From the Ashes

It has been a long time since I posted on my blog. 5 years, yeah! And so much has happened. So I've been living in Belgium for the last couple of years. The plan-B I spoke of a few blogs back. Tonight I am ¨trying¨ to study for my Dutch exam tomorrow and I came across an oefening (exercise) in blogging (so I remembered logging on here, haha). So here goes my primary-school NL:

Toen ik naar Belgie kwam, had ik cultuur shock want ik kom uit een derde wereld met tropisch klimaat. Ik hou van reizen met de trein, omdat ik een gewone pendelaar in de Filipijnen was. Doordat af-en-toe regent het in Belgie, rijd ik met een auto. Ik heb meestal de Vlaamse steden bezocht, omdat ze dichtbij zijn. In 2009, had ik (met de Oudenaardse-koor Gregoriusgilde www.gregoriusgilde.info) de Ardennen bezocht. Er was een grote verschil van de Vlaamse landschap, omdat er veel bergen waren. Omdat mijn buurmensen meestal 60-plussers zijn, vind ik de Belgen heel gastvrij.

Well the point of the exercise is to use bij- and hoofdzinnen, with the omdat, doordat and want conjunctions.

So what has happened this past few years? Lost 10 kilos in 2010 and that was a resolution I really made happen. I just remembered, I used to keep a blog in facebook. Let me just look for that and I'll copy it here. It's almost Valentine's and I thought of making poetry. I still have to fill out the words, but it starts like:

Would it freak you out if you knewOut of the blue I glimlach when I think of youShall I speak my mind and invade your thoughtsOr let you drift away. Adieu.

Maligning Malu

We Filipinos are indeed the kings of internet. We have voted a boxer and several beauty titlists to stardom with but a mouseclick. On a Pinoy-per-packet basis, we may even have dominated Friendster or any other free service we may find on cyberspace, more than any other race. Freedom of expression has taken a huge facelift and just like any Belo or Calayan operation, we still find flaws.

The Malu Fernandez issue brought to light Pedro's love-hate on the superficial. Malu's elitism on one side and Pedro's disgust over her waistline.

In no way am I defending Malu; she clearly has her faults. Making fun of OFW's while bleating every designer brand she knows of would have been unthinkable. Her style puts journalism, and everything it represents, in a bad taste. With her article attached, an email brigade calling all to 'arms' must have spread like the Greek fires last week. These mouse-toting Pinoys swarmed onto her like mad bees waiting for their turn to sting.

Double whammo! We hit her back with every adjective to describe her waistline. Sad thing is, we have just become bigots like Malu, only poorer.

Starstruck part 1

Lunch and Learn with Chot Reyes, the phenomenal coach of winning PBA teams. Actually I'm no basketball fan, but I felt I needed to attend this seminar. Me boss is so busy he forgets about us taking some workshops. So I forced my way in.

His seminar wasn't really about basketball. It's about being a coach to someone. Was the seminar effective? I didn't even remember how it went. Seminars like these only draw audiences because the speaker is a celeb. A very enjoyable way to earn money: surround yourself with showbiz peeps and you automatically get resource persons. Only thing left is a willing victim.

Orange Afternoon

So what exactly is an orange afternoon? I live in the tropics so I don't usually see maple leaves this colorful. I'd rarely see it nowadays that I'm working, sometimes I'd catch it on a weekend. Simply put, everything is orange because of the weather, and it almost always happens before a stormy week. On those days I would go out and just let the dampened sunlight flush everything with the color orange.

The photo here was taken after our trip to the White mountain in New Hampshire. We missed the afternoon train goin up the peak, so we just stopped by this colorful spot in the middle of autumn. I call this the "Winnie the Pooh" shot. It's not really what I would consider an orange afternoon, but I think it qualifies.

Puerto Galera 2006

Just the vacation I was talking about! This is my third time here in Mindoro, I didn't see that much live corals but I found several uncommon fauna.

On the rocky coral formation where our boat was anchored on, I saw what first seemed to be a cuttlefish. But when it changed colors (spotted to total black) and was strutting to and fro several crevices I was certain it was an octopus, by way of its web-like tentacles. I'd say the head was the size of a family-sized watermelon. I dunno if it was trying to catch some prey but there were damsels nearby. At close watch were a pair of large pipette fishes about 2 feet long (I'm unsure what they were but they were slender and transparent like pipettes). Later on in my snorkelling, I found a moray eel and a crown-of-thorns starfish, a voracious coral destroyer (comes second to man I guess).

It's the first time I saw a Moorish Idol (the one with the big scar on Finding Nemo, costs a lot from a petshop) about a foot long though, it appeared to be parenting a juvenile. Too bad they weren't interested in the bits of bread I was swooshing around. I still had enormous fish attention though - trust your good ol' damsels for that.

I think we haggled too much: the boatman must've decided the location (full of dead corals) was already worth our 1000 pesos. But it wasn't bad at all, the sea floor wasn't entirely dead, plus the sight of the octopus in action puts the entire experience a step further.

Choices

Can't believe it's been six months since I've entered anything here. I have mourned for about a month after losing a battle that I was eager to win.

Nijmegen oh Nijmegen, wherefore art thou oh Nijmegen.

This calls for a vacation, a long time of reflection and plan B.

Maiden post

Et itur ad astrae

Work is lot lighter these days. It's a post-holiday thing you see. It's a few weeks into the new year 2006 and although I made no 'new year resolutions', I decided to put up a blog.

(Lyn just dropped by saying Advantest has a lot of incoming returns. Happiness... just checked out, gone shopping.)

I am indeed lucky for having friends that love the outdoors. At the first word of invitation, I always saddle on. This picture was taken inside the SM Mall in Baguio City, Philippines. As the city is a few thousands of feet above sea level, the climate is about 10'C cooler than the rest of the archipelago. For this reason, the mall has minimal or no need of air conditioning. It is exposed to and technically thus a part of the outdoors :).