It's So Cold

It's so cold that when I entered the bus this morning, my glasses got cloudy.

Fish Tales

We recently received some freshly caught fish. The one who caught the fish gave them to us personally.

Now to be honest, much as I know that fish is healthy and all, I just don't buy fish on a regular basis. At best I would get Fillet of Fish, instead of McChicken at McDonald's. You see, fish and I aren't really on cooking terms. I just don't know how to cook fish without the whole house smelling fishy. Plus, I don't know if the kids would eat fish.

However, I was happy to receive the fish even if I wasn't sure what to do with it. It sat in the refrigerator for a couple of days. I wanted to make them into fish balls because if it seemed that transforming them into fish balls would increase the probability of the fish getting eaten. But when I opened the bag and examined the fish, these yellow tail fish didn't seem the type I could easily debone prior to cooking.

I was told that these fish would be good for frying but I didn't want to fry the fish because I knew I wouldn't hear the end of it if the house ended up smelling of fried fish. So I decided to make it into paksiw.

When we were small, we would have paksiw na isda for dinner (or even breakfast) once in a while. It would be served with soft boiled eggs. I would go through the deboning process before starting to eat. When I was done, I would mix the flaked fish and egg into the rice and sprinkle some salt. I can't remember if I would add soy sauce or patis to the brew. What I do remember is that I would build little towers on my plate with the rice mixture and eat away at my structures. I've never really been a paksiw na isda fan so I suppose that was my way of getting through dinner.

Anyway, since I didn't want the fresh fish going to waste, I did make the fish into paksiw. (My first ever paksiw na isda. And possibly, my last.)

Now the kids aren't real big fans of fish, and paksiw na isda is not remotely close to being in their list of favorite foods.

I knew that.

But what I didn't know was how foreign paksiw na isda was to them, particularly to MyGirl.

When I sat down to eat one of the fish, MyGirl looked towards my direction as I was flaking the fish.

"It's paksiw, MyGirl," I said.

She knitted her eyebrows and said, "Hhmmmm.... paksiw .... I've heard about that."

Quickie Sightseeing

Across the street from my office is the Queen Victoria Building. The QVB, as it is commonly called, fills an entire city block bound by George, Market, York and Druitt Streets.

On my way to work, the bus stops at right before the QVB along York. On the way home, the bus stop is at the QVB itself along George.

Normally in the morning, I would walk along the sides of the QVB after getting off the bus. First along Market Street then along George Street before crossing George where our office is located at the corner of George and Park Streets. However, since the temperature has dropped to a chilly cold, one day I decided to modify my route and go THROUGH the QVB instead of AROUND it.

It was nice to walk inside the building which now houses several high-end shops. So aside from getting some protection from the cold, I am able to do some window shopping as well.

Once I happened to pass by once at about 8:30 am and I heard a clock chime. I looked up and lo and behold, I saw this huge clock hanging from the ceiling.

This is among the many things one can find in the QVB.

The ROYAL CLOCK was installed in 1986. It is a Royal Automated clock that chimes on the hour daily between 9am - 9pm. Once this hanging clock has finished chiming, it then displays a series of mechanically moving figures of British kings and queens every hour on the hour.

(I have yet to catch that.)

There is another clock suspended from the ceiling on the other side of the building.


I usually just walk quickly through the corridors since I am either rushing to get to the office or rushing to catch the bus to get home. However, there are days that I just wish I could sit down and admire the building, and especially the stained glass windows.

World Cup Fever

While the whole world is busy watching the FIFA World Cup currently being held in South Africa, we caught up with a different set of World Cup games.

Our World Cup match was held about fifteen years ago ... it was rugby, not football ... and had Matt Damon as the South African team captain.

Yup, you guessed it! We watched the DVD of the movie Invictus.

Good movie. Very interesting.

(Oh, unfortunately, the Australian team lost in the movie, too.)

Northern Views

This is the townhouse complex where we live.

That is our town house, unit 2. Ours is the first unit on the left as you enter the driveway.

It has a kitchen, dining and lounge area downstairs (plus the laundry room with a toilet). Upstairs there are three bedrooms and 2 toilet & bath. From the picture you can see the windows to the kids' rooms upstairs, the windows of the lounge, the front door, and the garage (good for one car)

We are right beside the common bin area ...

... and right across the mailboxes.

For the moment, this is home.

Jogging Your Memory

Do you know what to do with this?

You use the quadratic equation, of course, so you can find the value of x.

At the moment I can't think of what else I would use the quadratic equation for. It doesn't really matter what I think; what is important is that GI knows what to do with it and how to use it.

(As you can probably tell, GI is studying these things now that he's in Year 11.)

I had to do a crash review of getting the first derivative the long way a couple of days ago

because GI would not immediately accept my short cut method where I would put the exponent down and subtract one from the original exponent.

Now, the quadratic equation and finding the first derivative are peanuts as compared to the various trigonometric equations. Gosh, I haven't used the special functions in a scientific calculator in a long time.

There were some vague memories of sine, cosine and tangent (and 1/2 and the square root of 3 over 2)

But I needed GI to remind me of the other equations needed for the proving portions in his worksheet when he asked me to help him.

I mean, really. I have yet to find a real life situation where I needed to know these.

and these ...

But I have to admit. I did love doing high school maths, especially if the answers were in the back of the book (even if only the odd numbered questions had answers). And helping GI out this weekend brought out the nerd in me.

Stretch of the Imagination

I left the house this morning in the freezing cold to catch the morning mass. It was all worth it though. I looked up to see the crescent moon. It was beautiful against the pale blue sky. What was different about this crescent moon was that I could still see the outline of the whole moon.

I never really thought about it before, but it was then that I realized that it is impossible for anyone to sit on the crescent moon because the moon is round even if it doesn't look it sometimes.

I searched my mind for other examples of images which are really just impossible but creative nonetheless. These are all I could think of : people walking on clouds and a pot at the end of the rainbow.

GI suggested talking animals.

What about you? What have you got to add?

Movie Date

For MacGyver's birthday, we decided to have a 'date'. A date for us could be going off together on a walk, having a meal or dessert, or watching a movie together. Essentially, anything even remotely romantic done without any of the kids can be considered as a date.

Although the concept sounds simple, whenever we mention that we are going on a date, the kids groan and complain as if we were going on a month-long cruise and leaving them behind.

Since MacGyver was nursing a cold, we decided going for a walk after dinner was out of the question. We had a fairly hearty meal so extra dessert was not too promising either. We decided we'd watch a movie.

Now when I say 'watch a movie', I don't mean we would go to a mall and enter a cinema with a big screen. There is no buttered popcorn and soda in the picture. When we say, we are going on a date and we're watching a movie, it would mean a choice of watching a movie on RD's desktop downstairs or on MacGyver's laptop upstairs in our bedroom. Now if we wanted to eat chips while watching the movie, there would be no choice but to watch downstairs. However, if we were to open a bag of chips (assuming we had any) there would be violent objections from the kids because of course they would want to partake of the junkie (GI in particular if the chips were salt and vinegar flavour). So based on the above logic, it is not a wonder that we ended up watching the movie upstairs.

We didn't have too many choices yesterday so we settled for Shawshank Redemption, which apparently MacGyver hadn't seen yet. GI calls this movie an epic movie. (Sometimes GI's appreciation for good movies surprises me. )

Though it WAS a long movie, it was worth watching again.

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I used to think it would take six-hundred years to tunnel under the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved Geology, I guess it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big god-damned poster. Like I said, in prison a man will do anything to keep his mind occupied. It turns out Andy's favourite hobby was totin' his wall through the exercise yard, a handful at a time. I guess after Tommy was killed, he decided he had been here just about long enough. Andy did like he was told, buffed those shoes to a high mirror shine. The guard simply didn't notice, neither did I... I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man's shoes? Andy crawled to freedom through five-hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe I just don't want too. Five-Hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile.

Andy Dufresne - who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.

The Last Leaf

I truly love the colours of the autumn leaves. I felt quite sad to see all those beautiful red and orange leaves fall on the ground. It didn't help that the last few days of autumn were dampened by the rain. It was bad enough that the leaves got detached from the branches. But all that rain meant more leaves would fall from the trees then all these fallen leaves would get wet and often end up pasted on the ground.

Back in the Philippines, yes, the leaves would fall, but there always seemed to be more than enough leaves to go around. The trees were almost always green. I cannot really recall seeing a tree lose all its leaves.

The closest thing to experiencing "fall" I can think of would be walking along narra tree lined sidewalk of Ayala Avenue. There would be times when the trees were filled with fragrant yellow flowers. Then soon after, these flowers would be scattered all about on the ground along with the leaves. If you happened to be walking along the street at that time, you could end up walking through a shower of leaves and flowers.

We also have a narra tree in the backyard at Cebu Avenue. I remember Father pointing out that particular tree beside the pelota courtwhen it had regained its foliage. I think he had taken a picture of the tree when the branches were kind of bare and was planning on taking another at that time when the leaves had returned. But somehow the tree never seemed to be stripped of ALL of its leaves.

GI has fond memories of narra trees as well. There were narra trees inside the campus of Don Bosco Makati before they were cut down to make way for the Savio Dome. There is often a hint of sadness when he mentions those trees even if their removal paved the way for a huge covered area within the school campus.

Enough of memory lane for the moment and back to the present... I left the house and headed for the city, I couldn't help but notice that so many of the trees along the way had shed all their leaves. The only consolation was that the knowledge that winter was but a season and soon it will be spring. New life would spring forth and the branches would once again be filled with leaves.

The truth is, when I saw these trees stripped of all their leaves, I couldn't help but feel that the insides of the trees were exposed. It made me think of the sacrament of confession. You know how at the confessional, you bare it all and your essence is brought out in the open. There is a mix of emotions which hinges on sadness and remorse. However after a good confession, there is joy and peace and hope. The YOU which had shed all your layers of sin and falsehood, will soon have a fresh start whereby a new YOU, a better YOU, a happier and more beautiful YOU can emerge; just like the winter trees that have only their branches to show today but as summer arrives these branches will surely be covered by so many new leaves you would hardly recognise the skeleton of a tree that it once was.

I do so look forward to spring.

Knit and Purl

It is officially winter. MyGirl and I are trying our hand at knitting. (It is always a good idea to learn something new, right?)

I borrowed a book from the library, then bought a couple of knitting needles and two balls of yarn. According to the book, since people will knit differently (different tension, etc.), it is advisable to knit a 5" x 5" piece first to see whether it is necessary to use a bigger (or smaller) needle for the desired knitted item. So we decided we would take it from there.

We embarked on our DIY knitting lessons last Saturday. We cast on our first stitches based on what we estimated would make 5 inches of knitting. By the time we finished our FIRST row, it was time to sleep.

We added a couple of rows to our work on Sunday. MyGirl got more knitting done than I did because I tried to squeeze a visit to the library, a trip to the grocery, making spaghetti sauce and Korean beef in between.

When I looked at MyGirl's masterpiece that evening and compared it to my one-of-a-kind linked up yarn pretending to be something knitted work, I realized that the book failed to mention that knitting is not WYSIWYG. What I saw on the book was definitely not what I got on my knitting needles.

I'm not giving up ... YET.

I do intend to get my 5" x 5" square out by hook or by crook.

If I don't learn how to knit (well) from the book, at the very least, I will have learned the various types of fibres from there. I found the below quite interesting. I am only vaguely familiar with plant fibres that eventually become cloth. I never really paid much attention to animal fibres. However when it comes to knitting, choosing the right type of fibre does matter to the finished product.

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Natural Animal Fibres

ALPACA --a very fine, soft yarn that comes from the animal of the same name. Alpacas are related to llamas.

ANGORA -- is made from the shorn fur of angora rabbits. It is very fine, lightweight, and has the ability to absorb considerable amounts of moisture before it feels wet.

CAMEL HAIR -- has a wonderful sheen. It does not accept dye so is often mixed with other fibres.

CASHMERE -- is combed from the backs of cashmere goats. This silky, soft fibre is very expensive but also extremely warm.

MOHAIR -- a hairy yarn obtained from angora goats. The yarn from very young goats is known as kid mohair. Mohair accepts dyes readily.

SILK -- this luxurious fibre is taken from the cocoons of silk worms. A very comfortable wear fibre, it keeps you warm when the weather is cool and cool when the weather is warm.

WOOL -- although wool is often used as a generic term for knitting yarn, it applies more specifically to the fleece of sheep. It accepts dyes easily and is particularly warm and durable. Lamb's wool is obtained from the very first shearing of an animal and is particularly soft. Shetland wool is a coarser wool taken from the back of Shetland sheep. It is mainly use to create country tweed yarns.

Natural plant fibres

COTTON -- is an easy care, cool to wear yarn but it lacks the elasticity of wool.

LINEN -- was one of the first fibres used by humans in making fabric. It makes a strong, stiff yarn, however it is usually blended with other fibres to soften it.



RAMIE -- is very similar in appearance and handling properties to linen. Like linen, it is usually combined with other fibres when making a knitting yarn.

RAYON -- is spun from cellulose and readily accepts dyes. It is not very resilient and so can easily stretch out of shape.