Our Newest Hangout

Chi and AA moved into a new flat with one of their friends and we checked the place out on the first day of this month. The place is fabulous! So excited to have it as our newest hangout place.

Tonight, we went back to the place when AA threw a housewarming party for her friends. Her friend Jam cooked a yummy dinner including freshly baked pandesal. We brought ice cream for dessert.

homecooked feast

I usually hate wine, but this was oh so fine

ex and current flatmates with a newfound friend

AA and friends (sounds like Garfield)

Meanwhile, I fell in love with AA's flatmate's stuffed chipmunk based on the Chip and Dale cartoon. It's Dale because it has a red nose while Chip has a black nose, according to AA. He is oh so cute! Can't believe he was just bought from a 7-11. Christmas is just around the corner. *Hint hint!*

My new obsession. All I want for christmas is you!

On the way home in an MRT, I took a picture of Cate and our newest flatmate Ervyn. The guy sitting next to me oh-so-unsubtly stared at my camera as I did so. After my third picture, he finally talked to me, asking me how much I bought it for. Then he took out his camera and complained that he had bought it for 150 dollars but it was no good, saying that its battery run out after 25 minutes. No good indeed, I agreed, advising him to go for Canon next time. When I left at my stop, he bid me goodbye, saying, "see you around." What is up with my train seatmates lately?

I'm reflected in the mirror, where you can also see my seatmate looking at my camera

Bangkok '09 Highlights

When I was not staying home or shopping as I mentioned previously, Chu or Jean managed to drag me around town. Here are the highlights.

Chu shows off his new Canon Ixus camera. I learned how to use my Mac face powder as concealer, so for the first time, I don't have any eyebags in a picture.

In the Siam Paragon Cinema lobby, with some sleeping stranger.

Holding hands with a werewolf, Jacob Black.

Staring match with a vampire, Edward Cullen.

Pacute at some guy I don't know from some movie I don't know either.

Blowing glass bubbles. Love the ceiling design.

Our movie time grub - strawberry slushy and caramel popcorn. Chu picked The Box because it stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden and he thought it was an action thriller, only for us to realize once we got inside that it was actually a seriously eerie, creepy film that gave us nosebleeds. 

Reminded me of Twilight Zone.

Coconut is one of my favorite food of all time. And this coconut ice cream with fresh coconut in its shell really rocks! Available at Siam Paragon's basement. I went to buy some the two more times I was there, but they were always out of it. :(

This should convince you how chocoholic I am.

This bookworm's paradise. Unleashing me here is the equivalent of 

dropping a little girl at a candy store.

I am a fan of the TV show Flashforward, so when I saw the book in Kinokuniya, I just had to get it. It was a disappointment, though. An excellent concept that wasn't quite well executed, 

like the movie The Invention of Lying.

Mezzo-mezzo (or mocha) + banoffee pie + a book + a couch at Segafredo = happiness.

Out with Chu and Jean, Atenistas and Zamboanguenos based in Thailand.

Sour white (not green) mango.. yum!

These guys were strangers. I had no idea they had joined in till I saw the photo. Haha.

At Chu's place with my homecooked meal - fried brown rice and tuna.

Jean brought me to a place in Lumpini - 

grill + steamboat + salads + appetizers + desserts = 109 baht ONLY! 

Mara Clara episode at the night market.

Chu treated us at Doitung. I really loved the choco-macadamia 

blended ice drink that I had at the last minute.

A flashforward of Chu's future.

My nth coconut shake in Thailand, this time at the Piri-Piri place.

Piri-piri Portuguese chicken (I did not eat the entire thing, don't worry).

Asian horror dolls?

Kimmy Dora's Dora. LOL.

I've fulfilled a dream - become a fur-wearing blonde. It doesn't suit me after all.

Chu's costume for their office "superstar" event - 
Neo of The Matrix or that priest from The Exorcist?

Lead Me Not Into Temp-thai-tions

Chu is wondering why I would rather stay home than scour the streets of Thailand. Reason 1: I've already been here and done that before. No need to do it again. Reason 2: I'm trying to avoid temptation. Whenever I go out, I end up spending. Why is everything so temptingly cheaper here? Argh!

shopping from a street bazaar

 

is it a hat? no it's an earring!

 

I've been wanting to buy midnight blue eyeshadow for a while. That I bought it with 11 other shades (6 more shades in a bottom compartment) for the same price is sweet indeed.

fell in love with this funky bracelet the moment I saw it

 

you can't buy a 10 dollar dress as pretty as this in Singapore 

(yes, I convert to SGD instead of PHP now)

comfy and pretty bedroom slippers

DVDs

 

I had been looking all over Singapore for this, to no avail. Thank you MBK!

 

even books are cheaper here than in Singapore

And don't even get me started on the food.

Pepper Lunch, at half the price compared to Singapore

 

Swensens ice cream, at half the price compared to Singapore

 

DQ blizzard, at a quarter of the price compared to Singapore and Philippines

 

delectable coconut ice cream with fresh coconut in a shell

Doitung's choco-macadamia drink is a dream

banoffee pie, which I'd always been curious about

what I like to call Thailand turon - bananas wrapped in fried batter and egg

 

steam boat + grill buffet for 100 baht

 
salad buffet included with the steam boat one mentioned above

tamarind, the ultimate Thai pasalubong, and my fave too

Dr. House Works on Alexe

Alexe, my macbook, has been upgraded to the Snow Leopard (Mac OS X version 10.6), thanks to Chu's persistence. Oh, it took a while, maybe 10 times we got the error "please clean the CD and try again." I was all set to give up, but not Chu, who somehow got the idea of tilting my macbook at a 90 degree angle while running the installation process. It was a crazy idea but to my complete surprise, it actually worked! Sounds like a Dr. House moment, which is funny because that's what we tease to him due to their similarity in sarcasm and maybe looks? 

uncanny resemblance (I am so gonna get killed)

Snow Leopard OS for my baby

Aside from that, I also used another CD of his to install some new toys to play around with - Microsoft Office for Mac and iWork.

new icons on my dock (sounds like new kids on the block)

Previously I used the free software Open Office to tinker with my Word, Excel and Power Point files, but it just isn't the same. Now my OC self can go back to plotting my life on Excel sheets on my laptop again. (insert evil laugh here)

Aside from the three most popular applications for Yuppies, there is a bonus: the Microsoft Entourage, an email client that is very much like Outlook. I fell in love with it and hooked it up to my Ymail account which was fun until this morning, when I opened my Ymail on the Internet and realized that all the emails uploaded to Entourage had been deleted from the Yahoo server. Egad!

Then I realized that while Gmail has an option to keep the emails in the inbox even if I use Apple Mail to read my messages, Yahoo doesn't. Argh. Oh well, at least I've gotten rid of a bunch of emails which I probably should have cleaned out a long time ago anyway.

Gmail has more options for pop mail

Yahoo loses hands down in this fight

As for iWork, it has applications that make those top three MS Office application files I mentioned earlier a lot easier to do. Keynote lets you create slide presentations from over 40 templates and you can integrate pictures and sounds into them by just dragging and dropping media from your iPhoto and iTunes libraries. And you can choose transitions similar to videomaking tools. Pages, meanwhile, is a streamlined word processor and an easy-to-use page layout tool. It allows you to be a writer one minute and a designer the next. When I saw the preset templates which includes layouts and pictures which you can easily interchange with your own, I decided that I was going to have to create a newsletter. It was too pretty to pass up! Numbers, meanwhile, is all about spreadsheets. Suddenly I want to crunch some data and make a gap analysis, a POT letter, anything!

I will now be spending way more time than I usually do on my computer. Thanks so much, Dr. House!

Taylor Swift's SNL Monologue

Taylor Swift, one of my favorite singer-composers, hosts Saturday Night Live and composes a song for the opening monologue. You might think she will talk about Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, or Kanye, but she's NOT gonna talk about that on her SNL monologue. No siree. XD

College Sweethearts

Yesterday, two of my College classmates changed their status to "in a relationship" in Facebook and were soon inundated with happy comments from their common friends, including me. It was a surprise because even though they had the same personalities, they didn't exactly revolve in the same circles except for the classroom. So I have yet to know the story as to how they fell back into each other's paths.

Like the revelation about Rodel's girlfriend, though, once I found out, it wasn't a complete shock. I had always suspected back in College that Joy, who was in my barkada, had a crush on Ryan, even though she never actually admitted it.

Ryan and I also go a long way back, since we were classmates in High School and I became his confidant and co-conspirator when he fell for one of my friends back then. It seems as though his taste hasn't changed that much because his choice is still a friend of mine, albeit a different one.

I'm glad they are together now. That makes them the fourth official couple to come out from our College block. I say "official" because there were so many unofficial teams and one-sided love affairs.

In the picture below, Ryan and Joy are encircled. The boxed ones are all those who ever loved or was loved by someone in the class. That I know of, anyway. The picture is missing four people, three of whom also need to be "boxed."

I suppose those TV series plots are not too far off reality, huh?

Bad Hair Days

Once upon a time, I cut my hair really short because it was summer and my thick long hair made it even more unbearably hot. When my friend saw this and heard my excuse, she laughed and said she didn't believe me. "Women don't get a haircut for convenience! There is always some other reason behind it, whether for vanity or depression." Then she told me that Ricky Reyes, the famous hairdresser, said that 99% of women who get a haircut are depressed. I actually found this site where Ricky said so, and here I was, thinking that she was just inventing things. She does have a point, though. I remember visiting the salon after getting my heart broken the first time, hoping that the painful memories would fall along with the hair that got snipped off my head.

So yesterday I got a haircut. Partly because I'm bored with how I look. Partly because it's a lot cheaper here. Partly because I'm hoping that new hair equals new life, like I always tell myself every new year when I get a haircut. Nothing too drastic, though. It looks just like my old hairstyle, only a bit shorter.

Over the years, here are the different hairstyles I've tried. Which one looks best on me?