Taong Bundok

This year seemed pleasant after what happened to us last year. I had a car accident because of the negligence of a trucking company! Their spare tire came loose in the middle of the expressway and rushed in front of me head on! Imagine how large the tire of a 10 Wheeler truck is I wasn’t able to avoid it because we were in the South Luzon Expressway and vehicles were approaching right and left I did my best but I guess the unexpected still happened, we almost died, my pregnant wife my 1 year old son, my mother in law and myself. I guess by the grace of the Almighty we survived without a scratch but unfortunately I cant say the same for my minivan. I guess this could have been avoided if the Department of Transportation and Communication and The Land Transportation Office was doing their job and not just messing around. How can a truck that large run without undergoing preventive maintenance? Well that goes to show everyone that in the Philippines that is not a thing they would care about. How did it get registered? all I can say is “MONEY TALKS” if you have money and can bribe the Land Transportation Office well you can register any vehicle that is not road worthy. After all that happened the part that bugs me the most is the culprits were standing there and watching? Yes the driver and his companion saw what happened to us and after feasting their eyes on our little mishap they still have the nerve to pick up their spare tire and was going to run away. I asked them about their tire and they said “It ain’t ours” I said “Well, why are you risking your lives running in and out of the motorway to pick it up?” and they replied “We are going to sell this” I asked again “If it ain’t yours then why don’t you have a spare tire?” again they replied “We don’t have a spare tire” so I said “Oh ok if it ain’t yours then can we wait for the highway patrol to arrive?” They said yes but they were climbing the truck and was planning to run for it. I got pissed off and asked them politely to stay because if not I’m going to rip them apart with my bare hands. I think they got the point and stayed. We’ve waited for 2-3hours before the highway patrol arrived after which they admitted that the spare tire was theirs. A nice year ending don’t you think? My migraine is kicking in I’ll tell you guys all about 2010 maybe tomorrow Happy New Year!!!

We were invited to a wedding which took place yesterday at the Edsa shangri-la hotel in one of their ballroms. Everything was dumbfounding from the floor up to the ceiling it was like a palace!  The food was great from the appetizer to the main course but there was something in between that caught my attention….. all the guests were served pumpkin soup with bacon bits and of course like most of the soup dishes served it was topped with croutons, some may say that its common or typical others could say that there is nothing special but in my soup there was something special, something out of the ordinary! I gave the soup a whiff and it smelled good but after I gave it a closer look I thought that there was pepper already sprinkled in my soup which was quite odd because the supposed black pepper was moving!!! was the pepper alive? when I gave it a closer look THERE WERE BUGS/BEETLES CRAWLING OUT OF MY CROUTONS!!! I almost threw up! I called the attention of the waiter and told him that I had trespassers in my soup, and the waiter was kind enough to ask me if I wanted the soup to be replaced, and came back and whispered “I will report this sir” after that I didn’t hear anything anymore, who do you think he will report it to? Oscar the Grouch? or maybe to Mr. Mike Enriquez and tell him that he is the “SAKSI” (witness) I think even if he replaced the soup I doubt that I still had the appetite. Unfortunately I didn’t take pictures because I was still keeping my self from throwing up. Almost all of the people who sat on the same table we did saw the bug using the crouton as a diving board and did the backstroke in my soup.

I just wonder how these things happen to a prestigious hotel like The Shangri-La maybe their experimenting on how the people would react specially when they see a bug doing the backstroke inside the bowl of pumpkin soup. Well, I don’t care and I don’t mind I just want to get people informed so that if the go to The Shangri-La Hotel they should take a closer look at what their eating before putting it in to their mouths. If I only had a strong stomach I would have taken pictures that I can share with you but at  least there are other people who saw it so I rest my case.

I’ve already posted this on my old blog, this is just a sort of a rewind…..

I had nothing to do that day was pissed off with work, came home and was about to cook dinner. I guess I played around with my dinner first before I cooked it…

The Singing Dinner

Its been a long day…. and I guess its also been quite a while since I’ve last visited my blog, time is not only running fast but things are also changing quite rapidly. I got sick last Sunday so I didn’t go to work this week (like duh?!?!?!) after a few days of recovery I’m finally back on my feet. I wanted to go back to work since yesterday but my request was denied by my commanding officer (I guess we all know who that is). She told me that its pointless because the week is almost over and I should just make the most of my time off, she has a point so we both agreed. I was in excruciating pain last Sunday and couldn’t sleep, everything happened so fast, I was on my way to see my good friend, I drove for almost two hours and when I finally reached my destination I twisted my hip disembarking my car. I could barely walk! After the gathering we went straight home. I was exhausted but I couldn’t sleep, I took pain relievers but the pain was so excruciating I couldn’t even lie down properly. I fell asleep sitting down and woke up a number of times because of the pain, fortunately it only lasted a day, I felt better the following day but I still couldn’t walk, I was bed ridden. I do admit that it was hard and during that experience I felt like I really wanted to die, because the pain was a hell of an experience, but it also had its perks.

You might be wondering why even though the pain I experienced felt like I was in hell I still said that it had its perks? Okay here is my reason, I do admit that it was hard for me because I couldn’t even walk or sit properly and during the first day it was extremely painful (please do let me know if you want me to explain the pain I felt and I will be more than happy to come up with the appropriate words so that you can feel what I felt) after the first day the pain mellowed down but it was still painful when I move, but there is one thing that kept me sane during these days and it was my one year old son. My daily routine is I woke up around 7:00Am and prepare to leave for work at around 7:30AM because I need to be at the office before 8:00AM so I usually leave home with my son still sleeping when I come home he leaves everything he is doing (either playing, eating watching TV or just running around the house) and runs straight to me, I pick him up give him a hug and carry him around. This week was different, extremely different. I wake up because I feel a small hand patting my face or pulling my nose and when I open my eyes I see my one year old son sitting beside me and smiling at me. Trust me it takes away all my problems, my pain, my frustration and my stress, I couldn’t walk so I tell him that I wont be able to carry him, and I do think he understands because he just its there beside me watches TV with me or gets his favorite book and comes back to me opening it up and wants me to read to him.

The reason I wanted to share this experience to all that can read this is because life now is different, we are all bounded to our work because we want to give our families, specially our children, a better future but how can we give them a better future if we cant give them any of our time? Most of us are caught up with work, we either get someone else to take care of our children for us, either a relative or a nanny (good thing we couldn’t afford one) and we miss the most important part of our children’s lives. The first diaper change, the first steps, the first word, the first tooth etc. I guess that is why most children now are different in many ways. A good friend of mine (Pastor Rene) once asked me how old my first born is, and I told him that he is one year old, and this is what he told me… “I want share something with you but please don’t get me wrong, I once was your age and I was working my ass off to give my children a better future, I come home dead tired, when my children come and want me to carry them or sit on my lap I always tell them that I’m tired and need to rest. Sometimes I need to talk to clients or run errands, my children come and ask if they could tag along, I always tell them to stay with their mom because they cant come with me. Time passed and we were a bit more financially stable so when I finally told myself to slow down, when I finally did, my children were all grown up! There are times that I want to hug them and kiss them but everytime I do they get a little bit bashful because they are already grown up, sometimes I want them to sit on my lap but they are too heavy, and there are also times that I want them to accompany me to some of my meetings but unfortunately they cant, because they either have schoolwork or they want to meet up with friends or something,” and he said…. “I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to make the same mistake I made, time runs very fast so you have to properly balance your time for your work and your family. We all know that we have to work hard and earn for a living but you cannot deprive your family of the time they need from you or you will regret everything that passed because you wont be able to turn back the clock.”

I guess that is why when I was younger my father always does his best to make time for us, accompanying us to school (dropping us off and picking us up) accompanying us to buy school supplies every time the school year is about to begin, accompanies us to almost anywhere and everywhere we needed to go and taking us on road trips waking us up as early as 3:00 AM and spend the whole day on the road sightseeing or going to places we want to visit, I cant compare myself to my father because he is a workhorse, he works from Monday through Saturday at 8:00AM to 5:00PM and still has the energy to drive around like crazy on a Sunday even if it means we get back home late in the evening and he still has to work the next day. I cant even imagine how he does it or where he gets the energy but one things for sure I now understand why.

A couple of years ago my former girlfriend (now my better half) wanted to get her hands on a digital camera, she called me up and asked me what to buy but unfortunately I was more familiar with DSLRs rather than Point-and-Shoot cameras so I went to dpreview to check things out. I was a canon fan back then so the Canon Powershot S80 caught my attention, a small camera packed with features that almost replicates a DSLR and it had a “Highly Recommended” tagged on it so I told her to get that particular model. It was a week or so after we had the time to catch up, she was complaining and nagging because she wasn’t quite satisfied with the camera, I told her to bring her camera so I can have a look. I went deep into the menu and saw that it was a very interesting piece of equipment,  it even had “manual settings”. I was playing with it but after I while I got frustrated because it didn’t work that well with the flash, specially when set on “full-auto” its either over exposed or underexposed. If you use program mode you will usually get blurred pictures when shooting at night. A few years passed and we tied the knot, she was still complaining about it (I think I should have used nagging instead of complaining) I gave it some  thought and finally arrived at a decision! I told her to sell it because she wouldn’t need it anymore, we are together most of the time and I had a Canon Rebel XT anyways. She agreed and finally sold the camera, I taught her how to use my camera but she just isn’t used to carrying a big bulky piece of equipment just to take photos so I told her that I will ask around and we can use the money she got from selling the S80 and buy a new one.

I was having dinner with a couple of my good friends namely Rhea (because it was her birthday), my good friend and mentor Ken, his wife Abbie and two kids Pao and Patty.  After our meal Ken mentioned that there was a new point-and-shoot camera that had an aperture of f2.0-f2.8 and it immediately rung a bell because I am a fan of fast lenses. Ken being a professional photographer knows heaps about cameras so I took advantage of that particular moment and asked him about it. He told me that a part of the specification sheet that is sometimes easy to overlook as a string of numbers. With the LX3 it’s really worth spending a moment thinking about it because starting at 24mm equivalent is pretty unusual in a compact camera, and it also offers an aperture range of F2.0-2.8 is extraordinary. Combining the two and include Image Stabilization is simply astonishing  this is not an everyday lens and it’s something that defines how the camera behaves and what it can be used for. Beyond that, there the new, higher-resolution rear screen that conforms to the more traditional 3:2 aspect ratio, rather than its forebear’s 16:9 unit.

I finally decided and told my better half that the Panasonic LX3 got my vote, we both ageed and I visited an old friend Mr. Tony Leung, unfortunately the LX3 was out of stock!!! Tony said that he will call me as soon as he gets his hands on one, after a week or more of waiting my phone rang… it was Tony and he told me that he got one and he already had my name on it. I thanked him for his call and went straight to him. The reason why I like buying stuff from Tony is because first of all he knows his products and will give you his honest opinion, his prices are competitive, he is a man of  his word and warranty is not a problem, most of all I get to play around with  the equipment before I decide if I really want it or not hehehe.

Here are some pictures I took with my wife’s LX3

Its the beginning of a new year and I guess its time to begin a new blog, I’ve attempted to try and write blogs, but its either I can’t think of anything to write or I become  too busy and can’t find the time to write. This time I’m planning to make the most out of my year with the time I have, I hope I can share with you the world through my eyes.