Dan and Indo

As you can tell from attached pictures, Indo's aversion of his picture being taken is still with him. He was happy to see Daniel though. And I think the feeling was mutual.

A Day In The Life...

Sunday, Dec 10

It’s being reported that 6 people have died in the Visayas in the wake of typhoon Seniang. It’s now on its way out of the Philippines. But Luzon is on its path towards the western China Sea, hence, all the rains that we’ve been getting for the last day or so. It was raining pretty hard last night, actually.

The last couple of days was a break in our routine due to the storm.

For those of you who’re wondering how we pass the time, here basically is:

A day in the life of Rey and Donna in the Phil.

We try to wake up around 6:30ish. After a couple of snoozes on the alarm clock, we get up and start walking around the neighborhood. This is how we got to know a few of our neighbors, some of them do walk in the mornings like we do. After three rounds, which is roughly three kilometers, we turn in. She prepares breakfast and I do lawn work. After breakfast, I continue with lawn work and she does house work, like putting away stuff, dusting, etc. We take naps either before or after lunch. I do the dishes and the laundry and she does the cooking. These past few days, we’re so fortunate that we have our washer and dryer because of all the rain. Once in a while we go to the town market to buy fish, chicken and veggies. We get our soda mostly from Essel Supermarket in Telabastagan or Jenra in Angeles by Nepo Mall. There’s a huge flea market/swap meet type thing going on in Angeles City every Friday. In fact that’s where we got the material for all of our curtains.

In a nutshell that’s basically what we do. We spend our afternoons paying bills or malling. And then there’s Donna’s casino nights, I drop her off and pick her up when she texts me saying she’s ready to go home. In between, I usually go home and do my on line stuff: blogging, checking eMails, surfing the net, etc., sometimes I watch DVD's or a cable movie. Our nights are spent mostly watching movies on cable or DVD’s in the music room. We go to bed usually between midnight to 1 am. So naps during the day are a must.

All of the above activities keep us busy. We haven’t even started our Pampanga road trips, Luzon road trips and eventually our visit around the Philippines.

Tuesday, Dec 12

DANIEL'S ON HIS WAY HOME!!!!
YAY!!

Last Typhoon of 2006

Here we are Sunday Dec 10 and the Philippines is once again in the middle of a typhoon. The poor people of Albay and the Bicol Regions haven’t yet recovered from the last super typhoon Reming and here comes another one, Senyang. Although this one hits a slightly southern part of the Philippines – the Visayas (Leyte, Cebu, Samar, etc.) including Boracay Beach world famous for its powdery white sand shores. The mudflows victims of Albay are up to a thousand dead and missing, by the way.

All morning the rain has been on and off, mostly on. Not hard rain, mind you, but just enough to make for a gloomy day. It’s great for my lawn and my plants though. I heard this is supposed to be the last storm of the year.

We haven’t gone out all day. I’ve been doing laundry, among other things. She’s unpacking the rest of the leftover boxes. Yesterday we unpacked and assembled our old Pioneer stereo component in the master bedroom 2. In its cassette deck was the long lost tape I recorded for her of several Karaoke songs. I gave it to her as a birthday gift in the year 2000. We used it for a few months and then it disappeared. We altogether forgot that it was in this cassette deck. I’m thinking of looking for an outfit to transfer it to a CD, not sure if one exists actually. I also cut the master bedroom bathroom window blinds to size. Rommel installed them but they were too long and they had to be cut. I did the same thing for our blinds in the house in Norwalk. They’ve been up for a few weeks but I’ve just now had the chance to cut them since it’s raining and like I said, we haven’t gone out. We’ll have to go SM grocery shopping today, ‘cause we’re running out of some stuff. Talk about running out of stuff, we’re down to our last box of sugar free cocoa mix and we’re totally out of Egg Beaters as well as turkey bacon. Hopefully Daniel will save us by bringing some from the commissary in Japan through Reggie. We try to stick to our South Beach diet. We’ve been weighing ourselves again, I didn’t do too bad, gained about 7 or so lbs but Donna gained a little more than me. By the way, Dan is coming in two days. Woohoo!! We’re having Leda and them pick him up because I can’t drive to Manila on Tuesdays due to the Innova’s plates. There’s a popular OPM song here called “Miss Kita ‘Pag Tuesday” and there’s a line in it, “Coding ako pag Tuesday”, which is the same exact case with us.

Talk about malling, the following are our SM sightings for the last times we were over at SM:

Former high school teacher Mr. Manaloto and wife
High school classmate Alvin Carreon and wife
High school classmate Nora Punzalan (don’t really know her)

Mr. Manaloto and his wife were eating at Sushi-Ya when we saw them, Alvin and his wife were on their way out of the mall and Nora just approached us asking, “Do we have another reunion?” I guess she recognized us from previous reunions and she introduced herself quickly afterwards when she realized we didn’t know her.

Last Monday, Leda and them were here for some much needed kwaho session. I guess she catered three occasions Friday through Sunday back-to-back and she was beat. Kwaho was a much needed respite. They left here at almost midnight and didn’t get home to Muntinglupa till about 2 am.

Last Thursday, Ned, wife Imelda and Susan Mangio were over here and collected the remittance for the raffle tickets we sold to classmates in the States this last time we were there to visit. I gave them a sample of Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith in my home theater. Also that day, Alan’s wife Neneng and daughter Betsy left for California to attend son Diego’s wedding. She and Alan were here before that. Donna loaned them several pairs of long johns, sweaters and sweat shirts. The day before they left they came over and gave us a bag full of huge live crabs! Yummy!

We’ve picked up the housewarming invitations we had Bernadette of Etc. print for us. I’ve already sent text messages inviting people that I have numbers in my cell. Mostly all I invited replied they’d come. Donna gave Ate Pie several invitations to give to her friends in Guagua.

Friday evening after Donna had her hair done, we went and watched the latest James Bond flick Casino Royale with brand new 007, Daniel Craig. It was pretty good, typical of all James Bond movies, cool special effects, gorgeous chicks. They could have turned down the volume just a tad and raised the thermostat setting a couple of degrees. I was freezing cold and my ears were ringing by the time it was over, it was a long movie, by the way.

We received a text message each the other day from Eph telling us to go to Yahoo.com to see Rach. I hurriedly turned on my laptop and to my surprise, she was on the front page of a Yahoo news article about Instant Messaging. I guess that’s her 15 minutes of fame!

Yesterday, we went to Lakeshore and visited Bert’s house and took several pictures. They’ve already completed pouring the concrete for the 2nd room floor and beams. They’ve started installing some of the steel trusses but the foreman said they’re forbidden to use their welding machine when there’s an event in the nearby clubhouse, a little island in the lake at their backyard.

My cousin Josie called the other day. She’s here visiting and to attend a couple of reunions from her elementary and high school classes. We went to her brother-in-law’s resort in Baliti, Alfredo’s, to see her. She said she’ll stay with us for a couple of days before she leaves for San Diego where she’ll spend Christmas with Rey and the boys.

One of the subdivision security guards was at our door the other day announcing we have a certain guest at the gate who wanted to see us and, would we let him in? I asked for his name so the guard radioed the gate and got it. It’s someone we don’t know, we asked what the purpose of the visit and he said he knows my brother Romy and he’s selling insurance. I told the guard to tell him we’re not interested. When he left, I was left asking myself was I rude in not letting him in and at least explain his product? On the other hand, this is the reason why we chose this neighborhood, so we can screen ‘undesirables’.