Why I love staycations

A new word I've learned from reading foreign articles is "staycation": just a fancy term for spending some time off from work to stay home, having little or no cash to spend on travel expenses, especially that the US and European economies are in recession. Since hubby and I resolved to have only one travel vacation every year, and we already have plans to travel some time at the end of this year, we decided to spend this year's holy week at home, just resting, having a "staycation" as American yuppies are wont to call it.

Now that our five-day long staycation is finally over, hear are some finer points of our homemade R&R:

Day 1, Maundy Thursday
After having spent three days at work, this day was spent being idle: napping, Facebook browsing, novel reading. Around night time, because of too much inactivity I began to fantasize about things to do, places to visit; this inspired me to purchase online a month's worth of belly dancing classes. So much for trying to save up but hey: at least I got it on sale.

Day 2, Good Friday
Okay, symptoms of boredom are finally becoming apparent. Now beginning to picture my office desk with longing. I did feel unnerved at the lack of ringing phones and / or elevator bells. To counter this feeling, I began to memorize cookie and cake recipes for when I save up enough to buy an oven for baking. In the end, I microwave-baked three batches of cookies: plain chocolate chips, and two experimental flavors of double chocolate chip and oat-cinnamon chocolate chip. Mental note: use decaf coffee powder in the double chocolate chip cookie dough next time.

Day 3, Black Saturday
An idle mind is evil. Or the playground of the devil? Whatever, I decided to begin rearranging our study room. Even with his cough and fever (which had been going on for about a week), hubby helped me move my desktop PC / study desk downstairs, right next to the kitchen. This way I can be baking cookies and working on spreadsheets, for when I start my own baking business someday. (As you may have noticed, I did a lot of building castles in the air.) My new desktop setup is so sweet, with hubby's geeky World of Warcraft minis and my own collector's edition games, The Sims 3 and Spore Galactic Edition. And the living / dining / kitchen areas are now spotless and pomengranate-scented, thanks to my new reed diffuser, a gift from last Christmas. All these because I needed an outlet for my energies.

Day 4, Easter Sunday
Finally got started on my borrowed Batman comic books. In between scenes of Gotham City, I began to plot out my plans for an herb garden. So right after lunch I put on some sunblock and went to the palengke, hoping to get some herb seedlings. Unfortunately, the Pasig Public Market does not sell these, so I decided to take a bus to the Farmer's Garden in Cubao, right in my sweat pants and ratty tsinelas. When I found the right stall that sells the variety of seedlings that I wanted, I had a field day trying to catch the tindera's attention, who was having a very deep siesta. Begrudgingly, I had to take a halo-halo break and wait for her to wake up, in which I discovered a shop selling commercial-grade kitchen items, but still in shopping mall prices. I got myself a potato masher and a spatula since my old spatula got broken from my intense cookie-baking episode last Friday. When I came back to the Garden, I bought seven species of plants (thyme, basil, oregano, dill, tarragon, rosemary and sampaguita) and some potting soil. Immediately, I planted these in a tiny plot near our front door. I was so inspired that right afterwards, I took a shower and went to the mall to browse for some more gardening items and herb seedlings.

Day 5, Araw ng Kagitingan
Despite promising myself that I'll wake up early since its a week day, I still woke up late. Mental note: tomorrow, I can't be idle anymore. (Yay!) I spent the whole afternoon clearing up some more garden space in our yard and gathered enough kindling wood to barbecue a whole pig. I didn't know we had so much yard space hiding underneath all those dried leaves.

Five days off from work and I still found myself being productive. I guess I can take myself off from work, but not take the work off from me. But I enjoyed all those five days immensely. Mental note: take a real breather next time!

Guilt-less Fantasies Cupcakes

Although I love sweets, I have never been a cake person. This is why I don't pay much attention to cupcakes. Besides being a heavy snack, a cupcake can be hideously fattening! Sometimes, though, very pretty and very cute cupcakes make me want to eat them!

If you do pay attention to the sugar content in food in order to keep from getting fat, or if you are a diabetic, these cupcakes will be good news to you. A supplier called Guilt-less Fantasies produces sugar free cupcakes in various custom made designs. For a recent baby shower, we got these wonderful cupcakes. Charming!

 More pictures after the jump!

Yabu Restaurant, Megamall

Cross-section of a deep fried oyster. Yum!

It is no secret that my husband and I love Japanese food. If we're out and the question of where to eat comes up, nine out of ten times the answer will be a Japanese restaurant. Since we are both creatures of habit (ie, we are too lazy to venture out of our usual stomping grounds) our favorite eating places of Japanese food are quite few. 

Luckily, we chanced upon a new restaurant in Megamall, called Yabu, quite near Teriyaki Boy where we have our usual Japanese fare. On the window is a sign that says "soft opening": we knew we were up for something new.

Mochi Balls: Conquered

Finally, I found galapong! It made a world of difference. Although my shelled sweet beans ended up in the trash, I used cubes of cheddar cheese and my mochi balls ended up sweet-salty-sticky, yummy!

Long Weekend Day 2: Glutinous Rice Balls

One of my favorite frozen yogurt toppings is mochi. This sweet, chewy treat compliments the creamy tartness of yogurt. You could say I'm a mochi fan. So when I found a magazine recipe for mochi, I was completely won over. Never mind that its a Filipino recipe and the type of mochi that I like are Japanese almond-scented ones. For weeks, I read and re-read the recipe and imagined myself chewing on a piece of home made mochi at home. 

Never mind that I never handled galapong before or that I don't even like beans. I wanted to make mochi filled with sweet bean paste, like the one in the picture above. I even spent the whole afternoon shelling red beans; a very long process involving not only one cup, like the recipe called for, but rather two, since apparently dried monggo beans expand when soaked overnight. My fingers are still smarting from squeezing out shelled beans from their peel. At the end of a long journey which took most of my free time, I ended up with these: 

Long Weekend Day 1: Chocolate Truffles

It's a known fact that I love chocolates, cream cheese and cocoa powder. Why not have all three in one bite? This is precisely the reason why I created these cocoa powder coated chocolate truffles - I did not exactly invent the recipe, I borrowed a recipe from a magazine for truffle acorns and ended up with these creamy, powdery chocolate treats. Not bad, not at all.

How could the one food that looks like poop end up to be the best tasting food ever invented?

Today was my second attempt at making chocolate truffles; I was confident enough to try making three kinds of them: dark chocolate, white chocolate and milk chocolate. My first attempt was the milk chocolate kind, using Philadelphia cream cheese and Ricoa Easy-Melt baking chocolate chips (semi-sweet milk chocolates). So far, so good: by the time Carlo had recovered from a recent bout of stomach flu (another story) he and I were literally at each other's necks for dibs on the chocolate truffles chilling in the fridge. 

Filipino: Language of the Learned

Because I did not want to promote the article itself, I attribute this blog post to a link I found posted by a Facebook friend: AdMU student's essay on Filipino language raises online firestorm

Here's my two-cents on the issue:

For while Filipino may be the language of identity, it is the language of the streets. It might have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the language of the learned.

In the same way that there's cockney English and pidgin Latin, there's Filipino spoken on the streets: salitang balbal. This is far removed from beautifully spoken Filipino, the Filipino language of the learned. Mr. Soriano has probably never read great literary masterpieces written in Filipino. His knowledge of the Filipino language is a slap in the face for Amado V. Hernandez, Lualhati Bautista and all of us who appreciate the beauty of Filipino as our native language.

Surprise, Surprise!

I can't believe how time flies! Last time I posted on this blog, I was twenty five and unmarried. Now I am twenty six and unbelievably happy. It's a puzzle how I ended up this way, I think its a combination of events that led up to my current generally happy disposition. As an update, and because they paint a thousand words, here are some of my life's significant events in the past months, in pictures:

I tied the knot with my sweetie of nine years in a gorgeous church wedding last December. If I were to do it over and over again - this whole wedding business, I would always get married to the same person and in exactly the same way. :-)

A few months later, we spent a week in Coron, Palawan, a piece of paradise on Earth, if I say so myself. I will not trade vacationing in our own Coron with traveling to Europe or the U.S. or whichever popular tourist destination. I guess its just my kind of honey moon place. Now I can tell anyone from anywhere that I've visited the most beautiful place in my country - or the whole world, for that matter.

Some of the happy trips I've gone to during the year include an office trip to Davao and a trip with college friends to Bataan. I feel so blessed to have such wonderful people in my life!

Ala-Saturday afternoon teenage flick series

Let's do it! Taken at Pearl Farm, Davao

Guess What?

A total of 52 years' worth of friendship is in this picture. Seriously.

Friendship with Abby = 17 years
Friendship with Arvin = 17 years
Friendship with EJ = 18 years (debut age!)

Grand total = 52 years!

Yes, I am proud to still be friends with those who have known me when I was eight. They will be helping me with wedding chores, etcetera, etcetera. Which means we necessarily have to be friends for decades after. And our children, and children's children should be friends too. That's a sweet yet creepy thought... (for reasons I can't explain... LOL!)

Alumni Homecoming

I am not really familiar with the standards set by whoever as to whenever an alumni reunion must be held. Yesterday, however, we had a college alumni homecoming. It was nice seeing old faces again, friendlier albeit older (and hopefully, wiser) faces. Unlike other reunions, I guess the KC Reunion was a much friendlier affair because no matter how we turned out, there was a general atmosphere of supportive-ness. I was also surprised at the number of fellow Kalayistas taking up law! A few more Kalayaan graduates to enter law school and I'll start thinking about setting up a law students' support group. LOL As if reading cases won't be enough work! Here are some of our pictures:

The triumverate is complete! Also, Carlo looks like Tracy in this shot.

 

Our requisite photo with the school founders

Old friends. Posing outside and not knowingly, right in front if the school's new van!

Bonus: we got free coffee from Vaj! He's setting up a business of roasting coffee and has given away samples at the event. No wonder Vaj was such a wonderful group mate in our Marketing classes. He's really planning on being an entrepreneur. I hope I will be as successful in my plans of becoming a business lawyer. =)

Free coffee! I am sucker for freebies, you know.

Next week, me and my college sweetheart will be tying the knot. I guess our story didn't end with our college graduation. Neither will our stories with our college friends. =)

Masquerade Party

Ho hum. I've been busy (and stressed) from all the preparations I have to go through for the wedding (in six days... yikes!) and have been neglecting my personal blog. I feel like hurling through the nearest wall any wedding magazine I see, even when only a few months ago I hungrily and dreamily search each and every page of The Wedding Digest and Martha Stewart Weddings. 

At least, in the last two days, my last weekend of being unmarried, I was able to do some non-wedding-related stuff. Our office Christmas party held last Friday is the most beautiful and opulent office event I've been to so far. I wore an old dress of my sister's, since I wanted to save every peso I have for incidental wedding expenses, even when my mask and jewelry were not exactly cheap. Even when I didn't win the Best Costume award, at least I got to doll myself up. (I'm the simple, classic, button-down shirt, straight skirt and black pumps girl, with only lip gloss on.) Here's a masqueraded me with a cocktail dress on, sans makeup. (One of these days I am truly learning makeup skills, grrr!)

A few pics of my office mates who have turned into faeries and princesses and angels and empresses for the night:

Our Best in Costume awardee:

Fried Garlic Beef Adobo

The supermarket gave me lean beef cubes when I paid for kenchie! Next time, will check the meat first before leaving. My fried beef garlic adobo would've been better with ribbons of fat lacing through the meat. I tried to compensate by making a tastier sauce... this dish was a lesson learned. I also burned the garlic in the process. Oh well. At least my boneless chicken curry from last week turned out well.

The Chronicles of Narnia

What I was not able to mention in my previous blog post was that the thing that brought me back to book buying and readings was, finding this huge bargain of The Chronicles of Narnia books 1-7 at a Book Sale, for only 40 pesos per book! (Less than a dollar each.) 

Inspired by my great find, I decided to once again comb the second hand book stores for even more bargains. But nothing came up except for Weekend by Christopher Pike, and The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans, something that I haven't read and which I hope is good, because its not my normal genre of interest and I only got it to keep an open mind about books in general.

I have read up to Book 4, Prince Caspian, when I took a break and shifted back to Pikean horror. Narnia books are children's books.

Weekend by Christopher Pike

When I was in high school, I devoured horror books (especially vampire books), mysteries / whodunnits and thriller books. I enjoyed reading Stephen King, R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike at a time when most of my friends read teenage chick lit and other trash about dating boys. Now that I look back at it, the books that I read were still very teenage-y with a lot of references on dating, but there's still some interesting aspect in them like a monster or a killer destroying everything and love prevailing over the rest. I avoid romance novels like the plague, they're something that spinster aunts love to read. But I still get my dose of romance - in books with very unromantic covers, lol!

One night after work, I fell back into my old habit of searching for second-hand pocketbooks in the mall. I found something that made me feel nostalgic in an instant - a book by Christopher Pike. Mind you, I didn't go to high school when Christopher Pike became a bestselling author; he was popular back in the '80s and '90s, and this book, called Weekend, was published in 1986, a year after I was born. Still, I am a lover of old second-hand books; I had very little money as a student, and I always chose the thickest, cheapest novels that I could buy with my money. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I chose horror over romance - I get more pages in a book, the book gives me an adrenaline fix (and not make me sleep), and thus, I get more value for my money.

When I got back to reading Christopher Pike again, it was like the good old days when all I worry about was algebra, bringing a cute shoulder bag for all of my school stuff, and finding a good book to read. Yet it wasn't as good as I remembered it to be.

Lol = King Leonidas vs. Chuck Norris

I've never been a fan of Chuck Norris, except for the Chuck Norris fact generator which can get funny sometimes, but here's a cool video of CN and King Leonidas battling. Who won? Watch to find out!

Blood Diamonds

After watching a National Geographic Channel documentary on diamonds, I began to dislike these petty rocks. They may be sparkly and last forever, but some diamonds have been paid for with the blood of innocents in war. Blood diamonds, or those that come from war-torn regions (like Liberia, Angola, Congo, Zimbabwe, etc.), are sold by rebel groups / insurgents, in exchange for weapons to be used to kill people and destroy lives. These diamonds have been mined in terrible conditions and by prisoners-of-war or slaves held at gunpoint. Many people die - women, children, the sick and the elderly - at the diamond mines. How could anyone wear this rock on their finger as a promise of love, without seeing the faces of those murdered in exchange for it?

I remember a story I read as a child in a storybook written by Oscar Wilde. It's about a prince who dreamed of what he wanted to wear in his coronation. He saw a young boy diving for pearls in sea, paying the price of a perfect pearl with his own life. He saw slaves digging for rubies being whipped by a tyrant slave master. He saw gold vestments being woven by child laborers who work in the cold, having eaten only a single measly meal for the day. In the end, he went to his coronation in the simplest of garments - and ruled as the best king of his land. 

The most precious things in life aren't the ones that are superficial. A diamond may be precious, but a human life is priceless.

I Kissed a Nerd and I Liked It!

I kiss a nerd every day, and I like it a lot! Of course, my nerd is better looking than the nerds in this video. XD From Geeks Are Sexy.

Cheesy!

Because I am still a girl, I got *googly* with this Facebook exchange!

It was an "Aww, how sweet moment"! I've always known there's only one for me, and until now, this knowledge has never changed.

Dr. Quinzel and Dr. Arkham

A few days ago, my boss lent me his Harley Quinn comic books. I got to read them during my commute time (while waiting for a ride in a coffee shop - another story) There was a scene in an issue where Harley got fired by Dr. Arkham himself, when she set the Joker free. Somehow this seemed like an anachronism to me, because Dr. Arkham seems like a very old person, from when Arkham Asylum was first built, presumably in an older time than when Harley and the Joker existed.Speculation led to the Dr. Arkham firing Harley to be Arham Jr. C tries to set things right:

Malaysia Truly Asia

I know I am mababaw (shallow) but I really like this ad! I love the song; its so calming. I enjoy catching this ad on TV. I like singing the song in my spare time, also, and I wish I could download the full version of this ad so I can watch it whenever I feel like woolgathering.

I am not entirely impressed by Malaysia as a tourist spot. Of course, this is a biased view, because I am a Filipino and I think that the Philippines is still a better looking country (and cheaper!). Maybe if I get to visit Malaysia someday, I will have a point of comparison. From the commercials, though, which showcase Malaysia's tourism wonders, I can name spots in the Philippines which can compete, if not surpass, Malaysian tourist spots. But I am very impressed at the way the Malaysian government promotes tourism in their country. Case in point: this ad. They really make an effort for potential tourists from other parts of the world visit Malaysia. Even I, who already live in a beautiful tropical country, feel encouraged at the thought of visiting Malaysia, because of this ad.