Tuesday, Sept 12, 2006 - Good and Bad News

Excitement is up in the air. Donna has officially started putting stuff away today. She opened several boxes of glasses, vases, china, etc and stuffed most of our kitchen cabinets. We were able to clear up most of the living room to make room for our furniture. For those of you who've been in our place in Norwalk, do you remember how crowded the living room seemed to be with all of our huge and bulky couches?

They looked just perfect here!

Tomorrow we're supposed to break out her elephant figurines and put them up in our old curio cabinet. It's definitely looking like a home.

That's the good news. The bad news - we still do not have our 110V power line hooked up. Today they officially connected our 220V but as you know, 95% of our appliances, lighting, etc need 110V. This may delay our move in target date of Sept 15. We've already invoked the powers that be, namely Marny Castro, our next door neighbor who's supposed to be tight with the higher-ups of SFELAPCO, our local power company. Tomorrow I've told Donna to call John Andrade (she knows him from high school) who works for SFELAPCO and find out whether he can help expedite things a bit.

Last week, we went to the Swap Meet of Apu in Angeles City to hunt for our music room curtain material. We found some that we liked but the guy didn't have enough and we had to go to his place with a big warehouse in Sta. Rita the day after. We're having Beth David (a high school classmate) fabricate our curtains. The original idea was floor to ceiling carpet on the wall of the music room but it proved to be too expensive. Labor and material on curtains is about half the cost of carpet. We've also decided to use roof insulation for the ceiling instead of cork for the same reason.

This week we're going to try to lock out prices for the granite counter tops and the air conditioners. I'm going to try and attend a meeting with the homeowner's association tomorrow to discuss my lack of telephone lines, among other things.

Mina, my niece from Sunnyvale, Ca has inquired about our South Beach diet. Hi Mina!

Well, let me put it this way, my 30" sized jeans still fit. That's the good news. The bad news? I think I'm starting to have a gut again! Let's not even talk about Donna! All the daily trips to restaurants for lunch and dinner don't help, not to mention our nightly 'fruit' sessions! You see before we go to bed, she hogs on lanzones, atis and chico while I pig out on buko and chesa (whenever they're available). And then there are the weekly visits to Razon's Halo-Halo and sometimes the 'pick ups' from street vendors of corn on the cob, banana or camote cue. And then there are the birthdays and Fiestas every so often! I'm telling you, it's rough here!!

We promised each other, when we move in to the house, we'll be back with our routine of salads and all good stuff. It'll be kind of hard because they don't really have turkey here, nor Egg Beaters to speak of. We'll just have to improvise somehow. We probably should go and have some kind of exercise routine also. I've developed some shoulder and abs workout which I try to do in the morning and at night but that's just to help prevent my '50 year old shoulder syndrome' from recurring.