Kids are coming!

I can hardly wait...



P.S. Thanks to Meyan's blog for introducing me to Daisypath.com.

A Mom's Day Surprise

On Mother's Day, I found myself lounging around the Polo pool with the rest of the Valdeses - a laid back way of celebrating the day. Suddenly my cell rang. Joey Campillo, an old friend I hadn't seen in ages, was asking where I was. Minutes later, he was walking towards our cabana.

That's when I noticed there was a wide-brimmed hat bobbing up and down behind him. T was back from Tubbataha one day early! She had enlisted Joey's help to be able to sneak up on all of us.

It was such a cool Mom's Day surprise, especially since all the kids are in Oz and the house has been empty.

Tubbataha weather had turned bad on their last day, so they had come back a day early. More photos of their trip are on Vina M's Multiply site
and will eventually be on Cris H's Multiply site, when our fave photog gets the energy to post them. This photo by Cris is a good example of the great viz they had during their week there.

T's early return without advance warning to me generated a lot of funny comments. The best was from her Tita M, who noted, "You're lucky. Many wives would be the ones who are surprised."

Acquire Night

Over the past decade, four friends and I have been playing Acquire. We average four nights a year when we all get together at someone's home and play three games for the night.

Total accumulated winnings for the evening determine the winner and runner-up, who then share our prize pool in a 2:1 ratio. The pool is pretty small, P500 each plus fines for latecomers and for the last to arrive. The pool just brings a bit of excitement to the game.

The complete rules for Acquire are here.

We've been playing so long that when we first started, the game looked like this, with a Dracula-type banker on the box cover. (It was produced by 3M, the Scotch tape guys. The modern version above was developed by Hasbro.)

On Acquire Nights, we bring our wives, who gossip on their side of the table while the five of us play and chat on ours. (Note that I'm being politically incorrect by saying the women "gossip" while we "chat," as if our talk was any more substantive than theirs.)

Over the decade, four of the five of us have remained with the same spouse, which is a pretty good batting average for Manila. Also, about five children have been added in that decade, which is a pretty low figure for the country.

Acquire was invented by a board game designer named Sid Sackson in the '60's (interesting job title). Sackson also collected games and when he died (in 2002), had over 18,000 in his collection. As a nice touch, when Hasbro updated the game, they named one of the corporations Sackson (although they also used it for the cheapest corporation, which is kind of a cheap shot).

There are various websites that talk about the history of the game, its rules, variations, tournaments and all sorts of Acquire trivia. Naturally I read through it all, especially since there's nothing to do when nobody else is at home.

The point of all this is that we had an Acquire Night last night and I just now figured out we've been doing something wrong all this time. We've always dealt each other $5,000, and just tonight I read the exact rule:

Each player begins the game with $6000 in cash ($1000 x 4, $500 x 3, $100 x 5) and six tiles picked at random for their starting racks.

Oops, time to return all bets!

Athena's Birthday

I called her up this morning. When it's your third birthday, it's important to get a call from Daddy.

We had a fairly long conversation too, as discussions with three-year-olds go. She was babbling away and in the back, I could hear Yaya Juvy instructing her, "Thank you, Daddy," "I love you, Daddy," and finally "Bye-bye, Daddy."

All the kids are in Oz with their Prieto grandfolks; T left yesterday for a week of scuba diving in Tubbataha... the house is dark, hot and humid. To keep myself occupied, I played 22 holes of golf and swam a kilometer yesterday and then swam another today.

At home, it's the second round of mechado and binagoongan, but one hardly cares when you get home from the office past ten. And anyway afterwards, there's this blog to keep me occupied!

Why We Should Scrutinize Our Meralco Bills

I've often been amazed by our electric bill, which makes me feel like I might have an entire barangay surreptitiously connected to my meter or something. Last summer, for instance, T and the kids were all in the U.S. for a month. So I decided to "minimize my carbon footprint." At the end of a month of April's heat and darkness, our bill was still over Php 30k.

Here's a classic story of a guy with a high electric bill who should have bothered to look into it, from Agence France Presse:

AMSTETTEN, Austria (AFP) — A former tenant in Austria's "house of horrors" ... could have pointed to the secret dungeon where a woman was held as a sex slave by her father for 24 years, in an interview published Friday.

Sepp Leitner told the daily Die Presse he had come eerily close to discovering the windowless prison a decade ago. Leitner lived for four years in a small flat on the ground floor immediately above the cellar in the 1990s. He said he could never understand why his electricity bill was so high, considering he was frequently absent and did not even have a washing machine.

Leitner only realised this month after the case emerged that he was paying the utility costs for the underground prison as well, which had an elaborate security system installed by owner Josef Fritzl, a former electrician.

"If I'd been a bit more persistent and not let it go until the mystery of the high electricity consumption had been resolved, perhaps we'd have found out about the dungeon earlier," Leitner said.

This month, Ty, Annika and Athens are all in Oz with their grandparents. Only T and I are home, but she leaves for a week of diving in Tubbataha on Sunday, while I hold the proverbial fort. With the lights and the aircon shut off...

You Can HAVitALL!

It's not often that T's "SE" (social events) stuff can actually be fun, but it was when HAVitALL multivitamins paid for us plus six friends to have a scuba weekend at Dive Solana.

We ended up inviting u/w hockey players aka the Solana Six (although the rest of the group who didn't get to sign up called us the Solana Seniors). All our pix are on our Multiply sites, so you need to click here to see them.

Here's what Tessa had to say about the weekend in her Inquirer.net column:

New challenges

The newest multivitamin in the market, HAVitALL, has been actively promoting their product by inviting friends to take on new challenges. The invitation was a marvel of cute packaging, encouraging me to take up a new activity, like surfing, karting or even pottery making. Although I already scuba dive, I chose this activity so that I could bring along my husband, Dennis, and several of his friends from underwater hockey.

Dive Solana was our chosen resort, because of their friendly service and homey accommodations. In between the dives, we visited with agency bigwig Ichay Bulaong, who was spending her weekend on a personal social responsibility project with her family and friends—to help paint an underwater mural on the fence of the San Teodoro Elementary School in Barangay Mabini. The project organizer, Sandy Hammet, noted that the mural painting was part of Project Utay Utay, the barangay’s environmental initiative.

It’s great to see how many Pinoys find different ways of helping their communities. For me and the underwater hockey group, it was a great way to spend our HAVitALL weekend. Indeed, good deeds are cleansing for the soul!

Cross-posting from Multiply to Blogger to Facebook...

Amazing. FB has an app called My Blogs, which imports postings from any blog URL. So I can write this in Multiply, which would then cross-post to Blogger and finally be grabbed by FB.

What's all that about? Why have so many ways for Google Ads to be displayed? It's really amazing how Google's hegemony has completely changed the world.

For me, the best thing about FB has been Scrabulous. The other apps don't really hold my attention, although Text Twirl is promising.

Multiply on the other hand, is good for posting pix. It's photo loader is so much better than sites like Kodak Gallery. So I think I'm gonna be loading more pix on Multiply than the latter.

The other thing I like about Multiply is the polling thing. This way, I can see that 3 people read one of my posts and bothered to vote. Ha, ha.

As for Blogger, it's claim to fame is that it is still a better blog template than Multiply or any other site I've visited. Plus, since I've been blogging on that since 2004, it has all my content in its archives already. I also like the Preview function, which allows me to see if a photo is properly placed on the site or not.

With all this digital dallying, it's a wonder I find any time to go to the beach and hang out with the kids...

Whatever happened to March?

I blinked. And March was gone.

How funny that life can suddenly speed up and just like that, the blog gets de-prioritized. I guess Holy Week took up more time than its actual 7 days.

This image is my favorite from March. Tyrone and Annika walking on the beach in Surfers Paradise, on our way to body surf. We spent 11 beautiful days in Oz - great bonding time with T and the kids.

The pix are all here. Multiply has the best photo uploading software, so now I am uploading photos there rather than Kodak Gallery.

I'll post more about Oz when I have time this weekend...