dana820.blogspot.com

Christmas day lunch. Clockwise: I had lengua with sweet potato and saging na saba slices, roast chicken, embutido (it was my late grandma's recipe daw ) and a pork rib. Not pictured was a bowl of savory pancit molo that I also dug into. The lengua was my fave on this plate -- yummy! This may not look like a lot but it really was. It's just that we used big plates. Happy new year! :)

How strange this must look... like a novelty cookbook page (sans the recipe) that was made with the thought that filling up every space with media makes for good page composition. Moving on... The portions of food we had at this year's Christmas eve dinner were bigger than what we'd normally have. There was much left over. But we figured that the pansit canton (left) wouldn't keep well because it had corn starch so we ate as much as we can and it was nearly polished off. We tried to do the same with the menudo (right, pinoy version with purefoods hotdog) but failed because we ate with lots of rice. All in all, a filling eve. Oh, we had fried chicken too. Almost everyone had a cup of decaf or tea afterwards, enough said.

yahoo email was fine with receiving mms. but months ago, yahoo quit receiving mms. see, i take pictures with my phone. i used to send photos on my phone to a yahoo email via mms without worry. suddenly, at one of those mms-sends, the phone prompted that the mms was sent but it did not show up in the recipient's yahoo email. at first i thought mms was buggy so i tested it some, as is only logical, and sent an mms to another email domain that's not yahoo. that went through and was successfully received. ergo, only yahoo quit receiving mms. tonight, i took pictures with another person's phone. i sent the photos to a yahoo email... yes, via mms. toink, that's (their) 10 pesos down the drain! i forgot that yahoo quit receiving mms. sorry. [data cables and wi-fi weren't viable options in this short narrative... in case you were wondering]

christmas food pics coming soon! took some shots of our noche buena's & christmas day's grub. i ate a lot, to the point where it's like you're pregnant & it's hard to breathe & walk. sigh. it feels great when all you want for christmas is to see your baby nieces holding the christmas presents you sent them... and you get a picture of that without even asking. i've dropped my sister so many hints about taking pictures when i send gifts to the babies which i stopped doing when 2010 started. i'm glad she remembered it this time. happy, happy me.

Had a bit of holiday fun last week which included opening a bottle of wine from marks and spencer called "lambrusco rose". A dear someone bought it last year but we haven't had a chance to try it until some days ago. Here it was, properly chilled. It was sweet and semi-sparkling... very yummy, very girly. We had these nice milk chocolate-topped oatmeal dessert cuppies too. They were soft munchies. Me thinks that they were meant for another time but my sweet wine buddies broke 'em out that night. They're great. Will definitely make it up to them next time.

nicked someone's early holiday present ... ok, i asked first and they said yes. this tiny thing is quite thoughtful and useful since it's a citronella-infused candle. it's supposed to repel mosquitoes. i believe it's working. but three evenings in, it's all but burned out. pictured here was just day 1. oh well, it's good while it lasts. but the scent does give me a slight headache. just saying.

Oops, I nibbled the pita wrap. Anyway, here's a KFC California maki twister, unwrapped. The last time I had one of these, I only had half. I think that was a good thing 'cause I would not have finished a whole one. Now, it's not because it's a big serving since I think it's about right for one gal. But it's nakakaumay and if it wasn't for a surprising crunch from a cucumber strip 1/4 into the roll, I'd not have munched through half of it. It could be too much of one texture (or too much sauce). As to the other half that I didn't want to finish... I shared it with someone. :)

My second kamiseta[dot]com order arrived! Hurrah! Now, what's inside is as much for me as it is for a couple of people - for presents, I mean. Glad that's taken care of. The time-sequence of this transaction was similar to my first one - completed within a week . Order was placed Monday evening (their receipt landing page is buggy still, or they just can't get it to work so they left it as is ... the latter's probable). Received e-mail confirmation of order (mentioned that tracking info will be e-mailed too) on Tuesday morning. Wednesday , no e-mail about shipping received. Thursday , still no e-mail if item shipped so I went to my online kamiseta[dot]com account and saw the package's air21 tracking info there so sent text inquiry to air21 = tracking info not found daw that meant that I won't be receiving the box that day. Friday , texted air21 again = "in delivery vehicle", excited, and it came. Great! Oh, what's different from my previous t...

Sauteed canned mackerel ( saba ) in oil + egg This is what the combination's supposed to look like. Well this has been standing for an hour or so already and wasn't reheated, but you get the idea. I was just glad they left me some - more than half, from the looks of it. Briny and savory, best eaten with garlic fried rice - plenty of it. Hardly needed salt, really. The trick is to dump the mackerel first on a skillet (medium heat) with some of the oil from the can and break them up in big chunks. Then mix in the beaten eggs. A couple of eggs (3 if they're small) for a 15 oz. can will do. A chopped shallot thrown in at the beginning is taster's choice (but I don't prefer it).

enjoying sherlock holmes (on symbian60 "ereader") so much that i forgot about "the hobbit" earlier. my plan has been to read eBooks to fall asleep and read the tangible tolkien when i can during the day. "the hobbit" was started the day before. i placed my bookmark where i stopped, excited to get back to it 'cause it was as wonderful as i'd hoped. last night, i started my 2nd doyle ebook (the study..) but i got into it too much that i didn't stop until i was yawning and teary-eyed. rest assured, i fell asleep as soon as i put my phone down. it was ereader that i reached for after breakfast. it was "the study..." that i read (and finished) today. now, i want to read tolkien but i've no reading light. telling myself that i knew this was going to happen is sad. now i know to stick to my plan. i need to get sleepy now. writing about this my plan B. yes,my lids are getting heavy. goodnight.

Comforting chicken afritada . Someone learned to cook this at the time and for their first try, the taste was right on. It was thick, tart, salty... yum. Would've wanted more meat though, but we only had native chicken pieces that weren't many to begin with. Nothing turns out a hearty dish with a handful of meat than by stewing -- plenty of carrots and potatoes here, as you can see. Oh, and lots of thick, flavorful sabaw too.

when u get the feeling that something bad is gonna happen... i put a couple of fly paper sheets on the floor in hopes of catching a little critter i've seen scampering around at night. i laid them out tonight. one is by the garbage can. then, i went about my usual way. i picked up some paperwork with a grabber (explaining what's with the grabber isn't important). as i pulled the grabber up, it got caught on a cable. the papers went loose. as if in slow motion, they gracefully fell on the fly paper. they landed on the fly paper next to the garbage. [sigh]

goodies received! the last of my amazon (.com) purchases for the year (for me, that is) are finally here. luckily, my time on mturk has been rewarding even if i only get gift certs for it. bought these in june/july and have been gathering dust in my sister's house, waiting for anyone to visit the PH so we can ask them the kind favor of bringing these along. now, i can't thank them enough for saying yes. lovely stuff. will get on with "the hobbit" after i finish "the adventures of sherlock holmes" from proj. gutenberg. it's nice to be reading books again. excited to send presents to my darlings - my main reason for joining mturk. i've got nice stuff on amazon's gift organizer for them. so very excited.

Here's a piece of a day-old french toast. Didn't know it could keep overnight... But it was kept in the fridge so obviously, it can be stored and not go bad. Spread berry gelée on my french toast yesterday -- v. good combo. Had homemade daing (salted, dried fish) earlier. Impressed that they can make daing right here in stead of buying from the market. But we might have been too excited to dig into them today because they haven't dried as much as I'd have liked. Also, how pretty is my omelet today? Pretty. It was thicker than how it looks here and had a gooey yumminess in the center when I cut into it too. Mmm... Will try to use flash on future photos. These are too dark. I would've adjusted exposure on these before posting but I am trying to take pictures that I can just run with. Good luck to me, then.

To get a cup of decaf the way I like it -- I make it myself. Don't mind hauling all these containers in as long as these aren't left here overnight. Getting the hang of using the new phone's camera is proving to be slightly difficult than expected. One thing I've learned is not to use the touchscreen's capture button. In spite identical settings, the hard shutter button on the side produces better results than the touchscreen's. Alas, the new, clean, fresh look of my blogger blog isn't playing well with IE7 (don't know about other browsers though - except for mozilla FF where it looks the way I like it). My sidebar is down the bottom of the page on IE. Shame on the site's template designer for sucking me in, teasing me with this pretty template, then keeping me out by not loading at all. Though I can go back to standard layout with html, I won't. I've decided to keep this for now. [edit: looks fine on IE7 now. don't know what...

Finally got to change my header too. Simple. Clean. I wonder how long this simple, clean theme's going to last - maybe another two years, who knows? Now, to food... chicken liver . Mmmm.... This was rich and yummy adobo - neither overcooked nor undercooked. I guess cooking liver (pork or chicken) is tricky because it gets tough quickly. I hear they put it in chopsuey or menudo at the last minute (or two). Very good. Rich in iron, too!

Had a bad cold last night. I woke up this morning from an aching jaw. In fact, it felt like the lower part of my face was sore from the inside - gums, cheeks, ears, jaw... My cold was cleared up though. My sinuses must've been so congested that there was pressure on facial nerves and such. Since I couldn't get back to sleep (and I really wanted to) 'cause of the pain, I had breakfast and took a couple of Tylenol caplets. Afterwards, I lied in bed and waited for the meds to kick in. Good news is that I woke up a few hours later and my jaw was ache-free.

Ah, new blog layout and background, I like this now. It's fresh and clean. Now about that header...

"Brrr.." temps were felt yesterday. It's quite cool today too. Here's last night's warm egg-drop soup with those yellow sugary croutons that made the dish more sweet than savory. Made myself some decaf mocha tonight. That's with half a cup of hot water + half a teaspoon of decaf + 1 small sachet of Milo + half a packet of sweetener. Warms the tummy... mmm.

Still getting to know this phone's camera's settings - which work to get good shots and which don't since its auto setup doesn't take good photos at all. Here are some of its recent almost-successes: tinapa + itlog na maalat + tomato slices Having just one piece of tinapa doesn't seem enough, really. In this case, the fish wasn't very salty so I would've easily eaten two pieces at the time. Two would've been enough to finish all that rice.  This was brunch earlier: Mini hotdogs + scrambled egg + sweet sausage slice (longganisa). See how sticky and wet our rice is? That's what I meant when I said that it's not very good for fried rice. I'll eventually learn to work with this camera... future photos should be better, I hope.

We typically use KDO 3-in-1 sugar-free coffee mix but the store didn't have it in stock the last time they went grocery-shopping. We're currenty on Nescafe sugar-free coffee mix instead and sadly, it's not very good. Nescafe's mix is weak, not creamy at all even with my usual half a cup of hot water. Do they even put their nutty, yummy Coffee-mate in it? Doesn't taste like they do. Well they should. KDO's sugar-free mix still gets my vote. Hope they'll be in stock soon.

" Tradeport .com .ph " order received! The long 3-day weekend and an issue about them replacing a faulty charger delayed the shipping of my first order from local online shopping site, Tradeport. This arrived in the AM on Tuesday and I would've made a whole "unboxing" photo sequence but excitement won over. So, I settled for an after-shot. A couple of sad notes on my Tradeport shipping / shopping experience: (1) They didn't give me my package's Air21 tracking info, and (2) the charger* doesn't work. (*See Dec 18th update) [* update* Nov 7th] Managed to get my phone's microSD card out last night and saw that it was 4GB instead of 8GB that I expected. Add this to my "sad notes". Below is a screenshot of its Tradeport product details page that hasn't changed since I've placed the order (except for the sales price). Oh, and only one ear bud works on its headset* (*See Dec 18th update). Click the image to see its original s...

Finally, we made fried rice! We call it kalo-kalo in this house. It's still sticking together though and not buhaghag that I like... Me don't likey sticky rice-y (I think I've said this before, guess can't say it enough). Canned mackarel sauteed with egg and onion -- yum. Not really a fan of onions so I picked out the bits as I ate. I like the taste it left in the dish but don't like biting into onion bits. Corned beef was left out and didn't re-heat it so it looks "bleh" here but it was Purefoods so it's still "yum" for me. That thing on the left was left-over embutido that I didn't touch. Tummy upset a couple of days last week turned me off left-overs... for the time being.

Pldt dsl connection was terrible yesterday - from non-existent in the late afternoon to intermittent until I gave up and headed to bed. Yesterday - After 2 hours of waiting for it to go back to normal, finally decided to call the pldt 171 hot-line at 8:00 pm. Dialed once, entered data that the recorded voice asked, and waited over 30 minutes until a real person answered. CS Rep said that there was no advisory about problems in our area but there were some customer reports that came in that they had no working connections at all. Figured if I called earlier, I'd be one of them. But at that moment, we had sporadic but still useless bursts of connection. The CS Rep called it "intermittent" and that it would go on his report that the tech team will work on. Quite pleasant conversation, actually. The rep didn't insist on troubleshooting which I've already done before calling, of course. Asking once was enough, glad he knew that. Besides, it was something totally...

Was doing a bit of offline work earlier (ref: pencil and paper) and with how the lighting is in here, all I thought about was how I wanted to be ambidextrous. I would've plugged in my lamp to brighten the space more but my phone was plugged in first. Charging it was a priority before relieving myself of all the squinting. I've come to the conclusion that my cellphone is not meeting my needs well and its battery life is not keeping up. Blasting firecrackers (triangle super lolos , I think) can be heard around here the past few days. It was during early evenings at first and it was faint so we figure it was far from here. But earlier, at dawn, it came again and they were firing up those things close by. Car alarms were going off 'cause of 'em. So annoying.

We celebrated our town's fiesta last weekend and you will see that they put out more than a couple of dishes for the occasion. It goes without saying that I had leftovers for brunches since then. My day-of fiesta brunch - morcon and beef mechado This morcon was even better the day after because when we heat it up, it stews in its sauce. Shame I did not have any sauce on this pictured-day-of and it was slightly dry without it too. Leftover brunches - rellenong bangus and pork afritada Stuffed bangus was very tasty. The afritada was my fave on this plate.   More leftover brunch - pata tim and embutido Pata tim (Chinese-style, I think) meat was very tender. Had ketchup with the embutido, of course. That reminds me, I have to buy UFC banana ketchup. Me don't likey Hunt's tomato ketchup, UFC's has a kick at spicyness kasi na I like. We had more dishes too - lumpiang shanghai, fried chicken, valenciana, shrimps... These are just what I took pictures of since (like ...

Would've preferred to write "I've been under the weather..." but that wouldn't be entirely true. I was not feeling well last Friday night and Saturday, and from Sunday to today (Tuesday), I've been feeling progressively better. I don't normally complain but when you can't sleep because of the discomfort, well, yes, I complained. I was able to sleep well again Sunday night so now, I feel silly for complaining. What's tricky is it's not that bad. It's a gut thing. Hope it goes away really soon. Been using "manzanilla" on my belly and it smells good... I think it's helping, I like to think it is. No fever or vomiting ever happened. These past couple of days, how do I say it... there's just something there so it's not totally gone. I'm not sure what caused this. I'm pinning it on peanut butter sandwiches I ate Friday. OK. Moving away from my bodily aches... Yes, it rained. The much-newsed (making words up n...

When there's no time to cook (except for rice - there must always be rice), open a can of Ligo sardines and all will be well in the (my) world. I used to live off canned Ligo sardines (red can for hot and spicy, green for not) and canned Purefoods corned beef when I lived close to the uni I attended over a decade ago. It helped that I mostly ate in my room, alone, once every few days a week back then. With nothing but a rice cooker and a toaster oven, I was set. A few years ago, I discovered that it was better to saute Ligo sardines with a quartered ripe tomato because it mellows it out - if you've got time to cook, that is. No onions for me, please - that is what it's typically sauted with - I dislike onions. On a warm skillet, dump in the sardines and sliced tomato. I like to break up the fish and keep sauteing until the tomato slices soften. Since everything's already cooked to begin with (just two ingredients lang ), it takes less than five minutes to finish ove...

All canned meats. Lahat galing de-lata. Hmmm... One of either with eggs would've been fine. I like my brekky processed meats but this is too much of one thing. Mosquitoes abound. Daming lamok . [annoyed]

Half a california maki roll twister and half a brownie - all takeaway from KFC - were tonight's early dinner. I was generously shared those halves, v. good. Wish KFC delivers to our house. They don't - at least that's what I know. My fave KFC food (to date) is their fries. Yum. But I don't care for their instant-from-powder mashed potatoes. Used to, but not anymore. What else?

Sweltering nighttime temps these days are... severe. Calling it severe may be too much. But it is so uncomfortable. It's almost 2 a.m. now and I'm dabbing beads of sweat off my forehead - that's how bad it is. Let me write this down real-time ... I feel a cool draft now. It's strange since I was having sweat beads on my forehead only moments ago. But knowing how nighttime temps have been lately, I can confidently say that in a few minutes from now, that wave of damp heat will return. At this point, I can choose to go to bed and savor this coolness around me or I can choose to continue writing, just to prove my point - well, prove it to myself since I'm the only one here. I know it's coming... waiting for it... Okay, it's taking a little longer than expected. Okay, here's a good prediction -- rain. Yes, it could rain tonight. Yes, it's still cool. But at this point, I'd welcome to be proven wrong. Oh lovely, refreshing, cool showers...  come, co...

Down to the last 20 pages of "The Diary of a Young Girl" (Anne Frank), excluding the afterword. Took over two years to do it - pathetic effort, I know. The cover's corners are wrinkled now which is a little sad since it arrived in such good shape despite the fact that it was a used book when I bought it years ago. Should wrap it with plastic cover soon. Started on "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (Project Gutenberg's, of course). I'm 15 pages in and glad to say it interests me. Now, if I had this book on hand, I think I would not be able to put it down with easy detachment. Rather, it would take much conscientious effort to do so (or the need to go to the bathroom, or to eat, or to work...). That's me, saying that, just from reading the first 15 pages.

Yesterday's brunch of left-over giniling and pork bbq - adding a fried egg made the previous night's meats part of a proper brunch. Nice. Would've been very good if there was garlic fried rice. But no, the bigas we're using now makes sticky rice. Can't make kalo-kalo with it. Tonight's temp is lovely. Sadly, I feel the beginnings of a headache coming. Face and eyes are warm. Feeling blunt pressure on top of skull. But it's nothing... I think it's going away.

Sorted out. Still cramped. Need more space. Been staring at a banker's box I found on Amazon [dot] com that would fit perfectly here, against the wall. It would free up more desk space. I'm convinced it will. Sadly, all I can do is stare at it. Can't order it and have it shipped here -- that would be ridiculously impractical.

. .. ... Me not likey sticky rice-y .... Mean is me

Was indirectly yelled at for buying two cups of strawberry-flavored yogurt. Poor yogurt. So hot, so cold -- make up your  mind, weather. Like it has one. I want new eyeglasses, cellphone, a regular black ballpen... dropped my g-tec, it's dead. Up so late last night, staved off hunger by looking at food blogs.

21st Sep 2010. Update [again] -- May have overreacted on what went on recipient's head after getting the load from a no-name yesterday. Received a "who u? ty" text message this morning. Didn't care to respond, hahaba lang ang storya . The "ty" came a day late too -- surprise, surprise. I'm over it. 20th Sep 2010. Update - - The Globe "successfully shared" message arrived! Just now, WTH?! That's nearly two days after the fact. Now, my recipient gets their load - only grossly delayed - but I don't get my money. I still lose. [sulks again] In my head, this person is thinking that someone sent them mobile prepaid credits by mistake. "What luck! Wait, should I send this back? I feel terrible... not! Sucka! Bwahahahaha!" 19th Sep 2010: It's very humid tonight. Globe [my mobile network provider] stole Php 41.00 from me, from their "share a load" thing. Someone gave me two 20 crisp bills and asked if they coul...

Finished a platter of spaghetti tonight. So full. We don't have a fixed recipe for pasta sauce. I don't think we have a fixed recipe for any savory dish! Maybe we do, can't be sure... Point is that most meals are surprises. If someone says we'll be having adobo , I wouldn't be able to tell if it's going to lean towards one with more soy sauce or with more vinegar until it's right in front of me. I just dislike receipts printed on shiny, smooth paper. It's not paper! Details fade off too quickly - I'm talking days here. Unless you fold it (print side in) and keep it away from the elements, it's a waste of resources.

bean sprouts or toge, itlog, adobo livers  (even I can't make them out from this shot but those are livers) shakey's mojos, garlic bread, we made the pasta dish (massive pile of carbs)   I feel full just looking at these. Properly lost craving for Greenwich barbecued pork chop and java rice meal, though. Haven't tried it yet but the promo pics were appetizing... until now. Not craving anything at all, so full.

Treated myself to a birthday present. Shopped online on kamiseta[dot]com. Bought there "in my head" for a long while before actually doing it. Not a lot of reviews about buying online at kamiseta[dot]com yet - no posted yay or nay experiences to date, well, as far as my search went. Anyhoo... my exp went like so: Aug 16th, Monday, late evening - signed up, ordered, paid with paypal, was emailed the order confirmation including message that I'll receive an email when item is shipped out Aug 17th, Tuesday, early evening - no email if item shipped. sad. Aug 18th, Wednesday, early afternoon - checked email, still no email if item shipped, antsy, logged on to kamiseta account and saw Air21 tracking number on order details. Went to Air21, tracked item, saw "not found or doesn't exist" (forget which), figured Air21 site wasn't updated. Aug 19th, Thursday, 4pm (yes, today!) - checked email, read email that item shipped including order info, tracking...

Rains proceed humidity. That's how it's been this week, anyhow. With rains come (more) mosquitoes. Found a forearm peppered with itchy welts one morn. They were huge welts too, 3 or 4 covering my forearm. Not very good since their meal made more baby bugs. Their baby bugs then, are now the big bugs swarming my bare legs. Thankfully, Off! is serving its purpose - will now go slather more on my feet as they've now found a new spot to feast.

beans, vienna sausage (fried till skins crisped = v. good), egg  adobo chix livers, omelette These brunches last week were yum. That's all.

Foray outside this past weekend was injury-packed. I busted my lip and somebody sprained their ankle. All were minor and nothing that a day of rest couldn't cure. Something of note -- temperature's down to what could be called comfy. Finally.

Ran out of regular so had decaf, first thing today. Suffering from sleepiness at the moment. Writing about it should help. Have to be sharp and ready in an hour. Somebody went grocery shopping. Waiting for them to come back. Somebody's making dinner. I have a plan for later -- dinner with coke then dessert with regular coffee. That should wake me up. Not helping that it's August gloom, heard a few people call this "bed weather". Clever. 

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...

Slathered the "soft and scented" Off! on. I like how this insect repellent smells. Just as I thought that cooler season is here, it's not. It's muggy earlier and now, it's cool. We started to get these fitful temps last week. It's nice at this moment, I'm just sitting here and I'm not sweating -- very comfy. But I don't think this is going to last the night, I think that in an hour or so it will be hot and humid again. Enough about the weather...

Pretty, bright lettuce in my sandwich. Tweaked the photo (taken with flash) with more saturation - did the job nicely! Notice the black background? Lights went off the entire house after a quick "pshkt!" sound from the circuit box tonight. Outlets still had power (thank goodness - work on the PC wasn't shot). So while everyone else was using their TV or laptop monitor to brighten up their respective rooms, I was better off 'cause I had a lamp that plugs in. Anyway, some jiggle-waggle or whatever they did at the circuit box quickly put the lights back in order.

When it comes to bands, it's been that they'd put out new music every two or three years. Then, they'd go on hiatus... when members usually go do their own thing. There's no assurance that they'd work together again and if they do, you wonder if you'll like what they'll put out given that they've grown and maybe want to explore new music - the kind that's totally different from what you liked about them in the first place. I'm in the verge of being in a slump... coming close to getting music that I like from these men's bands... coming close to have all that I like so far... and sadly, after that, there's nothing else that I want to have. Nothing else, for now. But what about later and there's still nothing - what then?

Brunch was pulled chicken a.k.a. meat torn from yesterday's leftover chicken adobo legs. Already tore the fried egg before remembering to take a shot. Recent posts lack visuals, this should make up for them. Installed IE7. (Planned on IE8 but pal said it was "shite".) The process was OK until after restarting the machine. The "installing IE settings" window took longer than I was comfortable with, and when the desktop showed up - I literally sighed with relief. The reasons why I still bother with IE are - that I use a particular site that isn't supported by other browsers (yup, this condition still exists) and I tinker with some html codes so I've to make sure it looks OK on other browsers. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother with it at all. But this I've got to say, IE7 is better compared to IE6. I think four years (didn't IE7 come out in '04 or was it '06?) is enough to make sure that bugs are dealt with and it's OK to make that up...

lost Internet connection an hour ago. since weather's still warm and muggy (june gloom, where are you?) and devices have been plugged in continuously for three days (i usually turn the power strip off at least once a day to cool them down even if it's just a short while - couldn't lately), i turned them off hoping that they haven't malfunctioned from the heat. glad to know they haven't, obviously -- hurrah! now, it's really fast too, almost no-wait. could be 'cause it's the middle of the night but heck, i only come across it working this well so few times that it's worth mentioning. season's changed? the mosquitoes seem to think so. but apart from a 20-minute burst of rain a day or two (since last week? can't remember), it's still hot and humid. the mosquitoes are back. the ants are leaving or hiding. hope the season catches up 'cause this is just (whatever rhymes with dun-dun-ing).

Printed then signed a document for the bank. After sending it, it was returned with instructions - "print THEN sign". My fancy-shmancy pilot g-tec ink pen made my handwriting look digitally scanned, according to the bankers! I assume they thought it looked too clean to be original - shouldn't have been overly careful about signing it then or shouldn't have used the g-tec pen! I found it disproportionately funny. Re-did the form and this time, I used a regular ballpen. The banker's feedback was "pretty penmanship". Oh gosh.

it rained today and it came down hard that it sounded like hail but then again it could just be 'cause of the new gutters we installed last week

Copy-pasted over 100 items and decided to finish tomorrow. And then, will go over another file that's twice as long. Converting to CSV, mapping and importing was an option but discovered that duplicates wouldn't be detected by the program. Already saw a duplicate on the first file that I finished copy-pasting mano-mano so I couldn't risk it - wouldn't. Besides, I don't know lick about data-mapping, learning it would take SO long, I was not confident and I don't want to risk errors that would otherwise be prevented with mano-mano . It's too hot and humid. Complained about it already (a lot). Sticky keys.

Went bright and early to the nearby public school to vote, yesterday. The only way I was able to pull that (bright and early) off was without sleeping the night before. 'Twas the first automated elections in our country - history made! When we got home, this was breakfast. It was good.