkat Peach! Both from Japan!!!! :) It’s good to be back in the blogging world. And a very SWEET return it is!
We’re back… sort of. A change in server. A migration of data from Movable Type to Wordpress. And a new theme.
Ahhh… looks nice and tidy now. The transfer of domain to a new host and installation, and migration of data took long, but we are back. Seems like all of our old entries are also ok. I like this “crafty cart” theme now. I think this theme will be kept here for sometime, until I get to find time to make it look better. But there are still some holes due to some image files not being moved yet. More about the move soon. Expect us to get back into our regular posting schedule. Thanks for standing by this long!