Last Working Day of the Year for Me

I know that 31 December 2012 is a working day in Australia.

No more of this Rizal Day (30 Dec) and special banking holiday (31 Dec) stuff for me.

I know it is a month-end, quarter-end, AND year-end,

B U T  I choose to take a leave on that day.

(I have to cook for New Year's Eve dinner since we are celebrating RD's birthday.)

Therefore, today is my last working day for the year 2012.

When I return to the office, it will be 2013.

Closed for Christmas

They should take an extra day off to go back to school.

Complete with Camel

Every Christmastime, this 'Carols by the Manger' poster is displayed across the street. 

I got off the bus from work yesterday and saw what I can only assume to be the cast of the show. 

Check out this unique Christmas scene.

I see the the Holy Family, three wise men, a couple of shepherds, and of course, the camel.

May you have the spirit of Christmas which is Peace, 

the gladness of Christmas which is Hope,

and the Heart of Christmas which is Love.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

M E R R Y     C H R I S T M A S   ! ! !

Shadows, My Foot!

"Aaaahhhh,"  MyGirl screamed as she jumped up and down then ran from the dining to the kitchen.

"Aaaahhhh!!!!  Aaaahhh!!!!,"  she kept screaming.

"What is it?  What's the matter?"  we asked frantically.

"I saw something!  There's something there!"

"Where?  Where did you see it?   What was it?  What did it look like?"

"It looked like a lizard.  A big one!  It was there!,"  MyGirl shrieked and pointed towards RD's chair.

MacGyver looked around the dining table.  He checked under the chairs where MyGirl had pointed.  He moved RD's chair outside to clear the area then he shook the rug a little bit.  Seeing nothing, he gathered up the rug and tossed it outside over RD's chair.

"I don't see anything."  he said.

MyGirl was still kind of hysterical.

"Maybe it was just a shadow,"  I said, trying to calm her down.  "You know how sometimes you see something moving and you imagine it is something, but there really is nothing there.  It was just a shadow of something or another."

I pointed out how there were so many moving shadows on the floor created by the leaves from the trees outside because of the wind.

She calmed down a bit and we asked her if she wanted to eat her piece of toast in the dining room now that the coast was clear.

"No, I think I'll stay here."

We asked her how big was the thing she thought she saw.

"As big as an iguana,"  she replied.  

"About this big?"  MacGyver asked, holding his hands about a foot apart.

MyGirl nodded her head.

I didn't give it a second thought but was greatly relieved that it was a false alarm.  I was thinking butiki (house lizard)  but she just said iguana.

I went upstairs to do some overdue cleaning and clearing.  I had just started when the commotion downstairs resumed.

This time it was MacGyver who was doing the shouting.  

"Open the door, RD, quick!"   "Get out of the way!"

I went downstairs and found everyone on alert mode.

There it was by the glass, an unwanted visitor that had considered the open door as an invitation to enter the house.  (It is a warm day so we had opened the glass door, but someone must have accidentally left the screen door open at some point in time.)

MacGyver opened the screen door to provide a clear path for our far-from-little lizard.

Eventually, our reptilian intruder found its way back to the outside world.   (Thank God!)

I didn't do any screaming at the time so, in the exact words of MyGirl, "Aaaahhhh!  Aaaahhhh!!!!  Aaaahhhh!!!!"    (plus a deep sigh of relief) 

Do you see its tail in the corner, right behind the blinds?

Wrong way, lizard! Turn around!

That's right, the exit is this way.

Just to prove this is no house lizard, here it is close up.

I think it is more than a foot long.

Keep moving.  Keep moving.  Your freedom is near 

(and it coincides with our relief.)

MyGirl took this last one and she immediately posted it on Instagram.

"I walked past this and I screamed. and mum thought I was imagining things..."

Whew!  I'm glad that's over.

I'm sorry I doubted you, MyGirl.

Prayer Oven

Back in the home country, we each have study tables in the Study Room.   The initial eight desks are 2-drawers lengths long.  Beneath one drawer is a slot where the seat goes, beneath the other is a closed cabinet. (Two movable desks were added for J and Z, who were not yet in the headcount when the house was built in the early 1970's.)   

Each desk has a set of bookshelves overhead, except for.one. Given that Mindy was the baby when the house was built, she was assigned the study table that did not have the overhead bookshelves.  

Instead of bookshelves, this is where our altar is installed. 

Every morning, as soon as Father emerges from their room, he goes there to pray.  When we were younger, someone would ring the bell at night to signal the family to gather at the study room in front of the altar where the rosary would be prayed.  When all other lights are off, the lights on the altar remain.

The other week, I was out of sorts and reached out to one of my sisters.   She gave me advice which put my mind at ease in a way.  She wrote "Now when there is an issue that really worries me but it has to be very specific - I put it in a prayer oven.  I say to God - Lord I am going to park this lorry in your garage because there is no room in mine to take care of it. And you know what  - it works. The matter gets resolved somehow."

  

So I shall write my prayers down and leave it a prayer oven for God to work out the cooking and finishing time.

Routine and Traffic Save the Day

MacGyver had sent me a text message during the day asking if I was interested in checking out a particular store that evening if I arrive home early.

Fortunately, work was not too bad and I was able to step out earlier than my usual (late) departure time.   I think I was at the bus stop by 5:40 pm.  (Official office hours for me would be 8:45 am to 5 pm.)

It is a Thursday and the shops closing hours are later than usual.   It is also the first day of summer vacation for most of the schools so there were a lot of people around and even more cars on the road.  

I got on the bus and managed to find one last vacant seat.  There were people ahead of me who had opted not to take that spot because it was more like three-fourths of a seat rather than a whole one.  Anyway, I thought to myself, "This is great.  So lucky!  I'm out of the office early and I get to sit down on the way home."

I lifted my handbag to pull out my cellphone as this is my routine when going home.  I would give MacGyver a call so that he knows that I am about an hour away.  That way, he could adjust his dinner preparations accordingly, or know whether they would eat ahead.  I unzipped my bag and felt for my cellphone so that I could surprise him with my early ETA.

Apparently, the surprise was on me.  My cellphone was not in my bag!  Seems I had left it at the office.

We were approaching the end of our phone bill cycle and MacGyver had told me last night that I still had some credits for local and international calls.  If I wanted to make any "free" calls, I needed to have my phone with me.

The phone credits I could afford to lose, but I remembered that I had stuck my credit card into the cellphone case that morning.  I had done so before I stepped out to pick something up from the office mail room because there was a sale in the lobby.  Nope, I couldn't afford to lose a credit card, not in this "tap and go" age where the credit card PIN is no longer needed for transactions less than a certain amount.

I have to get my cellphone back pronto!

Fortunately for me, the traffic light was still red and even if it turned green, the traffic was so bad the bus would not have been able to move anyway.   

I got up, got off the bus, speed-walked back to the office and let out a big sigh of relief when I found my phone safely on top of my desk. 

It is a good thing I followed protocol or else I would not have discovered that my phone was missing until it was too late.  And this is one of those rare occasions that I thank my lucky stars for traffic.

One Quart Equals Four Cups

I thought it was easy to change from  English to Metric but apparently even my Engineering degree couldn't help me out if the conversion occurs during transcription.  This is today's story.

I woke up early this morning because my mind was in the "I have to bake cinnamon rolls" mode.  Not having had much time to go around to shop but still wanting to give something to my officemates for Christmas, I had decided last week that I would bake something.   And that something was going to be cinnamon rolls.

I figured if I made a whole recipe of cinnamon rolls (recipe here), there would be enough cinnamon rolls to give away.  A whole recipe would make 4 dozen rolls.

I had gone around last weekend to determine where I could get foil containers to "house" the rolls but had not really thought things through at that time to make the acquisition.  

This morning, however, I decided it's now or never.  I trusted my pantry to have sufficient flour and sugar.  I knew I had not finished the yeast in the freezer.   I checked the ref and found an unopened 3 litre container of milk and several sticks of butter.   I should have no problem, I thought.  I've done this before.

I like to have my recipes on hand so I have a physical spiral notebook (actually I have several) which contains recipes I use.  Some notebooks have recipes I'd like to test but there is one notebook that contains recipes which have been tried and tested.  The cinnamon roll recipe was in this particular notebook.

I opened the notebook to the page with the cinnamon roll recipe and brought out our biggest stockpot.  This stockpot would provide sufficient rising room for the cinnamon roll dough if I made the whole recipe.  The last time I made the whole recipe, the mixed up dough filled up only half the pot but by the time the rising time was completed, the pot was filled to the brim.

I went through the recipe in my notebook and started measuring out the ingredients into the pot.  

Eight cups of milk, check!  One cup of oil, check!  One cup of sugar, check!

Heat until almost boiling then add the yeast.

Let sit then add the flour.  

The ingredients list had 8 cups (+1 cup) flour.

Hhmmmm...  one cup of flour to one cup of milk?   I thought it was quite strange for the volume of dry ingredients to be about the same as that of the wet ingredients.  But hey, that's what the recipe says.  

  

One ... two ... three ... four ... five ... six ... seven ... (I was approaching the bottom of my flour container) ... eight!  

Whew!  I estimated there to be more than a cup of flour left inside.  I figured I shouldn't have any problem completing the requirements for the recipe.

Mix well.  Cover and let sit for an hour.

I spent this time wisely.  I checked my mail, logged into FaceBook, started off the laundry, moved the pot aside so I could use the burner to start off breakfast, tidied up a little, etc.  The washing machine beeped so I proceeded to hang the clothes.  MacGyver came down and took over cooking breakfast.  He was scheduled to borrow the van from his brother and pick up some freecycle items we were getting but he said it was still early.  

After preparing breakfast, he coordinated with his brother and decided to leave early so that the car exchange could occur earlier and both of them could do what they needed.

MyGirl came down but said she wasn't hungry yet.  I asked if it was all right for us to just wait for her dad to come back so that we could have breakfast together.  She said she didn't mind, so she sat down and watched her Sunday morning K-Pop MTV while I checked on the cinnamon rolls and found that they had risen to almost 3/4 of the container.  Looking good, I thought.  My yeast is alive!    

Confident that my cinnamon rolls were going well, I returned to my email and FaceBook.  I don't  know what triggered it, but I decided to click on the shortcut to the website from where I got the original cinnamon roll recipe and go to that blogpost.  The website had pictures for each stage of the process.

When I got to the photo corresponding to where I was in my cinnamon roll step, I said to myself, my dough doesn't look the least bit like THAT.  That dough is dry, mine is really quite wet.  

Uh-oh, let me check the recipe again.

Her original recipe calls for 1 quart of milk, 1 cup of oil and 1 cup of sugar.

I go to my 4thinline blogpost where the recipe is halved.  

Yikes!  My blogpost says "2 cups whole milk".   

Even my young nieces and nephews could tell me that two times two equals four.  But I've got 8 cups in there!

Denial sets in and I google "quart to cups".  

Of course the conversion says 1 quart : 4 cups.

Oh dear!  Dear, oh dear!  Oh dear!

What should I do?

Well, there was only one thing I could do... double the recipe!  

Mind you, the whole recipe yields a massive amount of cinnamon rolls. I almost dreaded the thought of so many cinnamon rolls.  When I first made the whole recipe, I placed half of the rolls in the freezer because there was absolutely NO WAY we could consume all those rolls.   Subsequently, I have only made half the recipe for a more manageable yield.

However, given that I had nowhere to go but forward, I had no choice but to double the 'yields 4 dozen cinnamon rolls' recipe.

I was lucky to have found an unopened bag of flour in the pantry, as well as enough of all the other ingredients I had put in so far.  I added them into the pot and mixed.  By this time, the stockpot was practically full.

Practically full!  But the dough is expected to double.

Uh-oh! I was in big trouble.  That was my biggest pot.  There is nothing bigger in the cupboards.  And I knew that given the summer heat and the active yeast, that dough was going to rise whether or not it fit in the pot.

I quickly rang MacGyver and asked if he was still at his brother's place.  When he said he was still there, I quickly asked him to borrow their biggest pot.  

Luckily, my sister-in-law MumofFive is a master at cooking for a crowd.  She lent us this HUGE stockpot which was just perfect for my predicament.

We were able to go out and buy containers for the rolls.  They are all baked and packed now.  I just have to figure out how to bring so many containers to the office tomorrow morning.

Check out the photos to get a feel of the volume of dough and the number of rolls  involved.

Note to self :  Do not forget ...  one quart = four cups

Which Son?

I received a lot of comments when I had my hair cut.

Of course the ones that matter are the ones from my loved ones.  

When I arrived home. everyone was quite pleased and said the short hair suited me.   Then my boys decided to expound on the issue and mentioned who they thought I looked like.

Now I am thinking, which of my sons should I worry about?

The one who compared my haircut to the one of Victoria Beckham?

Or the one who compared me to Android 18 (of Dragonball Z)?