Wednesday – 24 Nov 2010

[smartads] Fun Facts for Kids About the Philippines

(or for someone who knows nothing about the Philippines)

The Philippine Islands is a small country in comparison to the United States.  In fact, if you compare the Philippines with the state of Texas, Texas is about two times as big as the Philippines.

Even though the Philippines is a relatively small country, there are a whole bunch of people that live here.  There are about 80 million people who live in the Philippines!  That means there are four people living here for every one person who lives in the state of Texas.

There are 7,107 islands that make up the country of the Philippines.  Amazingly though, there are only a few hundred of these islands that have people living on them.  Some people say that the number of islands in the Philippines depends– it  depends on if you count at high tide or low tide!

There are over 70 different languages spoken in the Philippines with over 450 distinct dialects coming from those languages!

Do we have bananas?  O yeah!  We’ve got bananas, bananas, and more bananas!  We have bananas like you eat.  We have bananas that we cook like potatoes.  We’ve got bananas that taste like apples.  We have short bananas, long bananas, and fat bananas.  We have yellow bananas, green bananas, brown bananas, and red bananas.  In fact, we have over seventy different kinds of bananas!

December is one of the nicest and coolest months of the year in the Philippines.  The average temperature in the capital of Manila, during the month of December is about 26 degrees Celsius.  For those of you not familiar with the metric system that is about 79 degrees in the US!

On Tuesday morning I was up at 0810.  Lita woke me up so I could take out a heavy bag of trash because it was trash day.  She wanted Lynn to help me carry the bag, but I just did it by myself.  I don’t normally like for a woman to do hard labor if I’m around, not even if she is just helping me.  I do less work than any other grown up around here anyway, so if I have to do something like that, it’s no big deal.

Evidently they are having some problems getting that hotel finished.  Lita said that they stopped letting just anyone tour the place, and the new ‘scheduled’ grand opening is December 8th.  One of the Engineers told Lita that he’d be ‘very’ surprised if it did open by that date.  He thinks it will be more like March before it opens.  I don’t know all the problems they are having there, but I do know that they had 13 of the CR’s flood.  That happen last month, and I think they still haven’t fixed that problem yet.  I see them still working behind the hotel anyway, still working on the resort part of the hotel.  I still haven’t found out if the jet skis, touring boat or any of the other perks are all inclusive in the supposedly P4000 per night price tag.  Maybe I’ll be outside someday when that guy shows up and I’ll remember to ask him.  If it is all inclusive, then that P4000 per night is not so bad after all, as long as you take advantage of all the perks that are inclusive.  If they are not, then I still don’t see how they will make it work.  I’m told that they have some type of contract with someone that will send plenty of people to their hotel, but we’ll just wait and see.

Ramil is heading for Cebu and he volunteered to look in the supermarket there to see if he can find some beef and/or chicken stew.  He is also going to look for some cranberry sauce or just anything cranberry, even if it’s just juice.  I told him it doesn’t really matter what brand, but then told him that Dinty Moore and Swanson would be best for the stews, if he can find it.  I also told him no RAM brand and no generic.  If he can’t find anything, that’s okay.  I’m sure I’ll survive without it for now.

On my Sunday night, Monday day, our blog did really well.  We went from ranking 425 to 394 (personal) (28.1%).  Also the Overall went from 2186 to 2055 (33.6%).   But Monday night, Tuesday day we regressed to 416 (personal) (28.8%) and 2146 (overall) (33.8%).

On Wednesday morning, the 24th, I was up at 0757.  Precious was already looking for ice candy.  Of course we went through the normal ritual with the peso and she got one.  Lita wants me to give her the ice candy all the time, so that way if for some reason she can’t or shouldn’t give her one, she just says Uncle John is too busy.  I told Lita, just tell her that there are no pesos.  Precious can’t see on top of the refrigerator, she just knows we keep the money there, so she points towards it.

I made another batch of pancakes today.  This time though I made all small pancakes.  When I do that I can get 7 pancakes from that small box we usually buy.  I ate 3 of them, Lita ate 2, and I don’t know who ate the other 2.  I came in the computer room after that and I haven’t bothered to ask Lita yet.

I wrote down in my notes that I had to take a nap today, but I don’t remember doing that.  I guess I wanted to take that nap, but I never got around to doing it.  Come to think of it, that was about the time we were getting ready to go visit Poppa.  He has been having problems lately.  He fell down the other day and he was sick after that.  They took him to the doctor to check him out and it seems he is not getting enough vitamins, but he was feeling fine today, except for a hoarse throat.  They’ve been trying to give him vitamins, but he refuses to take them.  I think Lita had a nice talk with him and he finally agreed to take them.  When we went by there today, he mentioned that he had the Centrum vitamins.  I told him, you got them, but are you taking them?  It doesn’t do any good to have them if you don’t take them.  Since he lives with Judith, I think she will be sure he takes them from now on.  We were all worried about him, but I think that he’ll be just fine, at least for now.  He is getting old, but he still gets around pretty good as far as I can see.  I hope he is around for many more years, he’s a pretty cool guy and he talks to me every time I go over there.  He speaks very good English, because he used to be a school teacher.  In fact, he told me today that he speaks several different Filipino dialects.  I think that most or all of his children speak several dialects.  Heck I think almost everyone here speaks at least 2 different languages or dialects, even mga bata (the ones that can talk).  Maybe not everyone, but most of them.

I forgot to mention that sometime before noon, about 11:30, I think, Precious came by to get another ice candy.  We don’t have any of the small ones in the freezer right now, so she got 2 big ones today.  I think Crystal and maybe Khan were helping eat those.  It’s hard to say no to Precious, even though she does hear it sometimes.

Before Lita and I went to see Poppa, we went downtown to JustMar.  We took a motor to get there.  I only had to duck a little bit.  I think that if I was about 1 inch shorter, I wouldn’t have to scrunch at all.  So for y’all out there, if you come to visit and you are shorter than 71″, then maybe you too will not have to scrunch down.  I looked all over that grocery and I could not find anything that I wanted to take home to cook for supper.  The did have some bacon there, but since I’m so picky, I decided that I didn’t  want that brand of bacon, because I’ve never heard of it, and it looked funny anyway.  We took a tricycle (no motor) to Joyous Eatery to see Poppa.  We decided to just stop by Monterrey’s on the way home and get a package of bacon there.  Lita had Grace text Cathy and tell her to tell Ado to come by and pick us up at Judith’s.  Grace did get us a Mountain Dew while we was waiting.  I’m glad because I was getting thirsty.

Okay, so on the way back we did stop at Monterrey’s for the bacon.  I went in by myself, but there was no bacon.  I asked and even looked around some more, but none.  I did notice some ground beef though.  That’s not usually there.  I told Lita about it and she said, buy a lot of it.  Well I remembered last time, when we ran out of room in the refrigerator, so I only got 5 small packages.  Lita told me she would make me some chili tonight for supper, and she did.  So we have only 4 small packages for the freezer.  Not overcrowded.  I ate 1 medium size bowl (well medium for me) and I’m am feeling so very full.  Remember about a week, week and a half, ago I was complaining about feeling fat and bulgy?  Well I feel that way again.  Last time I felt like that I still ended up losing 1/2 kilo, so I hope it at least turns out that way again, but when I feel like this, it’s hard to believe that it will.

Just for a quick update, the top blog is at: 430 of 1486 (28.9%) and 2206 of 6567 (33.5%).  Hits now at 10:10pm is 34761, and we have had 81 unique hits so far this week.  That is compared to the #100 Personal with 539 hits and the #100 Overall at 4881 hits.  I wonder if we’ll ever get to numbers like those?  I never thought we’d get to almost 35,000 hits, and we did, so I guess you can only do your best and hope for the best.

Well that’s it for today.  I still didn’t have to use the How I Met Lita question, so I guess y’all will just have to wait.  You know I think that even some of my relatives don’t know how I met Lita.  So when I do have to include it, it should be entertaining for all.  I’ll bet that the story of how we met is a story that y’all have never heard before.  The story of how we met and a couple of incidents because of that meeting.

Don’t forget to rank, leave comments and suggest whatever you want to see or hear.  You know I’ll do my best to accommodate whatever it is.  I can’t promise I’ll have all the answers, but it’ll get my utmost attention and my best shot at giving you whatever it is.

Salamat, Paalam