Simply Belle

Just want to share with you guys Stephanie’s CD cover that she designed herself just a few hours ago. CD will be available soon!

Please share with me what you think about the design. Thanks!

She made some improvements on the above design and this is what she came up with. Which design is better?

Proceeds of the sales will help defray her college expenses at Stanford U. She has 2 2/3 years left in Biomechanical Engineering.

Update: Remember a couple of weeks ago, I personally brought the computer-burned CD to our most listened to FM station in town and I promised to update you with what the station manager had to say about it? Here is what she said:

Hi Belle!

I took a listen to Stephanie’s CD today, and I find her very very good. The song Poker Face would fit in our format very well, and would like to add it, if that is permissible with you. The whole CD is very nice, but that’s the one song that really stands out! I try to stay away from the Mariah Carey type songs, as we try to maintain the Classic Rock format. If she has anything else, let me know. Also, is she going to market the CD? I just have a problem when people call and want to know where they can buy something, and it’s not available. Thank so much! I invited Stephanie to be on my “friends” list on myspace!

For those of you who haven’t listened to Stephanie’s music, let me direct you to her myspace site. FYI, she composed, sang, played the piano and guitar, sang the harmony, and co-produced her songs. Her producer is the talented Mr Jack Conte, who sings and composes his songs himself.

And thank you to those who already placed an order. Thank you for supporting the independent artist

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On the eve of December 24th, I invited my friends over for a Christmas get-together due to the prodding of my daughter, Lexi. I was a bit apprehensive of hosting a party earlier because I was extremely busy at work and wasn’t sure if I had the energy to do the cooking and the cleaning of the house. However, I felt it wasn’t much of a Christmas without food and friends over so I went for it, after all, Christmas only comes once a year.

I spent the whole Sunday getting ready for the party- from grocery, to cleaning, and fixing some dishes ahead of time. The girls did their share by cleaning the bathrooms, tidying the living room, and mopping the kitchen. The night before, I cooked Beef Afritada in a crock pot. I sprinkled some salt and pepper before I coated it with flour to thicken the sauce. I cut up some Idaho potatoes and drizzled it with evvo (extra virgin olive oil) and baked it in the oven until golden brown. I sauted some garlic and onions in the pan until translucent and I tossed in the meat and cooked it until slightly brown. Then I put all the ingredients in the crock pot, including a can of roasted red pepper, a can of tomato sauce, and small can of tomato paste. I flavored it with more salt, pepper, some vinegar, and some already made beef broth. I simmered it on low for 24 hours.

On the day of the party, however, I had totally forgotten about the dish. The delicious-mouth-watering-brown sugar-glazed ham that my daughter Tepsi cooked and the turkey prepared by my friend satisfied our monstrous appetite and made us oblivious of the other dish simmering to perfection in the crock pot. I only noticed it when everybody had their fill and had no more room to even give it a taste except for one person.

I thought this would definitely be a big hit the following day for our next meal with freshly-steamed jasmine rice or with hot pandesal, don’t you think?

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To all my blogger-friends:

May you all have a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones. (Sorry, I don’t have time to visit each and everyone of you.)

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Hastily, I finished decorating my house for the holidays while I was doing my laundry. I wanted very much for a live and extra tall Christmas tree that is tailored to the size our living room but hubby was totally against live one because of fire hazard. We have had this tree for 20 years – older than our kids even! And we have accumulated ornaments of different kinds over the years. Half of them came from my MIL so they could be older than me. A few of them, the gold plated ones, were presents from a step MIL. The rest, I accumulated over time.

Here are my favorite ornaments in no particular order.

my favorite of them all is this one because my daughte made it especially for us.

my fireplace

My dining table
The home-made pink heart-shaped paper with pictures on the wall was also given to us by one of our dear daughters so it will always stay there.

my living room

and please don’t mind my mess on the kitchen counter. I will get to it later as I still have to do some errands and cook dinner. But, I think I may just have to buy sub for dinner as I have laundry clothes to fold and tomorrow is a hard day for me at work.

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I had days off Sunday and Monday and accomplished quite a bit despite of the dreary weather. I made some changes in my dental insurance first thing on Monday morning, personally delivered S’ CD to our local radio station as requested by the station manager. She said she received about 10 CDs a week but most of them don’t make the grade. The fact that she took interest in listening to it is enough to make me happy. Will update you on what she has to say about the CD when I hear from her. She said to give her a week and promised to get a hold of me.

I also finished wrapping the presents for my dear in-laws and are now in the mail stream –thanks to my husband. Since he was in the groove of helping, I delegated the task of sending Christmas cards in care of him with no objection whatsoever–first time he has ever done it. Now, all that is left is putting up of Christmas tree, and wrapping presents for my daughters. My husband volunteered to mount the Christmas tree tomorrow, and so all I have to do is to spruce it up. How is that for a teamwork?

Though, there was a catch. He had been bugging me since last week to cut his hair. I worked 6 days last week so I didn’t have time. And no, I am not a hairdresser. For the past months, I have been watching a hairdresser friend of mine at Wal-Mart cut people’s hair at least 5 to 10 minutes a day during my lunch break. For some reasons, I have this fascination and inclination about hair-cutting. When I look at people’s hair, I tend to analyze their hairstyle and conjure in my mind on how to go about it if I were to cut it myself. Then one day, when I felt I was ready to venture into it, I asked my husband to buy me a set of hair-cutting tools. Whoa, talking about confidence! Well, practice makes perfect right? And my husband doesn’t mind to be under my 10 inexperienced and clumsy fingers. Not only that, he saves $10 per haircut plus tip.

Tang tada dang—here are the pictures. What do you think?

He has a cowlick right above his ear that is why the hair is thin in this area.

I wanted to wet his hair so I could get a good grip of his hair to better style it but he refused.

This was the second time I cut his hair, the first time was at my friend’s house. E, convinced enough that there was nothing wrong with my husband’s haircut, took a chance, too, and let me cut her hair. Hahaha! She later went to a retired hairdresser friend of hers to make sure that I didn’t murder her hair. The hairdresser ran her hands through E’s hair and said that I did it perfectly. What a confidence booster! Yessss!

Who’s next?

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The winners of the recent baranggay election in our village held a blow-out party in my little beach. It looks like half of the village attended the event. It doesn’t take much to please these people. Simple food such as rice and fish and veggies suit them well. It is because that’s all they can afford. They live on a day to day basis.

But, look at how happy these kids are.

My husband is amazed at how much rice they can eat. I told him that is how people survive in the province by filling up on what they have most and less on other things. Somehow, they pull through. I am a living example. But now, I can only eat a small portion of what is considered a regular serving for them.

It looks like they run out of ulam.

Happy and well-fed.

The boy wearing a blue shirt is my nephew, who lives with his parents in this place to care for the property. He must have been tired of ocean water, reason why he is the only one who is dry.

Even the grow-ups join the craze.

The little girl on the right has quite a resemblance of myself when I was her age.

Despite of the black sand, this place is our favorite because the water is nice and calm and doesn’t have huge rocks to hurt our feet. It doesn’t have the waves crashing against the shore. Also, this place seems to be gaining land as opposed to the other place in the northern part of Catanduanes which is being swallowed by the seawater at the rate of 3 millimeters a year. Quite an alarming phenomenon! In fact, they already lost a street, 12 houses, and now building their seawall as the first two seawalls had been gorged by the ocean already. I hope there is something that can be done to save this town from being wiped out in the map. You can read all about it here.

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While browsing my old pictures tonight, I chanced upon this picture taken 10 years ago in Hawaii. I looked so much like native here, more like Tahitian with long curly black hair and brown complexion, don’t you think?

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Tagged by teacher Julie

I do blog next to a window but all I can see is a wall that my husband built for privacy. Behind that wall is our next door neighbor’s house, and there is nothing worthwhile to look at, thus, I leave that window half close most of the times. The window across from my computer, however, faces to the garden where we enjoy lush setting of garden environment during summer and spring, and even fall. Though, there is not much to it right now because all the trees and flowers lost its foliage in preparation for winter. In fact, today was the first time it went 4 degrees below zero. And during winter, I hardly ever visit my yard.

I had taken some pictures of the garden last summer right after I finished weeding. And here they are:

This is where we try to garden after the danger of frost is over. Notice I used the word try because except for the first year when our garden was prolific, the next years weren’t as productive due to the weather unpredictable behavior and pest problem.

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Two days before our trip, the forecast wasn’t that good. It said it was going to rain all day for two days in a row. I was having second thoughts about going, but my husband believed that the weather in where we were going is usually sunny when it is raining in our area. So, off we went.

It was unusually foggy the day we left. Rain started pouring when we were about halfway through our destination. There were pools of water on the road. My husband considered turning around, but we thought it was too much driving to do in one day to go all the way back. So, we just continued on and decided to get a hotel and a good Mexican seafood dinner.

It took us a while to pick out the best room in the hotel we stayed in. I wanted a good view of Sea Cortez, so the hotel attendant gave us the room facing the bay. But, when we opened the room, there was water all over the floor that entered under the door due to the storm. So, I went down and asked for another room, and it was just as bad. We then opted to get a room away from the bay, and this time, it was nice and dry. Hey, that is Mexico, by the way.

We then grabbed a bite to eat. It took us a while to find a good restaurant. It was so dark and rainy that it was hard to see where we were going. One guy was going the wrong direction in a one-way lane. We were trying to gauge the restaurant by how busy they were inside, but since the weather was bad, most restaurants were empty. We saw this one restaurant, which was adorned with Christmas lights and had several cars parked outside. We decided to take it as we were getting hungry. I was craving for authentic Mexican food but the menu looked gringorized with french fries and boiled carrots on the side although the serving was generous. I ordered fresh fish pouched in its own juice, flavored with tomatoes and onions, while my husband went for the huge shrimps that the place is famous for. It was good but a bit pricey. We paid $16 per order.

These pictures were taken the next day when the weather improved but with gale force winds. It wasn’t easy taking these as the wind practically knocked us off from the balcony, but still, we managed to get some decent shots.

Can you see the Pelicans going against the wind? I thought it was weird.

The storm created pools of water everywhere.

This is the fish market where I bought fresh jumbo shrimps, scallops, chicken fish, and asparagus.

An orange house/structure that stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of the desert.

I had to brave strong wind to take this picture.

Rocky Point Fishing Wharf

Fishing boat

After we finished taking the above pictures, we packed our bags and headed home as there was not much we could do with the prevailing weather condition.

It surely feels good to be home.

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