da tomāto

beef kaldereta with olives, carne norte, garlic fried rice Today's brunch. Yum. And they ask if I eat at all! Well... haha! Forced to swallow bitter pill, literally. I've come to learn that the worst thing I can do to try to get rid of the bitterness on the tongue is to brush my teeth... ugh... makes it worse. I learned that the best thing to do is to eat something sweet, like a cookie. Mind you, NOT drink BUT eat. Munching on a chips ahoy cookie did the trick. Now it's - what bitter pill?

Brushing up on typing skills - Been keeping nails short and doing typing exercises a few minutes a day, for the past couple of days. I don't know, for some reason, I want to keep the fingers limber and warmed up for whatever might come up. Been having this feeling of "just in case". Since transcription work has not been on my plate for many, many months... It's all good, like riding a bike. Been wanting to buy groceries, running low on supplies. Can't do it 'cause I can't tell when people are coming and going at this house, and someone has to be here at all times. Needs sleep.

scrambled egg, sauteed crab meat + mushrooms, pork & beans, rice All I want to say -- nom, nom, nom! Lightning, thunder, strong winds and rain came out of nowhere kanina . It was quiet and then, boom! Thunder! Rain lasted for, maybe, 15 minutes then stopped. It was quiet again. Strange weather we're having.

13th July, Tuesday, evening - Typhoon "Basyang" went over us. Winds were strong! 14th July, Wednesday    > around 2 a.m. - Blackout.    > all day - Phone line dead. No running water. Power was gone, and so was Basyang.    > 9:30 p.m . - Electricity and landline restored. Still no running water. 15th July, Thursday    > all day - Had running dripping water on tap.    > around 11 a.m. - Affected by rotating brownout. Meralco said it was a "tentative" 4-hour-long outage. It actually lasted a little over 2 hours -- thank goodness it was short. Power came back up at around 1:30 p.m.    > 7 p.m. - Normal-running water restored. The end.

Small portions of viand can be stretched to finish with a plateful of rice if they're generously seasoned (but not so much that they're inedible). Take this plate, for instance. The corned beef was extra crunchy and the one-egg scramble was a bit salty. Portions were disproportionate to how much rice I had but all was cleaned off without my asking for an extra serving of corned beef. And yes, I'm being serious. Nyahahaha!

How much do I love Google Docs ? Let me count the ways. For one, it converts .xlsx files to .xls. This feature must've been recent (less than two years, maybe?). There are so many wonderful productivity tools on Google and if we just keep our eyes open, we can see that they keep on putting great stuff out over time. Since I don't remember seeing an in-your-face "convert excel .xlsx to .xls here" feature sign on there, I was wonderfully surprised when I tried it out and it worked. A few months ago, I received several .xlsx files from a client to process. But I had MS Office 2003 so I couldn't read them. I could've sent them back and asked them to be changed to .xls format... but I didn't since figuring things out was part of what I do - besides, I didn't want to send them back at all. And being a keep-the-pc-safe-and-secure nut, I had one limitation in finding a solution -- no software downloads! I googled, yahoo-ed, bing-ed for a fix, but all I g