Monday – 1 Aug

[smartads] Eastern Visayas has a total number of 7 Cities, 136 Municipalities, and 4,390 Barangays. The regional center is Tacloban City. Different ethnic group live in various areas of the region like, though Waray-Waray inhabited most of the region Cebuanos live in nearby island like Ormoc City, Western Leyte and Southwest part of Leyte. Various languages spoke in the region most of is Waray-Waray, Cebuano, and Abaknon.

http://adventurephilippines.tripod.com/id19.html

 I did mention that is website was rated PG, right?  It is.

Useless Knowledge:  The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell. It is about 1/180 inch in diameter. The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm. It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell. Hence, even in the beginning, women have more substance than men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body

http://www.kidskonnect.com/subject-index/31-health/337-human-body.html

http://www.philippinenewsdaily.com/2011/04/5488/pagasa-warns-on-landslide-and-flood-to-occur-in-eastern-visayas-and-mindanao.html

31 Jul – Hits @ 0110 = 791777 = 10,568 (26 hrs, 25 mins).  I can’t count that as a record, it’s two extra hours.  But onward and upward.

I didn’t bother getting out of bed until, don’t get jealous, 11:37.  It’s Sunday, it’s going to be pretty slow all day, probably.  Besides all the drinking the night before was making my head throb.  I figured I’d take 2 more aspirins, because I took 2 before I went to bed, and lay back down.  Also Lita stayed up until about 0400 watching movies.  She was watching English movies, which is rather surprising because she hasn’t watched too much English TV since we’ve been here.  She was acting like this is the first she’s known that we have HBO and Cinemax.  I told her, yeah we have that and Star Movies, plus Cinema One (Filipino movies).  She may stay up late watching movies from now one, who knows.  She also does not have to get up if she doesn’t want to.

http://www.philippineholidays.com.au/tacloban.htm

J finally admitted to me last night that his “classmate” is actually his girlfriend.  So I won’t have this “classmate” thing anymore, unless of course he gets another “classmate” later.  This one, who’s name I still don’t know, is very quiet.  At least I don’t hear her speak much.  She reminds me of Chiqui in that regards.  You remember Chiqui?  That’s Marlou’s wife.  I don’t want to take her picture yet, until she is use to us around here.  She only shows up here once or twice a week.  I guess they see enough of each other at school all day.

I see that on the Samar Paradise Facebook page they have a picture of the “Future site of Robinson’s Place Calbayog”.  It’s a picture of the RFM area.  According to them, there are ongoing soil samples to determine if the soil is suitable for building a mall there.  I guess to hold such a large amount of concrete, it would have to be a pretty solid area.

http://www.lakbaypilipinas.com/travel_tacloban_city.html

Okay, it’s 3:38pm now.  I just got out in LolyKat to watch it for awhile.  Lita’s going downtown to get a few things.  She has extra money now that we are not going to Tacloban, again.  I was so close this time.  The only time I know, for 100% sure that we will go down that way is for All Saints Day on November 1st.  If I don’t find a way to get there before then, it’ll be 1 year before I finally get back again.  I don’t think it’s fair that I’d have to wait another 3 months, but it might come down to that.

Although J went downtown with Lita, his girlfriend stayed here.  I heard Lita offer for her to go, but she decided to just wait here, out at the picnic table.

I know Lita is going to buy rice and chicken, but I think eggs and onions too, minimum.  I hope she gets some more bread.

Presto!  She back now, but no eggs or bread.  She did buy me some Granny Smith apples, which cost P20 (.47) each here.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/samarleyte/discuss/72157594483354407/

Useless Knowledge:  Fashionable ladies of the sixteenth century thought it elegant to allow their pubic hair to grow as lengthy as possible. This way, it could be braided, pomaded, and embellished with bows and ribbons.  (I wasn’t going to put this one on here, but the more I looked at it the stranger it seemed.  It opposite of the women thinking these days, isn’t it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_century

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pubic_hair

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomade

http://eastvisayastour.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

She says she’s going to bake a couple of potatoes tonight.  That’s good for me, I really like baked potatoes.  In fact, I introduced this place to baked potatoes on my last visit to the Philippines before we moved here.  There are a couple of people here that like them.  I don’t remember both of them, but Juvic was one of them.  We have to cook the potatoes in the coals of the BBQ grill, because we don’t have a stove/oven, yet.  If you double wrap them in aluminum foil, they come out pretty good.

She wants me to eat the leftover soup.  I’ve still got about 1 bowl of it left, but I don’t want it.  I want to either throw it away or give it away.  It will be a battle of wills on that one.  I usually win when it comes to food, especially if I’m the one that has to eat it.  Let the mind games begin.

http://www.1stopboracay.com/visayas/leyte

I’ve also got a little of the ground beef with potatoes and onions left.  Probably enough for about a sandwich and a half.  I’ll probably eat that so I hope there is still enough ketchup and hot sauce to kill that lousy ground beef taste.  Sometimes I wonder if that, when I do get to a place that has good beef, will I be able to eat it?  I hope so, because I do so love steak, especially Filet Mignon and T-Bone.

Sometimes I wonder how the Filipinos around here would react to some BBQ beef, or even BBQ pork cooked Texas style.  I know they don’t eat much beef, but pork they love.  When we get the convection oven working, soon I hope, I will get Lita to cook some of the BBQ she made in Texas.  In fact, I hope to have a regular 4th of July celebration here every year in our compound.  Every year that we will be here anyway.  Next year we plan to be in Texas for the 4th, enjoying our last few days of steak, BBQ and Tex-Mex, before getting on the plane to head back here to Calbayog.

http://www.batch2006.com/visit_tacloban.htm  (Lots of pictures at this site)

Another good thing about going back to Texas is, this time, we KNOW what we should send in a balikbayan box.  I wouldn’t be surprised if we sent 12-15 boxes in this direction.  We’ve already got a couple packed up and ready to go, in storage.  One of them has our phones and a couple of my Bourne series books.  That’s the box that we accidentally put in storage and sent another box that we didn’t really need yet.  I can say that there will be plenty of can goods and sauces coming this way.  Have I mentioned that the sauces here are no where close to my liking?  Even Lita is not fond of most of them.  The most popular sauce around this neck of the woods, is Lita’s homemade BBQ sauce that most people, even Precious, use for dipping their BBQ.  Usually when they buy it, the seller will dip it in a jar of the sauce and brush some sauce on it also.  Just about everyone wants the sauce.  Some people even come by to buy it and ask for the BBQ to soak in the sauce until they come back to get it.  The point is, the sauce that Lita makes is largely preferred to any other sauce that was normally used before we got here.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1316541

On Wednesday I am going downtown to get some money from the ATM and take care of the bills.  These days there ain’t much left after all that, but that will be changing in the not so long from now future.

I just sold my first soft drink that I had to put in a take out baggie.  Some nice and nice looking lady walking by decided she wanted one.  I’m just glad that I didn’t spill any of it.  Lita said that the only time she tried to do it, she spill half of it on the ground.

It’s 7:00pm now and J is BBQ-ing.  The potatoes are already cooking.  Emie is at the picnic table drinking again.  That’s too much for me.  I’m still reeling from the night before.  Even though I wasn’t officially drunk, I wasn’t more than a couple of beers away from it.  I did have enough common sense left to finish the post yesterday after I came back in.  I didn’t see any mistakes, even though I haven’t re-read any of it yet.  Anyone see any problem with it?

http://www.pinoyprogress.com/showthread.php?p=17018

I had 4 BBQ-ed chicken wings and 2 small baked potatoes.  The potatoes could have stood a little bit longer under the coals and I still could have put them there, but they were good enough.  I haven’t had a baked potatoes for several months, that I remember, so it was good to have them.  Some tabasco sauce would have been nice for that.

Judith and Victor were here for a little while to chit chat.  I don’t know what it was all about, but one of the reasons that I get along so well around here, is I don’t really care, unless they are talking about me.  They wasn’t.  Judith did confirm that they still plan to move here at the end of the year.  That means that the establishment of the Blue Gazebo Cafe is still probable.  Lita has already told Judith that she is going to leave her in charge of all our stuff and businesses while we are in Texas for the 4 months.

http://www.lawstude.net/2009/04/tinago-falls-biliran.html

Well that’s it.  It turned out a lot longer than I figured because I added a couple of things that I thought of when putting something in.  I also got long winded on a couple and I added in this paragraph that probably wasn’t necessary, but it added more words to the post.

Useless Knowledge:  The psychology department of Dayton University reports that loud talk can be ten times more distracting than the sound of a jackhammer. Loud, incessant chatter can make a listener nervous and irritable, and even start him on the road to insanity.  (I’m not going to comment on this one, but did you notice it said “start him on the road to insanity?)”

http://www.udayton.edu/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology

http://eastvisayastour.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

Salamat, Palaam

There are so many good website about the Eastern Visayas, more than any other Region I’ve come across so far.  I guess World War II and General MacArthur had a big say in that.

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/ph-viii.html

http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/Waray%20Culture/waray_history.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Visayas

Today in Philippine History

31 JULY

Colonial body Philippine Assembly, imperialist US Occupation

1907 – As the bloody and protracted  Philippine-American War (1899-1914)  persists in certain parts of the Southeast Asian  archipelago, elections are held for the Philippine Assembly,  the colonial legislative body set up during the  imperialist United States Occupation, with Sergio S. Osmena’s (pro-immediate independence) Nacionalista Party capturing  majority of the 80 seats representing 80 districts;  only  less than 1.5% of the Filipinos were able to  vote their representatives to the Assembly, which  was effectively the lower house to the appointive,  all or mainly American-in-composition Philippine Commission, because of the  severe qualification requirements (real estate ownership worth at least P500; able to read and  write; and could speak in Spanish or English)

Photo credit: http://philippineamericanwar.webs.com/