my weekend roundup & emails

It has been a busy week and I was hoping that I could catch up with my blogging last weekend. I’ve got so many things to blog about but I didn’t have enough time. One thing are the loving goodies I received from Odette. I received my orders of lunchcards about two weeks ago. I’ll blog about it maybe this week if I have some spare time.

What made me busy aside from work?

Hubby was sick all weekend. It started last week Thursday when he was having persistent colds. Friday came, he was having slight fever and some dry coughing. Saturday, he’s feeling all sore and chilly that he needed to wear his pajamas and a sweater with fox fur to keep him warm.

Our Friday and Saturday were spent with foodies, DVDs and lots of sleeping. Just looking at Hubby dozing off after taking his medicines, my eyes also get droopy at the same time.

Last night, I was so worried of his rising temperature. Every two hours or so, I would suddenly wake up to check on him, like if he needs a new shirt as he sweats heavily even if he’s telling me he’s cold. I gave him a cold press on his forehead to minimize his temp. After several cold presses, his temperature finally came to “almost normal” (as I don’t have a thermometer at hand).

I feel relieved this morning when I touched his neck and forehead. It was a brand new experience for me as Hubby seldom gets sick.

Luckily, I still managed to grab some 5 hours (all in all) of sleep throughout the night. It’s not really good to have your first day of the week, at work, feeling all sluggish then dozing off to your desk by noontime. It’s global crisis everywhere and there is no complete assurance that your job is still there when you wake up from your “dozing off to your desk” moment.

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In the office, first thing I do among my morning routines is to open my Outlook and check for incoming mails. I had five in my Inbox:

1. First one was sent by a colleague last Friday (8 May). So that means she went to work on a Friday? (which is equivalent to a Sunday). Anyways, it was about me moving on the other side of the building where I’ll be sitting next to this colleague. New office. New seatmate.

2. Second mail was sent by my guy friend P yesterday (9 May) at 1:58 AM! P works for an audit firm and the reason he’s still awake at this hour is because of audit deadlines. We were supposed to go out last Friday but he cancelled it since his manager had asked him to work in the weekend.

3. Still on 9 May, third one was from my boss. This, of course, is work-related.

4. Fourth one was from my other guy friend who is love-struck to my other girl friend. He just sent one of those forwarded mails with big “.wmv” attachments. Subject: The VocaPeople. I haven’t opened it yet due to the fact that the speakers of my office PC are disabled. I dunno why.

5. And the last one was from a former colleague who now works in the island of Cayman. She sent me an invitation to twit with her in the Twitter world. Unfortunately, Twitter is blocked in the office. “Tin don’t worry, I’ll twit you na lang sa Plurk. Lol”

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Right now, I am waiting for the IT guy to get my things (PC, files and office thingies) moved on my new office with my new seatmate.

And I hope I won’t forget to send an invitation to Tin (to plurk instead).

it's the same crisis

Here’s another Quarter-Life Crisis article e-mailed to me by a friend last year.

Beware: Long read!

Quarter-life crisis
By Gena Valerie Chua

I first heard it three months after graduation, over lunch with college blockmates.

Blockmate 1 (earns twice as much as any of us): I'm depressed. Work sucks. Is there any job that sucks more than mine?

Blockmate 2 (recently quit his job): Mine did. I was bored every day. I'm applying abroad. Do you know how much you can earn there?

Blockmate 3 (confessed bum): Money isn't worth your unhappiness. You should be dating more, I'll set you up with a friend.

Blockmate 1 says: But how can I be happy without money? Great dramatic sigh, I'm having a quarter- life crisis. Who are you setting me up with?


And there it was, the mystifying term that single-handedly captured our 22-year-old chaos. At first it sounded funny, but when the thought sank in, we were all quiet for an uncomfortably long period of time. Did we have it too?

Since then, I've heard the phrase thrown around a lot. After graduation get-togethers have been surprisingly frequent. It could be a withdrawal symptom, you're all desperate to hold on to the certainty you had in school. Now that everything has become so unstructured, we cling on dearly to the people whom we shared such carefree, and sometimes
careless days with. We reminisce about how our lives used to be, and how they are now. Many of us are in our third or fourth jobs. More and more are leaving the country to "find greener pastures," joining that ever-growing diaspora like spores drawn to more fertile ground.

There is a shared sense of "lostness," not because we have nowhere to be. No, we are all lucky enough to be somewhere, but most want to be somewhere else. Everyone tells us we are meant to be great, or at least achieve a slice of greatness. We are of that generation, the generation that has it all. The generation that never had to work for anything because it's all instant and automated. The natural expectation to surpass those before us poses an unnerving problem: What happens if we don't?

Maybe the pressure has been there for centuries, but never like this. The world used to be enormous, a planet of rocks we only see in science books. But now the world is shrinking.

Everything, everyone is within reach. The overwhelming proximity of it all has turned us claustrophobic. Wherever we find ourselves becomes too small a place. We are always looking for that something, the thing that will supposedly match our destined greatness.

Upon writing this article I decided to Google the term. Lo and behold, the omniscient Wikipedia had some interesting answers. Quarter-life crisis is a medical term for the phase following adolescence, usually for ages 21-30.

Some "symptoms" include:
(1) feeling not good enough about one's job
(2) frustration with relationships
(3) insecurity about life goals
(4) nostalgia for school
(5) a sense that everyone is doing better than you.

Furthermore, the stage occurs shortly after young, educated professionals enter the "real world", when they realize that it is tougher, more competitive and less forgiving than they imagined.

So it's not a 21st century thing after all. Ah, but Wikipedia doesn't stop there. It goes on to say that today, "the era when having a professional career meant a life of occupational security has come to an end." Indeed, it is no longer enough to get a well-paying job and do it for the rest of your life.

The lines used to be clearly drawn: you were a dentist, a doctor, an engineer, a businessman. Today, things are not as black and white. Our "real world" is now literally the entire world. We take our internships in multi-national corporations, study abroad on exchange programs, and attend art seminars in New York . We find worldwide options exceeding the imagination of those before us: techie jobs in Silicon Valley, trading in the Hong Kong stock market, even advertising for Google in hidden GoogleLand. I had a classmate who took up forensics in Maryland, while another one graduated from a famous fashion school in London . We are constantly considering so many options, debating which ones we can qualify for and which ones will ultimately help us define ourselves.

Older folks say this is generation me, me, me. We want it all now, now, now — even when we really have no idea what we want. So we end up wanting it all. They (my parents, friends of my parents, parents of my friends) shake their heads in disapproval at our inability to stay in one job.

They say we can't stand any ounce of discomfort, any morsel of unhappiness. It's true. We are impatient, always fleeing from one place to another — because that is what we grew up doing. Change has always been inevitable, but if there was ever a time when each year sees changes that used to span a century, this would have to be it.

As adolescents, none of our music icons had the longevity of The Beatles — every three weeks it was a new genre of sound. One minute we were shrieking fans of the Backstreet Boys, and the next we were cult followers of Matchbox 20. We have no memory of dinosaur computers; to us everything runs at 5Mbps. Our shelves of Britannica have gathered dust; we only have to go to YouTube and streams of video would unravel. We had the networking craze Friendster, but even that didn't last.

Soon we were creating separate accounts for Multiply, Facebook and self-blogs. We shop on sites of local strangers and order via cellphone banking. Oh yes, don't even get me started on cellphones. They have rendered everything else useless: watches, cameras, music players, calculators, dictionaries, even mirrors.

Every time the world changes a part of itself, we've had to change along with it. I'm not saying we should go back to the era of i'll-be-waiting-two-weeks-for-your-snail-mail. I cannot leave the house without my phone. Maybe we've become little brats of technology, the spawn of an age always trying to outdo itself. If patience is a virtue, then the remarkable deficiency of it has become our unconscious vice. Our adult lives are an extension of our adolescent years, when coolness was attained by downloading mp3s of a newbie rock band before everyone else did. We are always on the move.

We are fickle-minded, discontent and extremely volatile — which according to Wikipedia, are natural to those in their 20's. But to be in your 20s at a time when clients at work are Australians you will never see past email correspondence, then it becomes a world that gives you only two choices: move, or get left behind.

We are expected to march out into the world with iPod in backpocket, one earphone pounding against an eardrum. With our bountiful gifts from mother technology and our cross-cultural media grub, we're supposed to find a way to make ourselves great. Now more than ever, we have to prove ourselves worthy of the time we were born into. So who can blame us, for wanting to run all the time? The pressure is immense. So much is running
after us and worse, there is so much we are trying to keep up with. Like the reluctant monster Incredible Hulk, we are always growing out of proportion, our clothes tearing as we expand. And so we run, gasping for air, looking for a place that can contain us.

I'm grateful for being born in an era that constantly pushes itself forward. But we were raised in a period long past mere survival, where the worst blunder you can commit is not so much failure but mediocrity. And so we make this plea: don't be so hard on us. It may now be less challenging to defy boundaries, but the world out there is still as tough as ever. Let us have our little crisis; spare us the time that we never seem to have enough of. Give us the chance to find our own corner, where we can dig and shovel and bury ourselves in.

Because when the clouds clear up — when we can finally stop twiddling our thumbs and wringing our hands in restlessness — you will see what we have built out of our chaos, and you will be damn proud.

Kitchen Experiment #1: Broccoli with Mushroom & Chicken

since me and hubby came here in sharjah, we have assumed independence from our parents. not total independence though. hahaha!

what i'm really trying to say is, back home in pinas, we don't do the cooking. we both have an idea how some dishes are being cooked but we haven't actually tried doing it in the kitchen. why complicate things when we have the best cooks at home?

that was before.

now that our parents/sisters/brothers are not here to serve us good food when we get home, it's quite a responsibility for the un-skilled like us to come up with a yummylicious food to serve on our dinner or to pack for our lunch.

we now just rely on our "basic instincts". not the R18 movie of course.

*blush*

i'm not really thinking about that so let's skip that one. lol.

okay, moving on. me and hubby are being creative everytime. twisting some original recipes into what is just available here. for your info, the middle east is not as abundant as our pinas when it comes to the range of veggies available. even sayote (or chayote), in its super rarity in the supermarkets, costs 10 dirhams per kilo (1 dirham = 13 pesos). it's my favorite gulay pa naman. and i also miss the dahon ng malunggay!

anyways, today is Saturday and it's my off. since morning i've been thinking what to cook for dinner coz it feels nakakaumay if i cook fried chicken again or sauteed string beans. i remember that yesterday, hubby was eyeing that beef steak from our flatmate. it's a very rare occasion that hubby would crave for beef coz it's not really his most fave meat but i want to give him what i saw in his eyes yesterday.

we still have broccoli in the fridge so why not have Beef Broccoli for tonight. i went down to the supermarket right after i took a shower. i have gone into two supermarkets but no beef is available!!! i ended up buying oyster sauce, chicken and cauliflower, wondering what in hell will i do with the combination. i'm gonna reserve the cauliflower for tomorrow coz i'm still using the broccoli.

so here's my output for tonight:

Broccoli with Mushroom & Chicken

what it's made of:

1/2 kilo broccoli, sliced
1/4 kilo chicken breast, into small thin strips
2 cups chicken broth
2 gloves garlic, crushed & minced
sliced mushrooms
2 tablespoon oyster sauce
3 tablespoon soy sauce
salt & pepper for seasoning

how it's done:

1. first, bring to boil the chicken in 2 and half cups of water to come up with the chicken broth.
2. in a hot wok with cooking oil, cook the garlic until almost golden on its sides. then put the chicken and stir fry for about 10 seconds.
3. add the oyster sauce, soy sauce and mushrooms. stir fry again for 20-30 seconds or until the chicken has absorbed the flavors of the sauce.
4. put the broccoli and chicken broth. add salt and pepper to taste.
5. let it simmer for 5 minutes then serve it hot with rice!

Note: for a much creamier sauce, you can add a tablespoon of cornstarch. (i just forgot to buy one, hehehe)

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i also cooked some beef kebabs but i was so focused with the broccoli thingy that i forgot them for some minutes. it was a disappointment. really.

burnt beef kebabs

hubby liked the broccoli blah blah blah but when he saw the beef kebabs, he turned cynical with my cooking skills.


hubby: nagluluto ka ba talaga? bakit sunog? (were you really cooking? why are these burnt?)
yummybite: ahmmm...sorry, i forgot eh. [while making pacute na naman]
hubby: *sigh* buti na lang masarap ang broccoli. (good thing that the broccoli were good)



on my mind while we were eating: "sunog daw pero naka-dalawang servings ng rice?"

my youngest sister

my most favorite picture with Leslie taken at Pagudpud, Ilocos Norte

My sister Leslie and I are super close. Back home, she's my roommate, eating mate and "gala"-mate. And just like her big sister, she also loves reading. During her younger years (and until now, I suppose), she’s addicted with Tagalog romance pocketbooks. Then came Harry Potter (through me, of course) in her high school life, she started reading English fiction.

Her latest obsession today is none other than TWILIGHT! And since Twilight has been a big time craze among teens and women all over the world, my sister can’t find the book on any bookstore in Pampanga (my hometown). I can’t tell her to go to Manila for the book instead, lest she’ll get lost in such an unfamiliar jungle. So I asked her to wait for me to finish the books then I’ll send them to her.

That was December last year.

After that, every time I call her, she keeps on nagging me like “when are you sending the Twilight books?”

My younger brother Levi came home from the US last month so he bought the first two Twilight books as pasalubong to our youngest sister. Now I only have to send the last two.

As of today, I STILL haven’t read the fourth book, Breaking Dawn. Last week, I was already thinking of sending it (as brand new) off to her this week along with Shopaholic Takes Manhattan by Sophie Kinsella, which I still need to buy.

I have all Sophie Kinsella’s books back home, except for this one because it was the first Shopaholic book I’ve read and I just borrowed it from a colleague 3 years ago. I felt no need to buy it that time so now, my sister can’t read the 3^rd Shopaholic book, Shopaholic Ties the Knot, unless I buy the 2^nd book.

However, as I just found out from courier companies online, airfreight charges would cost me some 1,200 dirhams (equal to Php 15,600) for express delivery of 2-3 days. Waaaaaaay too expensive! I can opt for the 150 dirhams (equal to Php 1,950) with some local freight companies here but my sister is not too willing to wait for 30-45 days for it to come. You see, I have delayed it already for nearly four months.

This morning, as I was going through my normal routine of browsing the internet for some useful stuffs and readings, a “lightbulb” came flashing on my boredom. Why not search an online bookshop and make them deliver the books right at my sister’s doorstep? And make that an online bookstore in the Philippines.

I thought of National Bookstore and Powerbooks so I browsed through their webpages. For no other reason, I have decided to go for Powerbooks and checked the availability.

[Picture Source: Breaking Dawn, Eclipse, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan]

After some minutes of adding my chosen books into my cart, I have checked out a total of three books (Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan), provided the shipping and billing address, wrote a short message for my sister then paid for only Php 1,273 including the shipping cost of Php 250. The whole transaction for just 15 minutes.

A time-saver!

And soooo cheap!

I haven’t told her about this one but it will surely surprise her.

I soooo miss her!

I Was Not Invited?

just got this happy news from my sports widget. i was a bit late but still i just needed to share this one [especially to KG].

Federer Marries Longtime Girlfriend last
Saturday, 11 April 2009 in Basel Switzerland.

the couple, Roger Federer & Mirka Vavrinec, are expecting
their first baby this summer.

read the full article from this link.

Warning: mushy contents (for hubby)

i sooo sooo wanna thank hubby during my sick-o days.

he was, and will always be there to take care of me...

even if i was almost always throwing tantrums on my hospital bed...

even if i easily get irritated with his questions that needed loonggg answers...

even if i would always wake him up because i needed to make wee-wee in the bathroom in the middle of the night...

even if i was tigas-ulo that i would try to sneak eating grapes while i'm on "fasting"...

even if he needed to be absent to work for eight days just to take care of me...

even if i was making kulet for him to make kulet to my doctor to "please remove my freakin' catheter and stockings"...

even if in the middle of the night, he'll try to be as awake as i am when i can't sleep...

even if i was a cry-baby whenever the nurses prick the needles to get my blood...

even if most of the time i am too tired to answer him or even talk to him...

even if i got lots of hematoma (pasa) from the surgery...

even if i did not wash my face or had time to brush teeth everyday during my hospital time...

he did not care...
for he would still give me hugs and kisses
and whisper his "iloveyous"
to make me sleep amidst my pains.

i love you too, hubby, so much

in kapampangan, "kaluguran daka rin, babatak"!

*mwah*

my dear valentine

yesterday was supposedly a happy and lovely day since it's that time of the year where people, mostly couples, celebrate the grandeur of their love and affection for each other.

my day was very uneventful. hubby left the flat at 7.30am for work, right after my good-morning-happy-valentines kiss from him. i barely uttered my reply. for some moment of my sleepiness, i wonder if i really did reply. i'll have to confirm this to hubby tonight. *silly me*

with the other night not having enough sleep, i surrendered to another slumber and woke up at past 11 already. it's my "first day" of that girl thing of the month and my body from waist down just feels really heavy and cramped. i just had cereals for my lunch because i really don't feel like eating when i'm in this kind of pain. it doesn't make me feel hungry at all.

to keep me company the whole boring day, i played with my psp, read some chapters from eclipse, watched telly and checked my friendster. i received a text message from Mama so i called her up. we missed each other so much that aside from exchanging our valentine greetings, we also talked about beauty products that she is currently using (eventhough she knows how un-vain i am), and made some catching ups with my sis Leslie.

for dinner i have cooked mixed veggies and breaded shrimps. my hunger strike took its toll on me that by 7pm, hubby's still not home and i'm already starving. i waited with patience coz i can't let myself or hubby eat our dinner alone. by 9pm, i'm already ringing his mobile. the culprit must have been the super traffic at dubai-sharjah road! i was right!

the door opened at 9.20pm and there hubby is with some grocery stuffs (or so i thought). i didn't bother to check what he's brought coz really i'm dying already of starvation. but when i followed him on our room, i was surprised with the rose and the chocolates! *sweet*

that was sweet already even with only one rose since hubby is really not the romantic type. but at least he made the effort. that was enough for me.

i felt guilty though for not buying anything for him. but i have cooked him dinner anyways. hehehe. i hope that was enough for him.

***

on the contrary, my night ended up happy and lovely.