fantasy world

variety

I'm not sure why I took off the rrs/atom button from the bottom of the page when I initially made some changes to the layout. Maybe because it wasn't minimal enough, heheh. Anyway I realized the lack of one made it rather hard to add my site to an rss reader, at least without firefox. So if you want to do that, I added a "syndication" link to the menu over on the right.

Also, now that I'm on the internet a bit more often, I have more time to post random things.

the entertainer

I'm getting settled into my new house. Since I finally got some furniture I decided it might be a good time have a housewarming party. Absurdity of purposefully "warming" anything in this climate aside, the concept of housewarming is not entirely foreign to these lands. There were, however, still some cultural wrinkles that required ironing out.

Upon receiving her informal invitation via text message, my supervisor replied with the question: "who are you going to have bless the house?" (but half in tagalog and entirely in sqshd pnoy styl txt). I've gotten pretty good at deciphering such messages --I've read my share of 133t 5p33|< in my day-- so I replied hesitantly that I was just planning on having friends over for food and drinks. Later I learned it's fairly common in some places here to have not just a priestly blessing but some dollops of fresh chicken blood as well.

I take my role as cultural emissary very seriously, so I decided on a classic americana menu: chips and salsa, veggies, and deviled eggs. I made deviled eggs once already for the staffroom and they were a big hit (not least because eggs is slang for you-can-guess-what here). Corn chips are ubiquitous but they are all loaded with their own flavoring and, perhaps to accord to the size of the general population, perhaps from lack of evolutionary dipping utility, are very small. Unfortunately, while the chips, empanadas, and "como estas" made it over with the galleon trade, nobody thought to bring the salsa.

Luckily we kanos are quite adept at recreating weird simulacrums of life as we knew it, and a friend of my from up near the fingernails of the hand had introduced me to a fascinating concoction made of tomatos, onions, green peppers, mangoes, and some kalamansi (kind of like lime) juice, which, to my surprise, made an excellent salsa. I successfully recreated her work, and my coworkers were quite fond of it, and even good-humoredly attempted to scoop it up onto their teeny corn chip. When they weren't eating it with a fork.

The veggies and deviled eggs were a success as well, although I was lucky everyone decided to conform to the Pinoy stereotype of being generally very late, otherwise I would have not had the necessary extra hour and fifteen minutes to prepare them.
I had to improvise a bit, however, because I put too much water in the pot when I boiled the eggs (well! they were crowded and some of them were floating!) and upon peeling them found all of the yolks to be rather unhelpfully situated without any white between them and the fat bottom side. Thinking quickly, I put them them into a pot --whites and all-- and began mashing. A short mayonnaise packet and some salt and pepper later, I had the main ingredient to the more triangular, somewhat classier cousin of deviled eggs: the quarter-cut little egg-salad sandwich. With some tomato and some wheat bread (no toothpicks though, sadly), I was ready to go.

Now I'm getting a bit self-conscious about my domesticity, so I feel like I should mention that the several attendees of said housewarming were generally female, between 40 and 60, and have been feeding me their various domestic labors for over a year now. I felt compelled to reciprocate.

punctuated equilibrium

The last few weeks have been rather crazy. Last week, I went town to a southern island to help with another volunteer with his environmental camp, which was a blast. Hopefully I'll get to do something similar at my site. Last saturday, two days after I got back, I moved out of my host family's house into a small house/apartment of my own. That day I bought a bed, which is still my only piece of furniture. Yesterday I bought a fan, some pots and pans, some cheap speakers, and today I got my stove hooked up to the gas tank and cooked myself a delicious meal of spaghetti. On the floor.

The bathroom is tiny and the porch is big. I intend to spend more time on the latter, though, so it should be ok.

So my life is being reorganized a bit and hopefully things will settle down soon in a good way.