da tomāto

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