What Simply Works!

If you search on the web to find articles related to helicopter accidents, you’ll find about 429,000 results on Google alone. There are not many popular people (or celebrities) who died on a helicopter crash from what I read. One case though is that of Vic Morrow who died while filming Twilight Zone on board a chopper. I understand from the write-up that the accident involved kids and stuntmen.

On the legal side of things, it’s good that the families of these victims were able to seek help from a company like HelicopterAccidentAttorney.com, which can provide specific legal assistance through an aviation attorney.

When I started to blog actively again this year, I noticed that my writing has gone from bad to worse.  It’s not just the usual sentence construction and grammatical errors that I notice to be very obvious in each of my posts but I also lost spontaneity in my writing. I struggled to put my thoughts together before and I struggle more now.

Back then, I wasn’t so conscious thinking that not many people view my blogs but now that Google, Yahoo and other search robots frequently caches any article posted on the web, I realized that any one can stumble upon my blog and discover my poor writing skills!  Bleh.

Anyway, the few bucks that I get from sp0nsored p0sts and the joy that I get in sharing my love for photography in my other blog are enough reasons for me to keep enjoying what I do.

My college friends back in Manila have confirmed the details about our mini-reunion this year. Since I left home seven years ago, we manage to see each other almost every Christmas. But that doesn’t mean we no longer look forward to seeing each other again, we do!

I’m sure there’ll be a lot of catching up to do. We’ll reminisce about our good old (or should I say young) days. The usual topics that we chat about are careers, kids, who has gained weight and who are taking diet pills! Hee hee. It will be fun for sure and our reunion each year tops the previous one. I miss those girls.

At this moment, my internet connection is c.r.a.w.l.i.n.g. I can sing a Happy Birthday tune before I can save a blog post. Nope, we haven’t reached the download quota for the month (it’s pretty weird coming from Singapore where we don’t need to worry about such things). The problem is with our ISP. This happens every now and then and it’s pretty frustrating. Thankfully, our contract ends next month and we’re planning to move to another internet service provider.

At this point, I still don’t know when I will join the workforce again. Unlike before where I find myself getting anxious thinking over it, now I rest my cares and know that it’ll happen in God’s time. In fact, I’m pretty excited on what the coming year holds for me. Will I continue my career in IT? Will I have my own business? How about the many franchise opportunities out there? The possibilities are endless. And like a child, I’m waiting for things to unfold with much anticipation.

The first few months of being a stay at home mom, I thought of taking advantage of small business opportunities to keep me occupied. But true to what many moms have shared to me, that once my daughter becomes a toddler, my days will be insanely busy. And it’s true. So I thought of things to do other than chores and child-caring duties. Now I’m thankful that I found happiness in photography, blogging and digital scrap-booking – the three hobbies I’m passionate about.

Since I started shooting in RAW rather than JPG format, my laptop’s disk space only has 28.5 GB left. Although I create back-ups to an external hard disk, I plan to buy additional hard disks to move the huge files there. So as soon as I have the new disk ready, I will free-up some space then I will proceed to reformat the laptop to hopefully address the memory issues.

As expected, we didn’t get the apartment unit we viewed last weekend. We were about 50 people (no exaggeration) that day and the odds of getting it were pretty slim. And as we planned, we went again for one viewing today, this time for a landed property. There were about 5 or 6 who went and I tell you, we were all serious applicants!

It is actually a villa that’s one level with a small garden at the back of the house. It was just about the size we want and the location is pretty good, too. We’ll know the owner’s decision by Monday. The rental property market here is very, very aggressive!

Two weeks ago, we brought our daughter to the mall to get her a pair of sandals and rubber shoes. It was a bit of a challenge since she no longer stays in one place but prefers to run around. And being inside a store with shelves upon shelves of footwear is not her idea of a fun place.

Good thing she saw red boots lying on the floor. They were for sale but they probably fell from the shelf. She immediately took them and motioned for us to help her wear them. With that, I think she’ll love to wear a pair of comfy looking Blowfish shoes.

This may not be the time of year to wear them as it is nearly summer season, but the Blowfish designer shoes are too cute to be ignored. When my daughter saw a similar pair of red booties online, she immediately shouted ‘Red!’ I think she remembers the one she liked at the store.
When she grows up, I’m sure she will not have a hard time deciding on what Blowfish Women’s Shoes or boots to get. She might have better fashion sense than her mom.

We didn’t hear from the property agent today, which could likely mean that we didn’t get the apartment unit we applied for over the weekend. Would you believe that I even had a dream about it last night? I guess my subconscious was on overdrive and it shows how much I want to move to a different rental property.

With this development, I started checking for available rental properties online again. I saw this nice house up for rent but with no viewing schedule posted yet. The garden is well trimmed and the veranda has antique wood patio furniture. If we end up renting the place, I would likely follow the theme of having outdoor wooden furniture. Because I’m not expert when it comes to buying quality home furnishings, it is good that there are websites that provide buyer and manufacturers’ reviews as well as related articles. These websites will come in handy once our move is finalized.

Hopefully something good turns out this weekend. Otherwise, we’ll resume the house/apartment hunting next year.

With two weekends left this month, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with my tasks list.  There’s just so many teeny-weeny things that needed to be done. We’re also waiting for the outcome of our rental application, which hopefully we’ll know tomorrow.  If it pushes through, then gosh, I’ll be one busy mama!  So, I better finish my blogging activities now so I can move on to the next item on my to-dos!

It would be really interesting to know my family’s roots. I don’t much about relatives that existed before my grandparents, so to be able to trace my ancestors would give me and my family that sense of completeness and added closeness.

This website called publicgenealogy.org is a good starting point to trace the genealogy family tree. They charge a minimal fee, which I believe is negligible considering the amount of information one can access from their archive. Results are quick as the information is accessed through their database. I just might give this website a whirl.

I finally purchased a 2009 calendar kit for my mini Christmas project.  I plan to put in my daughter’s photos and a few of our family photos there, which I will give us gifts to our families back home.  I still have to look for nice CD cases and ribbons for the packaging but for now I intend to finish the kit first by end October!  That means I only have a little over two weeks to finish it. Whew!

Finding information like names, addresses or phone location is made easy with an area code finder. With a few clicks on the searchareacodes.org website, you can also get a free reverse phone look up with just about any phone number. Have I mentioned that this service is free? Well, you can’t emphasize that enough.

With 10 days remaining on the trial version I downloaded almost a month ago, I’m contemplating on signing up for a full license.  The student license is almost half the price but I don’t know a teacher or a university student here who will let me use their IDs to sign-up.  A friend told me to get the software via torrent but this time, I prefer to get the real thing.  I’m okay with torrent stuff really but for some reason, since I’m really serious with this hobby, I’d like to get a license for it.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the top websites are globally? When I came across talkreviews.co.uk, I found out that my former company is at the Top 20. Interestingly, when I further browsed the company’s link, the Alexa ranking, Google PR, traffic stats and user website reviews are all updated there. Aside from the Top 500 Sites, there are more links to Kids, Sports and Travel Websites. This is one of the best opinion website I’ve seen. Go on, check it out.

Since I started taking photos in RAW file as opposed to JPG format, I’m badly needing more disk space.  I can’t use a regular disk for this because one RAW file is approximately 14MB already!  So now, I’m looking at buying one or two external hard disks.  I’ll check out Ebay and Trading Post in a bit.

Apart from the junk emails we receive everyday, we also get at least five junk mails every week. The usual ones we receive are brochures for properties, house cleaning, car cleaning services and auto insurance quotes. For us, more often than not, those mails go straight to the trash bin.

Instead of spending a good sum of advertising money for that, those companies should advertise on the paper or Internet instead. I think it is more cost effective.

I called my aunt in San Diego a few days ago, to tell her that my family and I won’t be able to attend my cousin’s wedding in November. I was really sad telling her that because I really want to go.

When she shared that the rest of the family who will attend are planning a trip to Vegas, I was so envious! They will be staying at a hotel in Las Vegas because my uncle’s house won’t be able to accommodate them all. Gosh, I hope I made the right decision to miss this important event.

Last night, just out of the blue, my husband said that he’ll grant one of my wishes for Christmas. I didn’t ask him to get it for me (I never got used to “asking” him for stuff) but I guess he knew how much I wanted it. He said though that the gift will cover Christmas, our wedding Anniversary and my birthday and it’s no problem with me!

He said I should receive it in January and that just heightened the excitement! Now I have something to look forward to when we go back to Sydney after the holidays. Wee!