1 + 1

I blogged about grocery shopping with my mom and sister for the first time here. Last week, it was just my sister and I that went grocery shopping last week. Two grocery shoppers, as opposed to the usual three meant I had something other to do then maneuver the cart and arrange the stuff in the cart. Challenging?! I think so!

We have a budget we try to stick to when we grocery shop. Mom usually takes care of adding up the numbers as we go along. I tried it her style:

:|

Eep! Towards the end of the "trip", i recall wanting to throw my book up in the air and cry "uncle". My poor fried brain!

I have become totally dependent on a calculator and excel work sheets after graduating from school. Thank goodness no subtraction was involved... or even worse, multiplication or.. DIVISION! Eep! I think I may have actually forgotten how to do this by hand.

Will definitely try to keep it up though, THAT part of my brain lacks some serious flexing. Perhaps I oughta commit to some serious sudoku-ing for the next few months.

And EW, I can already guess where your comment is going to go... so I'm going to call you out on it already: Math Dork :)

Pipe Cleaners

Visited a huge crafts store for the first time in the US back in 2003. I love paper, scrapbooking anything, pens, and arts and crafts stuff - pretty much anything that you use to create with your heads. You can image my reaction when I stepped into the store. I was both dumbfounded and giddy. Have you ever seen Scrooge McDuck swim in his pool of coins and throw them up in the air with glee? That's what I felt like doing.

So I had myself a field day and bought whatever my budget would allow me at the time - all sorts of colored and textured paper, googly sticky eyes, colored wire, these poofy sparkly pom poms and all other sorts of stickies used for embellishment, colored sand (yes.. colored sand), photo corners, etc.

I still have a bunch of this stuff with me today - partly because I haven't gotten around to putting together a huge number of scrapbooks (they're time consuming! and expensive!) and partly because I used to have a weakness for hoarding pretty things that I thought I'd never see again if I used it up.

I do have one item stored that makes me wonder what I was thinking when I purchased them: pipe cleaners. Not literally pipe cleaners (I think) - but could very well be a pipe cleaner I suppose? They're basically long pieces of wire wrapped in all sorts of colored.. ehm.. fuzz? Being wire, you can basically bend them into any shape you want. I guess seeing them reminded me of my child hood and art classes in school. Though come to think of it, I don't remember actually using them for anything as a child. Lol.

So yes, I have this bag of pipe cleaners which I guess I intended to use for scrap booking but found out later on that they're pretty hard to glue down. Had no idea what to use them for after that so they kind of sat in storage for years.

Decided to give half of my stash away. Thank goodness for friends with kids who still like arts and crafts. Better off in that home than in mine.

Hmmm.. maybe I oughta add the colored sand to that list. Lol.

Chocolate Vs. Lemon

I adore chocolate, but a great lemon dessert can turn me into a traitor at the snap of its zingy zesty fingers.
Particularly, these rich spongy lemon cupcakes and buttery tangy lemon squares. Gah.

Speaking of lemons, A kalamansi / lemonade slushy would really hit the spot right about now.

Efficiently Renewed

My drivers license has been expired for over a year now. Almost a month short of two years actually. Well, you know how it goes, the longer you put it off, the harder it is to push yourself to get it done.

Thanks to the LTO E-Patrol, I got mine renewed in a jiffy! The E-Patrol is LTO's attempt at making the lives of busy peeps, a little bit easier. It is a fully furnished and automated bus that travels to different areas, offering car registration and drivers license renewal services.

Surprisingly, I had no problems with it. I say that because I live in a country where for the most part, anything that has to do with the government DOESN'T work. The e-patrol was servicing my village that day - and in the span of 30 min, I filled out the form, did the "medical", had my mug shot, ehm i mean photo taken and received my new license. Winner!

As a side comment - I must say, what a pimped out bus! It would've been nice though if they A/C'ed the ENTIRE bus and not just the enclosed section for the people processing the papers. Poo.

Glad I got it done before my license hit two years. Apparently after that, renewing the license becomes a bit of a hassle, ie: you gotta retake the tests, etc.

Perhaps the next step for me would be to actually use the license for its primary purpose noh?

In other news, I'd like to give myself a big pat on the back for FINALLY getting one blog continously going. This is my 100th entry to date. Yay me :)