Last Monday was a gig adventure. I didn’t think I’d enjoy one that started at 6PM. I couldn’t imagine that there was an actual smoke-free jazz bar in QC. I must’ve had numerous silly-face moments as I was just in awe of the amazing sound I was hearing from the 20-or-so performers on stage.

I find it just too awesome that this happens every two weeks.

This was the second gig of the big band jazz group AMP Bigband, lead by Mel Villena, whose a lot more popular as that guy who is the conductor of the band in the Singing Bee gameshow. I missed the first gig for reasons I don’t remember anymore, but getting my first dose guaranteed return visits.

The news of the gig came via Tots Tolentino, who is also a member of my photography group. Evidently he became star of my photoset, easily because the best light was on him, he was lead sax, and man, was he just stellar that night. Myra/Skarlet sang a number, and Chickoy Pura (The Jerks) did his, but they were under non-existent stage lights, and I couldn’t get any nearer for a decent flash photo, since the venue was full.

Expect more shots in the following weeks. By March, they’d have a setlist consisting of pre-war songs, the sort that was played at every bar along Dewey Boulevard in the olden days.

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Back to regular programming:

Vegetarian Barbecue (Gluten), Brown Rice, and Pickled Cucumber and Carrots

Something I read about a month ago had me shun red meat for some time. Not a complete dismissal in the normal, everyday diet, just that it won’t be cooked or served at home, nor taken to work as baon. That non-purist thinking was something I got from what Jane Goodall said recently on The Daily Show. Jon Stewart posed a question about him enjoying a good hamburger, and if it actually bothers Goodall. She said it doesn’t, and vs. the well-known PETA animal rights activism (I’m para-phrasing here) extremism is never good.

So, for about  a month, it was usually chicken and fish at home. I decided to quit the no red-meat rule by middle of this week, which I guess started with me reading up on the demerits of soymilk, which I have been consuming liters of. Yep, I’m putting back the milk carton on the ref again.

I’ve started eating brown rice since last month, too, and have even tried other non-white rice options, like red rice. I went gradual with the rice replacement, mixing white and brown at first. I do have find a cheaper way to get it, but it does help a lot that I don’t have to buy a sackful of it, since its just me and my brother at home. One thing I’m not so hot about is that the grocery-grade type has an annoying amount of palay in it.

Veggie-meat, or gluten, thanks to tips online, wasn’t that hard to get, but I was surprised to know that the price wasn’t so far from the price of meat. I tried cooking adobo from it the first time, which wasn’t a success, but today, considering I still have about half a kilo of it, I took out the stove-top grill and made barbecue out of it. Went pretty well, but next time, I really shouldn’t cut it into bite sized pieces, and just prepare it like faux-porkchops, which would make it easier to turn over on the grill. Glad to have barbecue marinade/sauce at home to put some flavor on it, since its also what I use when making tuna sisig.

Ok, did I get thinner? I’m not sure. I’m not as thin as I was after my hospital-stay last year, where I easily lost 20 pounds, but I do feel healthier. One apparent physical benefit, though a bit mundane, is that I don’t have much of a dry scalp anymore.

And so I finish this post, the day after I gorged on kilos(?) of seafood from a dampa gathering last night. Now you know the real reason why I prepared that meal you see above this blog entry.

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Sheng Jian Bao. Always piping hot delicious.

Ro Pao. I eat this when I’m sick of jianbing. Two pork buns with some broth inside. Best eaten once served.

A beef-and-vegetables dish from a Chinese-Muslim eatery, which the Pinoy OFW’s such as myself treated as Shanghai’s version of the turo-turo. Sort of like beef kaldereta, but not really. Since I never learned Mandarin, I just point at the picture at the wall menu to order it. Served with hot soup.

Spicy (Szechuan?) noodle soup a-la hotpot from a street-side eatery. You pick the ingredients from this assortment.

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See, despite my being in the IT for god-knows-how-long, I think I’ve been practical and reasonable with my geek purchases, with a few misses, of course. For example, I have no fashionable laptop to carry with me anywhere, because work does not require it, and if I do need to be online, unlike years ago when the only other option would be to find a netcafe, I have with me a wifi-enabled Nokia E63 smartphone.

This also means that I have a trusty, Gilmore-assembled desktop computer at home, about half a decade old would be my good estimate. There really is no need to make an upgrade, but rust started showing up on the corners of my CPU, and, though the computer is working perfectly anyway, I deemed it timely to make some upgrades.

First idea that came through was my stabilizing the temperature, and finding a way to make my rig quieter that it is, but the rust was getting to be real eyesore.

Now sitting on my desk is the new mini-tower casing (an Astone Enforcer), in glorious black. The new casing purchase isn’t the achievement here, its my ability now to have taken the guts out from the old one to this, sans short circuits, or incessant you-screwed-up beeps. There were only two things that were big concerns before I did the gutting: the wiring to turn on the pc, and the settling of the heatsink+fan (HSF) on the processor.

The HSF issue was resolved by a purchase of some cheap and accessible thermal paste (the gunk applied before putting the HSF on) a few days before, from everyone’s favorite cheap-everything PC place. Simple enough, I thought.

Then came another idea: the replacement of the HSF from the unit that came with my processor. Since I know I’ll be losing sleep over this, I got a new one, in its 500-peso glory, attached it, and was disappointed initially about how nothing changed. Further research made me learn two tips: one, the brass-colored screw bits that came with the casing purchase? I need them, but didn’t use them. They’re called spacers, and I should settled my motherboard over it. Two: lapping the heatsink, an overclocker term making the transfer of heat from the processor to the heatsink more efficient, by using sandpaper to make a mirror-finish on the heatsink-surface. That idea came through, and my processor temperature has drastically lowered itself to about 10C.

Then another idea: a keyboard tray. I don’t use a fancy computer table, but an actual office table my dad got from an office subasta, with some storage on both sides. For the longest time, I’ve had my monitor on top of phonebooks, and my keyboard dangerously sitting on the edge of the table. Mishaps have happened, and I have about 3-4 malfunctioning keyboards laying around to prove that. My existing one is only a few weeks old.

So I made a few calls to hardware stores, and made the Cubao roundup. No success, until I got to an office supplies shop with not very practical prices over most things, but at less than 500 pesos, with tired feet and a mind that begs to be satisfied, got it, had my brother install the thing, and my finalizing everything with flat-black spray-paint.

Any new ideas, you ask? Glad you did. Well, the HSF started emitting a very irritating barely-audible noise last night while my brother was burning discs. After some troubleshooting, the conclusion was: something was wrong with the HSF. Its usually silent on its own, but with the side-panel fan and the rear exhaust fan on, it gave off the noise, like there was some wire being hit by the fan. One temporary solution was to put some pressure on the actual unit, which I found out by pressing my finger on it. The resolution came to me as fairly easy: a one-peso coin, and a patch of double-sided tape.

I’m drained, and glad that today is payday. I hope to sleep well from now on, but then my last issue isn’t permanently resolved, but I have a load of crap around my workstation to tidy up first.

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That’s not as hostile as my first choice for blog title: 2009 You Bastard, 2010 You Bitch.

Though now that the holidays are over, expectations of daily life has normalised, and there’s none of that bloated, hopeful feeling, I now finally possess that settled feeling. December was the hardest, considering its where my birthday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve converge.

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Like most difficult predicaments this year, music was there to the rescue. I’ve always found it corny when people say music saved their lives blah blah, but now I understand: music doesn’t disappoint, people do.

On my sickbed this August, there were the dancing ladies of Perfume. On those overly emotional commute to work, there was the hope-laded pop-rock anthems of Kaela Kimura (I’ve discussed both acts on a previous post). On New Year’s Eve, the last chance that anyone could really cheer me up, I discovered ukulele geek-girl Tsuji Ayano.

There’s a more elaborate post on Ayano on my music blog here.

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The first half of New Year’s Eve was at work. I had expectations, but then I had a backup plan: buy pansit, make that festive food that night. However, after confirming via a phone call that this pansit place was open and was located where I would usually pass on the way to the bus terminal home -it was still listed as part of the now non-existent Fiesta Carnival on online directories- and locating the place, I resorted to doing the groceries to cook my own pansit. The pansit restaurant, which normally had the usual chairs and tables, was converted on that day to look like a busy phone billing area in the mall, an offsite horse-race betting place, an airline ticketing office on peak promo days. I was too tired and emotional to bother.

I cooked a Quezon special, sweet pansit chami, too much of it that I still have a plateful of it on the ref. Got sugar-free vanilla ice cream, too, which I realized was almost double the expected price on the checkout counter. No matter, I deserve this ice cream.

I damn well deserve that ice cream.

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New Year’s Day was spent either on the computer keyboard, or the ukulele fretboard. I’m still not any good, and don’t expect to be, but as part of the music-please-save-my-life project, I’ll persevere, like any good ukulele warrior you would so often see on Youtube these days.

Song I’m practicing? Sunday Smile by Beirut.

The ukulele, this thing I eagerly come home to, got new strings last week of 2009: D’Addario Pro Arte Classical Guitar strings, courtesy of a Cubao-based music store, which I walk by every day from work. So glad I did my research and didn’t order ukulele strings online, when I could customize my own string-set by buying single nylon strings for classical guitar (two high E’s, one G, one B) instead.

If only strings bought me talent as well.

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There. First post for the year. I’ve also started one of these Project365 projects the kids get into, but no, it won’t be a photo-a-day thing (too much effort; photography? BAH), but it’s just going to be one of those video-of-the-day postings, over at my music blog. Oh yeah, go to my too-personal, highly-opinionated music blog, slowly gathering content every few days.

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Its not technically Christmas yet, but then I’m at home with nothing much to do, which hasn’t been the practice for the past few years. I’d usually be at my brother’s place in Laguna with the pamangkin’s. Slept most of the day, and waking up early evening, it doesn’t look like my kuya and I will be making the 3-4 hour trek today.

Christmas eve started early as I woke up before my workday alarm, hungry, since the only thing I did after arriving home last night was open the gate, slide the house-door, put aside the gifts for the kids, put down bag, go to room, take away the day’s garments of filth, lie down in bed and sleep. The commute home was done by ditching the provincial bus beeline of people, which already stretched to another terminal. Ditching the line involves waiting for everyone to be seated and waiting for the bus conductor’s instructions that there was still room to stand along the aisle. It was Christmas eve’s eve, and I’m scared of the NLEX traffic situation, so I boarded.

An hour before that I was at a toy sale, and what I expected to be an easy task turned out to be like all my other presumed easy tasks: it took me a rather long to decide what to buy. Two boys, an eight year-old and a five year-old, should be a fairly easy duo to buy toys for, but then the eldest, Enzo, who’s my godson as well, as far as I can remember, was into Beyblade’s, or something like that. My brothers and I grew up salivating over Mazinger Z (their generation), and Voltron (my time), what’s this fuss about a multi-colored top? I almost settled on a big-boxed Pokemon arena thing, but I found out later it needed some effort to construct. My nephew’s haven’t shown any patience to do that, so yes boys, you will get Transformers.

I prep’d myself to have a more difficult time looking for my lone three year-old niece’s gift. An educational toy? I bet her siblings would have those old plastic shape sorters already to contend with. A stuffed toy? A doll? The store didn’t have one to my liking. Those Dora doll sets? I wouldn’t have an idea if she’s kikay enough. Anyway, this year, she’ll get Play Doh, with a machine to squeeze-to-shape it with.

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Since staying at the house today was unexpected, there’s no festive food. I was bent on just buying from Baliwag (for inihaw na liempo, which would be a treat for me, since I’ve shunned red meat for about a month already, except for special occasions), and Sr. Pedro for the lechon manok, but then I had kuya make that errand while I prepare soup. If there were any Campbell’s in the cupboard, I would’ve settled for that, but alas, there was none, and I settled for something I wouldn’t usually cook: sopas.

That takes care of breakfast though, since I have work tomorrow, Christmas day. Not a sad bit at all, since I wouldn’t have to entertain house guests all-day tomorrow, who, mostly, I don’t know by name. By face, sure, I might’ve come across them around our little neck of the woods (literally, woods, and rice paddies, too). It’s not that I’m a snob (insert LMAO smiley here) but I was a kid before and I know that this house-to-house walkabout is really just to get as much money as you can.

I take exception on blood relatives, of course. Yes, I do believe that Christmas is really just for kids, but my kuya does the standard macaroni salad merienda preparations and the handing out of crisp 20 peso bills, 50 or a 100 even if you’re a godson or god-daughter of anyone in the family, why would I even think of taking over that role?

:)

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Most people I know would probably treat themselves to a new phone, or new gadget this time. I didn’t give in, like last year, when I got my Nokia E63, which, as I understand, pretty much does what these uso Blackberry’s do, minus the cool-and-trendy factor. An mp3 player? My Sansa Clip still lives and is pretty capable (the key-lock doesn’t work sometimes, a minor nuisance), and though at a very limited 8GB, it really is just adjusting the way you think when you deal with these things: its something you listen podcasts, audiobooks with, listen to new albums, during the daily commute to and from work. Anything else? No, not really. If I were to work or be relocated somewhere else for a few months or years, where I can’t go home to my music library, that’s another case.

I’ve been thinking of getting my childhood dream toy, a Voltron robot, the original, lion-force version. My eyes would go sparkly and I would close always close my eyes to wish upon the sky’s first evening star. Star light, star bright I’d go, and I don’t remember wishing for anything else. I never should’ve allowed myself to walk around Virra Mall earlier this month.

However, another mall-wandering incident had me go somewhere that had my Christmas self-gift locked on-target. Refer to photo above this post. I’ll blog about the details some other time, but I’m very satisfied with this holiday purchase, along with the fact that it only took a very small chunk from that 13th month pay.

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Good times then for the always hard-to-satisfy self? I can’t say for sure yet. Maybe when 2010 decides to step in and force us to write the year differently on paper.

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I don’t think its believable, based on the music I listened to this year, that I could come up with a music list for 2009. Most of the music took a sidestep to all the Perfume and Kaela Kimura kitsch I wallowed in. What I sought out instead, just today, would be to come up with some songs from records released this year, and do a podcast on it. Sans rankings.

This is my profile of 2009-released music, in two parts. The differences are not so distinct, but the first one includes the more conventional songs, while the second one has a handful of brooding instrumental music, electronic/dance, and pretty brutal rock.

Stream Music Profile 2009 Podcast – Part 1 using the player below:

Download this part (Part 1) of the podcast here.

Stream Music Profile 2009 Podcast – Part 2 using the player below:

Download this part (Part 2) of the podcast here.

*The songs are shared without permission, and are intended for personal, non-commercial consumption. For any issues, contact me here.

UPDATE: Listening to this recording again makes me want to just add some more stuff I’ve missed, like Pasta Groove, probably a couple of jazz songs, and oh that Krallice album I just got to hear.

For more music stuff, head on over to http://music.raincontreras.com :)

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A mattress.

A few weeks ago, I had a ‘high’ of some sort for a few days, from cleaning my workstation area and room. See, I’m admittedly sloppy, and what I did was weird. Having a new mattress, I think, preceded that. Maybe its part of a physical cleansing I want to go through, which, in large part, is due to my ongoing illness. Anyhow, the literature is sketchy here, but mattresses should be replaced after 5-10 years. I don’t know how long I have had mine, but what I knew was, my mind won’t let me rest until I got a new one.

A front pocket wallet

I noticed my wallet looked worn already shortly before December. Hence, a new one should be a nice, reasonably cheap birthday treat. Like most things I get interested in, web searching lead me to the front pocket wallet, a thinner, less bulky version of the normal men’s wallet; also highly-advised since the bulk of a back-pocket wallet contributes to back pain, etc. A Cubao-wide mall search ensued, and I did get my version of one, which I don’t believe conforms to the standard (which sometimes involves, tada, a money clip), but it is now nested snugly and not as bumpy in the front pocket of my maong shorts.

Shoes: a pair of Jack Purcell’s, and a pair of One Star’s.

The house has a ridiculously long shoe rack, and how many shoes do I actually wear now? Less than 5. On a regular basis? Three. There was a mall sale I dragged myself to, where I went home with two shoe styles I’ve always been curious about: Jack Purcell’s, and One Star’s. I got red sun-washed of the former, and velcro-type gray of the latter. I posted a photo of the loot on Plurk, and a comment came through citing that my choices were retro, classic even. It dawned on me: this is 90s chic, especially the One Star’s, which was the more expensive alternative to Chicks for the local 90s rocker. This is now regarded as retro. Isn’t it enough knowing that I’m really old?

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There was also the recent realization that I never have pictures of myself. I’m now somewhat glad to see people tagging me on Facebook, reminding me of what I looked back when I had hair.

Hence, the birthday self-portrait:

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Fried Tawilis from Batangas

Being just a few days away from my birthday, and scheduled on my exact weekday work restdays, the promise of another food tour was very timely. Except for the part that I was deadset on my diet by that time, which involved eating a lot less red meat and processed food, adding the same amount of brown rice to white rice, and generally eating healthier than usual.

A compromise was taken without any hesitation. It’s also been too long since I took pictures.

Peanut Brittle Making at Taal, Batangas

The tour’s first stop was Taal, which I didn’t know was a Heritage City, same as Vigan. The cozy provincial vibe, the narrow streets, and the old churches reminded of a town further south: I spent summer vacations as a kid in Tayabas, Quezon, and I always wax poetic about those times. The ancestral houses, however, was a different thing, as they were scattered around the town, unlike Vigan. Most were in a semi-dilapidated state, but it was still a welcome sight that they still do exist. We were informed that there was a conscious effort to keep fast-food establishments out, but I couldn’t help noticing the 7-11.

Candle Vendors at the Our Lady of Casaysay Church

Luwa is a religious ritual in Taal that sees four young boys reciting a eulogy in verse as an offering to the patron saint.

Lunch was served at Escuela Pia, where I picked Sinaing na Tanigue, Adobong Batangas (Chicken) from the buffet table. Yes, my mind was still on eat-helathy mode. It was my first time to try Batangas’s version of adobo, but this time it had milk in it. Not impressed though, but I must make this a special case: I have not eaten any version of the adobo I liked, as I’ve always preferred pork.

We also paid a quick visit to a few local factories of Taal products: peanut brittle, balisong, and embroidery. Parang field trip lang talaga.

By mid-afternoon, we were off to Talisay for Club Balai Isabel, where the group would have dinner, and stay for the night. The group would be the first tenants to stay at one of their lakeside buildings, and, surprised and confused, I also found out I had a room to myself. The elevator wasn’t functional yet, and my room was on the third floor, which wasn’t really a big issue as I only had an overnight bag and a camera bag with me.

Room was cozy, was so glad to be cooled off from a tiring day, as well as this awesome early evening sight:

And this one:

So I changed, and swiftly went down to catch the sunset over Taal Volcano, on Taal Lake:

Dinnertime. I was early, and they were offering refreshments, or so I thought. It was punch. See, I don’t drink, and have no intentions of doing so that night. It was a vodka and rum punch. I probably spent less than an hour just outside the venue, finishing hot coffee, as I was feverish and ripe-tomato-red. Just as the tour photographer snapped me for documentation.

So forgive me if I can’t recall much of the night’s fare, but I remember the pumpkin soup. And the showband that didn’t quite sell, I’m assuming here, with the crowd.

I called it a day by retiring early in my room, catching up on local news, and my alarm set to sunrise so I can shoot some more.

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Burial is a monster in the hyberdub arena, which is one of those labels I just recently discovered. Untrue is an amazing record, and if you are like me who likes electronic music, but is not necessarily the dancing type, this is one atmospheric trip.

SONPUB -- I LOVE YOU

SONPUB’s 80 T.O 08 HAHA is an upbeat, refreshing-and-familiar record. I LOVE YOU is a weak song, but it’s the only available video to embed from Youtube.

Lykke Li (with Bon Iver) -- Dance Dance Dance

I have yet to listen to any of Lykke Li’s records, but most things done with Bon Iver is almost always done right, including this.

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