Canucks craze

Canada normally has a cold weather majority of the year which is why it's no surprise that hockey is their favorite sport here. And with the Vancouver Canucks reaching the Stanley Cup finals, everyone's just in hockey fever here.

I haven't seen this type of love and support by a whole city (or perhaps, even the whole country) to a sports team ever! A week ago, I was walking at Broadway and I see all these people, of all kinds of race, age, you name it, wearing a Canucks jersey, Canucks shirt, just about anything as long as it has the Canucks logo in it. Cars even have the Canucks flags sticking at their window. You'd even see houses setup with all Canucks related stuff!

In Manila, I'm guessing that when the Mavs won the NBA championship yesterday, everyone was talking about it. But here? We almost didn't know that NBA just finished, because basketball's just not the sport here. Everyone's just talking about the Stanley Cup!

The whole Canucks being in the finals of the Stanley Cup has proven to be good in the economy too. During a Canucks game, tons of people make their way to downtown, to different pubs and bars to watch the game. In fact, for this finals series, they even close off some areas in downtown because the fans are just everywhere! There's just this feeling of elation everywhere when the Canucks are playing. Once, I was in the skytrain, I saw these guys wearing their jerseys, had their face painted with the Canucks color, shouting around, and holding a replica of the Stanley Cup! So much fun to see these fans! I love their energy and support!

Think of it as when Manny Pacquiao has a boxing match, everyone in the Philippines is zoomed into their tv sets to watch the match. The only difference I see with the fans here is that, everyone's wearing the Canucks jersey (which by the way, will cost you 130++ dollars per jersey)! It's total madness, but it's so much fun too!

Tonight's game 6 at Boston with the Canucks leading the series 3-2. Everyone's gonna go bersek if they win! And I sure hope they win! It'll put everyone to a good mood! :)

Libre

For Leda, as requested.

Tea Cup

I didn't like tea before. But ever since I started going to Canada, for some reason, I ended up loving tea. Loving it so much that tea has become my water all day long. My usual drink were either earl grey's or the tea from Starbucks. I used them up because they were in a pouch. So no loose leafs there. And then one day, a colleague brought a huge stash, a ton of variety teas! There were so many different flavors, I didn't even know which one to choose. But the problem there was that they were loose leafs, and well, we don't want loose leafs in our drinks.

And thus, my other officemate, got me this:

A very very nice tea cup.

And the nice thing about it is that... look below, it has built in filtering system!

So technically, there are three parts to this cup: the cover, the filtering device, and the cup body. And what's even better is that you can remove the filtering and reseal the cup with just the cover and the body. Isn't it sooo cool?

Oh, and you won't notice it in the cup itself, but it's actually glass inside, and plastic or some other material outside. Which means, even though the tea is way hot, you won't feel it in your fingertips.

Beautiful isn't it? It makes tea taste better for some reason.

annoying take 2

We have an event tomorrow at the office where we can showcase our own cooking to different people. This event's been ongoing for the past three years and this year, we decided to join the event! As everyone might know, I'm not really a kitchen person, and so when we decided to join, I thought that maybe, I can prepare my mom's very very delicious leche flan. It's not the usual very creamy leche flan, which I don't like. I like it a bit thicker that the usual. And my mom's recipe is the best.

And so to prepare for this, I did a trial run of my leche flan last Monday. The result was a good old tasty leche flan but it had some flaws - it's not as soft as I wanted it to be. Perhaps this could be because it might have been cooked a little too much, and too high heat. But all in all, it tastes really good.

Since the event is tomorrow, I was going to prepare a new set of leche flan tonight again. The plan of action was, lower heat this time. I was excited to do that when my K.I.A. teammate (same one from my previous post) had to meddle in the affairs and wanted to change the recipe. Add this, add that. Whatever. I told him I didn't want to change the recipe but he insisted. While he was cracking the eggs (while changing my recipe), I left his side and went back to work in my laptop. And then he kept on calling me to help him out then out of my annoyance, I told him "No, recipe mo na naman iyan eh!" Haha... maldita noh. Sobrang inis.

I saw my landlady's reaction. I think she didn't know how to react because she probably knew I was annoyed. Strike 2 na ah. In two days!

Anyway, I still hope his leche flan is good. Because if it's not, I'm not going to say I made that. lol!

annoying

I find it annoying when people ask you something, you've already done it, and then you'd learn later on that they'd ask another one again to do it. I find it either a waste of my time, or even a lack of trust.

Take for instance what happened earlier.

My teammate has been asking me to ask our manager in Manila about the possibility of extending the vacation leave for onshore members. I did this. I sent an email, went online last night to try and catch her in communicator. Unfortunately, she didn't reply to either my emails or even my messages in communicator.

Ok so here's my teammate, asking me about that again. So I told him, I have asked, sent and email, but got no reply. But I assured him that I will followup.

Then the next thing I know, he goes and talks to my other team lead, asking her if she can ask our manager in Manila about the same thing he just asked me to do, and which I did!

The reason why I knew about it because this teammate of mine forwarded that inquiry to me. Asking me to do it.

Isn't that annoying? You do what you're asked to do. And it's not like it's my fault that I haven't gotten any response and yet, for some reason, I feel stupid that this teammate of mine don't have the trust to even consider my reply to him - that I'll followup on it again. Mababaw sa kung mababaw, pero it's definitely annoying.

You know, I don't mind if it's something that really needs to be confirmed or validated by another person. For example, I made a change in the code, we want someone to code review it for validation right? Or for newspapers, magazines, they usually have fact checkers for the articles written.

Maybe I'm just pissed off and stressed today. Perhaps, I wasn't in a good mood earlier that's why I'm pissed off over such a small thing.

Theme of the week: Gym and Shopping

Last week's theme was shopping and gym.
Those are the two things I "majored" on last week.

Gym

Went to the gym 4 times (actually three times only, the fourth was going on a 5k run in Central Park). I don't know why my friend and I just suddenly became so obsessed about losing weight. Perhaps it's because history tells us that we gain so much when we're here. Case in point. This is my fifth time over here in Canada and 4 out of 5 times (5th is right now), I gained a few pounds of weight when I went back to Manila. So this time around, we're focusing of killing off that pattern, and go the other way, be more fit and ready when we get back to Manila.

For the past weeks, we've been religiously going to the gym 3-4 times a week. My friend and I were both frustrated because we are killing our butts off in the gym, but we feel like there's no weight difference. But as I was reading through some articles off from the web, one article I read mentioned that we need to stop thinking about losing weight, but focus on fitness instead.

Yes, now that I think about it. I have better sleep these days. I don't get tired as much, and I'm not as cranky as I usually am especially with work being stressful these days. I'm attributing this better "mood" and lifestyle to having better fitness. And as long as I fit into those pants I love wearing, then I'd just have to maintain my fitness. No more worrying about numbers, instead worry about overall body feeling/state.

Workout

Last Saturday, I did a full body workout, following the exercise plan my trainer from Manila gave me. And holy cow it worked so well, specific areas in my body which I really worked on for that day ached! But that's aching in a good way. On weekday workouts, I usually just hop on the treadmill for 30 minutes, and then depending on the day, I focus on one area at a time. The only area that gets exercise regularly are my abs.

And now I'm up to this state wherein I'm adding exercise as part of my lifestyle already. I think a lot of people gave up on exercise because they didn't look at it as part of a lifestyle, but instead, looked at it as extra work that needs to be done. I am hoping that when I get back to Manila, I will be able to maintain this lifestyle.

Shopping

I've been making excuses of the need to go on a shopping spree because I left of couple of items back in the east coast - a couple of shirts, pant, etc. That's a good excuse to go buy new things right?

So in line with yet, another tradition that my friend and I do every time we're here, is that we go to the Roots outlet store in Grandview to buy ourselves some new stock of clothes. Well, at least I just ended up buying three shirts - two for me and one for my nephew. And spent a total of around 40$ all in all. Not bad if you compare it to Ronald, who spent almost a 100 dollars during that 1.5 hour window of shopping.

And that was last Thursday.

Last Saturday, we went to an outlet store area in Queensborough for one reason - to go to a Best Buy store to get Ronald's laptop fixed. Since we had to wait for an hour or two before he gets it back, we decided to walk around and see the goods out there. Of course, I couldn't resist and I ended up buying something else again.

Now yesterday, Sunday, we went to Costco and Walmart to stock up on some items that we'd like to send back to the Philippines. This time around, I did spend more that what I was planning to spend. But the difference is that, most of these things aren't for me. They're for my family back home. I bought chocolates, pistachios that my Dad loves and my mom's annual supply of Dove soap!

All in all, in a span of 4 days (Thursday to Sunday), I've spent close to two to three month's worth of my budget for miscellaneous expenses. But you know what, it's so much fun to do so! It's about time I reward myself with items I can really use (although I just did reward myself with a vacation last end of April). After all the shopping spree (though I feel like I want to do more!), the next few weeks will probably be slower paced weeks for us, meaning, less shopping for us.

As my mom always says, you need to enjoy the fruits of your labor, and I just did that last week, and I won't mind doing it again and again and again. :)

Bones

One of the many reasons why I love watching Dr. Brennan in the tv show, Bones.

Dr. Brennan: Can you sign? Cause we'll need to communicate with her.

Lawyer: Yes, but as of yet she hasn't responded and who are you?

Caroline Julian: Dr. Brennan is the best forensic anthropologist in the country.

Dr. Brennan: World.