| Cyndie's 25th :) |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|07:39 am] |
| [ | music |
| | TWIT talking about #iranelections | ] |
Turning thirty makes everyone a wee bit loopy. Fun times, nonetheless.
Full album at my Multiply
http://dimbalethren.multiply.com/photos/album/43#7
Eternal thanks to Zee, whose makeup tips from years (and years) ago prove invaluable and endlessly useful. I actually look 'nice'. Hehe. |
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| via mobile |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|06:48 am] |
First time to post using my cell. It's the second day we don't have freaking internet.
Was looking through lists of high school friends. I'm amazed at how many are now married, have kids, or both. So many of them are wives and moms already. Can't help but wonder if I missed the bus somehow.
I haven't been idle myself. Since I graduated high school, I've gone and finished college. I went to work. I guess where others focused on the parenting and coupledom side me adulthood, I took the career bus and stayed on. I'm not complaining, though. I like where I am, and I don't think I'm ready for parenting yet. But still. Can't help but wonder what I could've been if I took that path.
Maybe I'm meant for a good long journey of self discovery. |
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| Randomness. |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|06:27 am] |
Got home and immediately trooped to my room to deposit new girl back I got from the office. I promised Mom I would be more.. erm.. 'responsible' with my money, thus the cap on my spending habits. Well, I've definitely cut back (of course!). It's just that.. well, the bag was calling my name! And besides, I got Mom a second secret one that I'll keep until her birthday next month.
(Yes, I really buy presents weeks.. months in advance)
Can't stop geeking out over http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/main?page=2 and other sites that feature small homes and DIY decor. I'm a girl with a budget and a hidden desire for interior decorating. I am determined for the condo to show my personality and taste when I move in there.
So many decorating ideas to choose from!
I must start finishing up on the how-to documents for my work. Heard about some crappy rumor about my boss not really liking me. Pissed me off for a good five minutes. After that, I calmed down. Because, really. What good will it do everyone if I confront her (In corporate-speak, this is called "feedback") about it? It's going to make her even more paranoid about her friends' loyalties, and will cause a pre-attrition rift that will not improve on the existing non-relationship we have. Better keep status quo and make it an amicable separation.
Should enroll this next term once the schedule comes out. Apparently I thrive on being busy. I can't stand being idle, and it drives me crazy not to be passionate. Going back to school will keep me sane. |
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| Cut and color. |
[May. 18th, 2009|03:50 am] |
Red highlights under red-brown tints and my shoulder-length semi-blunt cut hair.
I love it.
I should've let them keep the highlights on longer so the color is brighter - oh well. Next time, I will let it stay thirty more minutes so that it's Allison Iraheta-red. |
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| Busy Weekend. |
[May. 11th, 2009|02:22 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  awake | ] |
| [ | music |
| | GWC: Star Trek XI | ] |
1. Finished OPEMAN class!
2. Presented the Project Proposal to HMM Business Process Improvement class.
3. Will take a break from class this term.
4. Went with Chi to photo-shoot in Manila: National Gallery, Paco Park
5. Went to the wake of Sister Carmelita
6. Brought Sister Jo to the convent.
7. Contract signing. Home mortgage.. (omg)
8. Mother's Day!
9. Some sleep.
10. Star Trek XI movie! |
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| Loans. |
[Apr. 21st, 2009|07:23 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Home (Dishwalla) | ] |
April is my last car payment.
As of today, Bubbles is now OFFICIALLY MINE!
And this is the first time EVER that I've ever completed a loan in my life.
Dang, it feels good.
So now, I need to look at property. Car now, condo next. And school.
Golly, how am I gonna survive the recession?
I know!
One coffee cup at a time. As much as I love you, espresso roast, venti Caffe Americano, I love my classes more. Our daily sessions will have to be cut back to once-a-week (Mondays will always be the exception).
I was asked once how come I'm thinking of buying myself an apartment, not a house.
I could, you know, save up a little and start buying a house of my own.
But I won't. Why?
Because.. because I don't want to do my house-shopping alone. Because I really want to buy a home and make a decision on a house with someone I can have a family with. I have the right to keep that little hope alive, right?
Therefore, I am not buying a house. |
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| Home. |
[Mar. 16th, 2009|03:17 am] |
Tere got married with this song playing their video during reception. The video presentation was nice, but the music. This song, wow. It's beautiful.
Home
By Dishwalla
I'm so sick and tired
of all these things
that drag me down
I've got no where to go
they say that life
is in these hands
you give everything
you give yourself away you give
and still you choke
and find yourself running for the door
come and take me
home
lead me to your door
take me where you are
lead me to your door
at least just for a while
its some kind of life
forever days
we're in the cold
unfamiliar way
so take this fear
and fade it out
it won't make me sad
cause I get sentimental lord
in other ways
and I don't want to let me down here anymore
so come and take me home
lead me to your door
take me where you are
lead me to your door
and let me in
just let me in
and let me leave
just let me leave this world
come on now let me leave this world
at least just for a while |
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| American Idol 8 - Fearless Prediction! |
[Feb. 6th, 2009|10:25 am] |
It's Hollywood Hell Week, but is it early to call in my favorite?
Okay here it is: Danny Gokey!
Has an amazing voice and great song choices so far.
And it doesn't hurt that he looks a LOT like Robert Downey Jr, with a lot of wholesome thrown in.
The only other time I felt this sure about a contestant was about Taylor Hicks. I was a fan the moment I saw the audition, really. Say what you want about the guy, but I was rooting for him the whole way through and he won :) |
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| 25 Things About Me You Didn't Know.. Yet. |
[Feb. 4th, 2009|11:33 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sleepy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | CNN in the background | ] |
1. I'm a moody, silent, grumpy person when I wake up. I hit the snooze button four times before getting out of bed. I don't like talking when I wake up and have a gravelly bedroom voice that takes me through the first three hours of my shift. I don't get to perk up till I've had my first caffeine hit of the day.
2. I'm a Nanny junkie. I can leave the TV on The Nanny marathon at the Hallmark channel. I still laugh at the same jokes.
3. I can quote the first two paragraphs of Erich Segal's book, "Love Story". The book, not the movie, is what hooked me. I found an old xeroxed copy of the book in a box in a relative's house in high school. The intro is what immediately sucked me into the story. It's short enough that you can read it within hours.
4. I do yoga in my spare time and twist myself like a pretzel. I yoga because it's interesting, and it's a physical sport/activity I can somewhat excel in. For a book nerd, that's a big deal.
5. I can twist cherry stems with my tongue. Even while tipsy. Never fails to make people's eyes pop out when they see it done the first time.
6. I've been blogging since 2000. I keep my blogs and social networking sites completely separate, which means only a few people know how to go to both. It's my placeholder and practice for when I actually get off my ass and write The Novel.
7. I can peel a banana, an apple and a pear without touching, using only a fork and a butter knife. I can get corn out of the cob using the same. The things you learn in exclusive retreat centers..
8. I like my men articulate. Like Josh Lyman. And Sam Seaborn. Or Gil Grissom. John Mayer. Kevin Rose. Lee Pace, Ned The Piemaker. Well, let me be more specific. I like guys who are articulate and slightly geeky.
9. I collect every Nora Roberts book there is (except her In Death series. I figure since I'm collecting everything else she's ever written, I'll get started on that series when it finally ends).
10. I traveled to the US on my own. 22 hours on the plane and six layovers to get to Waterloo, Iowa. The airports got smaller and smaller. In the end, my Manila phone battery died. I had to teach myself to use a US pay phone for the first time in a small airport and I only had one US phone number memorized and 1 quarter.
11. I know how it feels to be kissed brainless, despite speculation of many to the contrary.
12. I love peppermint-y food and drinks. Mocha with peppermint. Candies. Gum. Chewy things. It weirds my friends out.
13. I always order exactly these three things at Teriyaki Boy: miso soup, tuna tempura sashimi and gyoza.
14. When I drive, I talk to other drivers on the road. I cuss them out and use the horn like there's no tomorrow. I give jeepney drivers the finger and overtake on the right side of the road. It freaks my passengers out. I never thought I had it in me. And still, I'm the wussiest driver in the family. Imagine my dad, sister and brother..
15. I only wore glasses in 2006. For some reason, people imagine me as having worn glasses since high school. Never thought I carried the nerdy aura so obviously. I hate my glasses. But I hate not being able to *read* signs more. If it has words (and I mean anything), I will read.
16. My room is messy. It drives my mom nuts to see my clothes and stuff dumped on the floor and hooks by the door. My sibs make a big deal out of seeing what the floor looks like when I clean up enough for them to see the tile on the ground.
17. I am a late-bloomer fan of makeup. Maybe has something to do with being able to start buying my own things when I got to work. Before that, all my allowance money was spent on books and photocopying schoolbooks. My perspective on makeup changed when my sister told me to "imagine that you're just painting your face with makeup paints and brushes."
18. I'm a sucker for romantic movies. I cry at key moments, sigh at dramatic entrances, and get misty-eyed with grand gestures.
19. I can't cook to save my life. I can do everything else domestic in the house but I will throw in the towel when it comes to cooking. I can sew curtains, wash floors, paint, do plumbing, troubleshoot your PC. I just can't figure the cooking thing. There's a joke in the house that I can overcook/undercook boiling water.
20. I wrote fanfic.
21. I can nap at the drop of a hat. Having worked graveyard shifts for the past seven years, I've trained myself to take sleep when I can.
22. I played kickass badminton when I was in high school. I can make that shuttlecock (wow that sounds dirty) zoom straight to your forehead so fast you can't avoid it. Alas, I didn't have the guts to try out for sports. We were a small private girls' school and people all had their places in the social structure. I was "Book Nerd" and "Editor In Chief", not "Athlete".
23. I've always loved salads. I choose to eat salads because it tastes so good, especially if you have the right dressing. My friends used to think I was dieting all the time, now they know that I just plain like eating greens.
24. I taught myself how to play the guitar. Nothing too fancy, but enough to be able to play a few chords with some level of confidence. I can play a few songs without a hitch. Next stop: Piano!
25. I do what my brother calls a 'system check' before I start the car: get in, check. Close the door, check. Turn on the ignition, check. Locks, gear in neutral, check. Seatbelt, check. I have a flight checklist in my mind before I go. If my sister hadn't named the car Bubbles, I woulda named my little gray Chevy Aveo "Starbuck" instead. In honor of both the coffee brand and the Battlestar Galactica character (honestly, who kicks ass harder than Kara "Starbuck" Thrace?)
25 things. Pass it on. |
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| Goodbye sleep. |
[Jan. 27th, 2009|07:55 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  stressed | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Say (John Mayer) | ] |
Will sleep late, and wake early today.
Will sleep late because need to cram and finish assignments for class tonight.
Will wake early to go to class post-shift.
Tried to hit two birds with one stone (hey I'll be awake a while anyway) by deep conditioning my hair in the shower. Now the hair is gonna take forever to dry, it's cold season in Manila and I'm bundled up in blankets coz my hands are freezing.
(By 'freezing' I don't mean the weather you're experiencing Punz. Here in the tropics anything below 70 is 'cold')
Can't sleep till I finish the assignment.
Can't lay down in bed till my hair dries (here's the thing with my hair: I have miles and miles of it. And they're thick. As in, each-strand-as-thick as two strands in normal fair-haired folks).
Can't get started on the damn assignment until I get all the bloggable random thoughts out of my head to flush my mind of clutter.
Can't start concentrate on the Management Accounting book until I chew on some chips.
I'm procrastinating, I know.
Management Accounting would've been all well and good if the practical concepts weren't ALL manufacturing-related, I think. It's not the prof's fault. The book only almost exclusively talks about manufacturing, warehousing, supply-chain-and-demand numbers because most MBA takers are managers in real factories, plants and all those industries.
It's like wanting to listen to opera, and getting frustrated coz the lyrics are all Italian.
I don't speak a speck of italian. I understand the gist of it, once spoken slowly, but I don't have fluency.
In my case all my classmates are either fluent in Italian (factory managers who know the lingo in the case studies) or are music majors (engineers and accountants who can do math)
//rant.
Will complete the case studies now. |
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| Not a happy camper. Globe Broadband sucks. |
[Jan. 19th, 2009|07:19 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  aggravated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Listening to Globe Customer Care hotline messages | ] |
This is the third day on our subscription to the much-talked about Globe broadband in our neighborhood.
It's a dud.
On the first day, we built the wireless network so that I can log in from my laptop in my room (there are five people in the house: two PCs and three laptops. We have to have a wireless network). I had to get my brother and sister to do reset-logout-on/off clicking to get the internet connected. Had to turn on/off the wireless transmitter and close my internet windows to 'reset' the network connection many times.
Second day, I've already collected a dozen experiences of needing to log out and log back in coz the stupid connection won't stay stable. It logs in, connects, and stops after 200kbps up/down. And it stops, as if it's telling me "I'm connected already, what the hell else do you want from me??" I've tried doing a speed test by testing to download the latest Grey's Anatomy episode from the US and I can't even get the download started because of the reset-on/off-clicking thing.
I want for you to start streaming information, you fool.
Third day (this morning), I get "this domain has been blocked" filters on the websites I go to: Yahoo Mail for Pete's sake. Facebook and Multiply. Even freakin IMDB. What the frakking hell? Is Globe putting child-filters on their internet servers for their subscribers?
Oh, by the way, the filters seem to be working for vanilla sites only. I tested to connect to porn sites and it went juust fiinnne. Globe IT boys probably put those websites in their do-not-block list.
Plus, my wireless connection went kaput. I get prompted for the network password, I put in my password and wait. And wait. And wait.
So now, I'm physically connected to the LAN cable in the living room, typing this up.
I can't access my mail so that I can work from home and send assignments to my classmates.
I can't access Facebook and Multiply to rant about the horrendous three-day trial we have with Globe Broadband (maybe it's on purpose?).
I miss Smart Bro. Their customer service and tech support hotline may not be the best, but it's fairly reliable when it comes to just BASICALLY CONNECTING.
At this point, I don't even care about the download speeds, the up/down data transfer per second. If half the websites I go to (and they're innocuous mind you) I get blocked, I'm going to unearth my modem and get a prepaid internet card just to connect. I can't download my podcasts because my connection times out repeatedly. I can't log on to frakking yahoo and yahoogroups to pick up on my personal mail.'
I'm not seeing the benefits of switching.. I'm not feeling the love.
Customer care, here I come. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|07:03 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  angry | ] |
So, girls.
IF you have a boyfriend/your boyfriend posts on his PUBLIC blog, these words,
"(...And when I die,) I will leave all my worldly possessions to (your name) since she bought all of it anyway, and the rest I borrowed money from her to get. She's my sugar momma."
Nice, huh?
I wanna know your thoughts, coz that just made me spitting mad.
Are you reading that the same way I did? |
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| Resolutions? |
[Jan. 9th, 2009|01:52 pm] |
Snagged this from May's LJ.
The auto-generated resolutions are so creepy that it's worth posting over here.
Especially the part about the books and Starbucks :P
Oh, and the inner Punzie!
In 2009,  tesseract resolves to... Go to dindongbell every Sunday. Take evening classes in bigpoppasgurl. Eat more sidekicks. Put fifty books a month into my savings account. Connect with my inner punzerel. Volunteer to spend time with starbucks. |
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| MERRY CHRISTMAS! |
[Dec. 25th, 2008|02:32 am] |
It turned midnight here in the Philippines.
I hope everyone else is having a great holiday! |
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| Early Christmas. |
[Dec. 22nd, 2008|01:54 am] |
| [ | music |
| | sound of me typing. | ] |
The family went and joined mom on her sorority's annual Christmas outreach program. They normally go on medical/dental missions but this year it was a little different. They coordinated with the local parish in Pampanga, and we met up with a small barangay of katutubo - or Aetas - who are still struggling with surviving. They were relocated when Mt Pinatubo erupted in the 90's.
We woke up at around 4am, with mom doing the room rounds. I've been watching TV shows all night (Fringe! Private Practice! True Blood! Pushing Daisies!) so all I needed was to shower and dress. The sibs were harder to wake, and dad was already up.
Headed straight to NLEX and met with mom's sorority sisters.. We crossed to Pampanga, took the Megadike and saw remnants of the eruption on the ground: white ashy soot still covered the ground. Nevertheless the people are now able to farm and rebuild their lives. It was a long and winding road going inside the village, up the mountain and down the mountain (the village was at the bottom of the valley.
The family was split between the children's activity and packing. Chi and Bry went to the activity area to watch the kids. I stayed with mom to pack and re-pack the grocery items and kids cookie and candy bags.
After giving the grocery stuff to the families, we stayed a little and listened to them sing carols (really nice voices!)
I'd talk about the nice feeling you get when you help people, etc etc. That's true, it's there. But more than the altruism and the goody-goody feeling that people normally talk about when helping people out, it felt great to just be there. To be out of the city and do something for someone else. More than the GK stuff that the company takes part in, I'd rather go to activities like these - helping native tribes just a little for the holidays. The kids didn't look like jaded hardened street children like they do when you help out in the city. The parents don't have this shifty look in their eyes like they plan to scam you with crocodile tears.
No, this was pure happiness. The sorority group we were with were funded by their sponsors in the States, they wanted the stuff to go to people who really were happy to receive it. I think they hit jackpot yesterday. It was great to hear the phrase "Merry Christmas" and "Thank you" said in a really happy sincere way, the way the holidays are meant to be.
I talked to some of the parent-coordinators for the activity while I was there. They were honest, sincere folk. Times may be hard, but these are people of the land. They will survive as long as they have the forest to roam and some livestock to keep. They weren't city-dwellers or laborers. They were simple people who lived basic lives in the forest, and they had to relocate because of the eruption.
It was a good day. |
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