(no subject)

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013 11:30 am
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Grandma's ashes are here, I'm spending basically the entire afternoon at the wake and probably will do the same tomorrow, so if you look for me online and don't find me that's where I am.

Disabling comments because I am feeling completely unsociable, but I do appreciate any good thoughts (that would have been) said.

(This is a weird one. I'm going entirely by ritual, because, ritual).

FAMILY WHY SO FAMILY

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 11:04 pm
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Ehehehe. I thought I would be sharing a room with my mom. Turns out I'm sharing with my mom and two aunts. Ehehehe. Ehe. Ehe.

I'm getting very good at accepting being told the obvious. I suspect it's because I take their mind off grandma /o\

Being in SF with my family always leaves me feeling like a helpless kid. IDK IDK. Like I can drive and get around fine back home but I try to volunteer to help out by driving here (or even parking) and I just get roundly ignored.

Maybe for good reason, my instincts are all wrong. No one uses the horn which makes me very dubious that I'm polite enough for these roads. (Not that I use the horn *im*politely but idk idk). Also puzzlingly... okay so it took me a while to figure out that back home you're generally allowed to turn right even on a red light, unless there's a sign saying otherwise. But after careful observation that doesn't seem to be the case here? Anyway what I'm saying is it's a good thing I'm not the one driving here :p

Tomorrow is going to be painful. There's a huge family conference which I'm thankfully exempt from because, ahem, I'm not one of the adults yet. Look, sometimes it gets annoying but I'm not going to complain about it now.


We spent five hours switching hotels earlier today, and popped into four hotels in a wide loop only to end up about a mile down the road from where we started. I'm exhausted and after spending so much time trapped in a car with people who really don't let me get a word in edgewise (after asking me to look things up on the map ;_;), I'm very happy to have separate time.

Tomorrow evening should be excellent though. Attending my cousin's recital someplace in Union Square :) she was pretty good last time I heard her sing, and she's been training since then. Made her promise to give me a couple free tickets to her performances when she gets all famous. This is a reasonable start ;)

Can I manufacture a work emergency? I know some of you thought I was kidding when I said I was going to work while I was here but I was serious about that. Because! Notfamily!time!

ON A FINAL NOTE: Cable television scars... Scares me (thank you autocorrect) but this is not new.

So uh food yes

Saturday, December 24th, 2011 10:28 pm
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
So uh my sister bought a roast turkey for dinner and had it carved in the kitchen. After we are the oddly dry meat, we found out there was all this stuffing thing left nthe kitchen? And it wasnt dry? I don't even know /o\

Cranberry sauce was great though :)
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
I love tea, and I have a couple containers of loose-leaf lying around somewhere, but I generally forget to drink it because we don't have a teapot, so it's very fussy to boil water in a pot and then pour it into a glass to steep, and then do that again once the single mug is gone.

But uh. Apparently we have a tea ball, which I found in box of post-its, and it is so much easier to use, frankly it makes me happy to a ridiculous level :)

(It just occurred to me that I could have used the hot water dispenser with the loose-leaf, but!)


SO ANYWAY. I have a stomach full of warm tea, a list of things to do, and a calm, relaxed sense of well being. Tea is awesome.



My grandpa wanted to spend some time out of the city, so we (grandpa, me, cousin, aunt) went to Subic over the weekend. Sadly it rained, which meant we had to forego a lot of the things we wanted to do, so the weekend was boring, but it was boring in a stress-free chill kind of way. That's okay. (In fact, that's very okay)

Also okay: we found a restaurant that serves an excellent fried shrimp dish with salt and pepper. Excellent I say :)

Ummmm. I did get to drape my arm over a tiger, though, so uh yay? It was two years old and kinda big but mostly it ignored us. So I wasn't terrified, but there was no way I was going to move my hand off of where the trainer put it.


Oh! And I borrowed my brother's camera, which beats my crappy phone camera, so theoretically should have been able to get decent shots. Unfortunately, I didn't really know how to compensate for blurring under low light conditions. I had to immediately throw away two-thirds of my shots because they were blurry; that leaves me some 250-odd to go through for quality. Still better than my old record which is taking two shots early in the day, then forgetting to get any later on.


Cameras are fun! Having been able to take photos on this trip makes me want to splurge on a phone with a better camera. I mean it won't be any kind of DSLR, but it should get me to near enough point-and-shoot that I'll be able to take photos on a whim (currently, whims are broken by the fact that the camera on my phone takes forever to load and doesn't really take good pics besides). Bonus: with the right app, I can just upload and share the pics as I take them, rather than having to remember to sync from the camera and organize and etc (...currently Flickr crashes on my phone when I try to upload. Another point for getting a new phone)

Currently my options are the iPhone 4S, and, well, the iPhone 4S. I've thought about trying out Android, but honestly I can't be bothered to wade into the ios-vs-android religious wars long enough to find a review that'll influence my decision either way.


Also, speaking of DSLRs, it turns out that if you turn the zoom level way up, that can aggravate blurriness in low-light, especially if you accidentally turn off image stabilization. Even the very best technology can't help a person who's determined to shoot themselves in the foot /o\



Also, also, I am tempted to tweak the default Tags module location so it's the first thing that comes after the entry, rather than the icon, but maybe that's too big a change now. Hm.

Finished the vest!

Saturday, May 14th, 2011 12:25 am
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
I finished seaming together the vest for my grandpa today (SHINING MOMENT OF HAPPINESS)

And then I realized that I forgot to block the pieces before doing the edgings and the seaming. (OH CRAP)

I am hoping that it will still be okay. It's a bit, er, oddly misshapen when it just hangs loosely or when I put it on, but the flaws aren't as noticeable when I get my dad (who is similar to my grandpa in build) to model it.

Next vest I make I'm making for myself though. Then I can try it on and play with it and experiment and take accurate measurements and try it on all throughout and stuff >_>

Overall, though, I'm really happy. Even when it was just endless rows of stockinette, I was too busy enjoying the softness of the yarn to get bored. And now it's a garment! And the fabric hangs heavily and yet pleasingly from my hand! And it drapes! And it's super soft! And super warm!

I think I foresee more tops in the future :) I wasn't bored through any of it at all: the plain parts were soothing and suitable for mindless knitting, the shaping parts came at regular enough intervals to be interesting, but not so often that I couldn't have my bouts of mindless knitting, and it's just. I mean, it's just I mean it's a piece of clothing that I made from scratch, and it's like *flail* magic. Ridiculous woolly magic.

Now to improve my finishing skills :D

(no subject)

Monday, April 18th, 2011 01:31 am
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Went swimming today with my cousin. Oddly, I didn't feel tired at the pool, and my muscles weren't aching. But once I got out, I couldn't walk without wobbling. And for the next few hour (until I dragged myself up out of bed for dinner *G*) I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Have forgotten how good that feels :)



So now my cousin and I are thinking of doing dance classes. Got some vouchers for three days unlimited so we're taking a sampler plate approach: a bit of everything (so: hiphop, zumba (?), pole, belly... what in the world is belly hiphop? *puzzled*)

I'm curious, also excited, also I know that I'd be mortified to do any of this on my own, which is why it's great that I'm egging on my cousin and my cousin is egging me on.

I don't expect to be good at anything, but hopefully this should be fun! (If nothing else even if I'm the worst dancer in the class, my cousin is approximately as bad so we can be the worst together)
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
*exhales*

So my brother went to the beach for a long weekend with friends, and I forgot until my mom called me up frantically to see if I could get in contact with him before a hypothetical tsunami from the all-too-real Japan earthquake hit.

I checked Google Maps and the particular island he's on is way to the south, and is hidden behind a couple bigger landmasses to the east, which calmed me down a lot.

We finally managed to grab ahold of him through one of our friends. He's more annoyed than anything at our calls. I can sympathize! And hope that annoyance is the most that he'll have to worry about on his vacation *phew*

There's all this other stuff going on in the world and me -- well on a deeply personal level, I'm just really really glad that my brother didn't pick a more exposed beach.


ETA: Because I just realized some people have been worrying about me: My family and I (except for my brother) are on the west coast, and totally safe from. I hope that you and yours and everyone else you know is the same ♥
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
We decided to push forward with cleaning up our stuff. As usual, it's only my mom, my sister, and I who are cleaning. My dad and brother are not doing anything about it. *makes faces at them* Sometimes I wish they would take more responsibility for home stuff. They live here, too! But whatever.

We need to clean up about half a dozen areas, and decided to start with all the junk in the upstairs sala. We have a lot of I got to sixty before giving up. My sister went on and counted out (approximately) 138. That's probably three-fourths gigantic tupperware boxes, with the rest being slightly smaller cardboard boxes, or huge plastic sacks of... whatever. A lot of it is documents, which are going to be the hardest to sort through.

this is what we're up against )

Everyone in this family hoards, and it reaches a level of ridiculous that's just... um. Okay so today, among other things, I threw out a roll of calendars from 1969; receipts dating back to 1992; old newspapers; boxes that just contained empty boxes and plastic bags;

However, it's not all junk. We dug up a box of pictures, including some of my oldest sister at a Trek convention :D My oldest sister, my Atsi, introduced me and my older brother to sci-fi. She was also the one who sent us a steady supply, shipping back VHS tapes (ahahah :D) with recordings of ST:TNG, ST:DS9, ST:VOY. These days I could probably just hit up a torrent site, but back then there was no other way for me to see these shows. (A few years after my Atsi passed away, they showed a Filipino-dubbed version of DS9 on a local channel. I didn't follow it though. By then, I had seen many of the episodes in English).


By my Ditsi's calculations, If we each do one box a day, that's seven boxes a week each, or twenty-one boxes total, and we can be done in seven weeks (give or take half a week) -- just in time for my birthday ;-). I half expect us to fizzle out the way we usually do but OTOH we are better organized than we have ever been. Perhaps this time we will make it! *fistpump*

Or perhaps not. I went for it and did seven boxes today though. But that's low-hanging fruit :D We still have a couple more boxes of easy stuff (toys for example go directly in the donate pile), so I want to build up as much momentum as we can on those.

The hard boxes are going to be the stuff with my Atsi's and my Shoti's (little brother) stuff :( We have put off processing these boxes for years each, and thinking of opening those up and choosing what to keep and throwing away the rest is enough to cut into my jubilation.

Ugh.

ANYWAY, besides organizing the epic cleanup of our house, I am trying to organize my work habits. To that end I have bought office supplies (I love office supplies :D). Three whiteboards to supplement the two I already have, white board markers, and (the whiteboard having been so cheap that it didn't come with a frame or a ledge to put the markers on) blu tack to stick the whiteboards and the pens to the walls :D

I love this blu tack stuff. srsly.

haaaaands

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 01:58 pm
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Oh maaan. This day is just not my right hand's day.

Moment of panic when I woke up and had shooting pains up my hand as soon as I moved my thumb. Went away after a few minutes, so it looks like maybe I just slept on my hand or slept in a wrong position or something.

Then while burning incense for Chinese New Year, I managed to flick ash all over my fingers. I haven't done that since I was a clumsy fifteen-year-old! I thought I was over those days but I guess not :x

And then I thoughtlessly opened the steamer where the siomai and dumplings were being heated, and scalded two fingers on my right hand in the cloud of steam.

Maybe my right hand got out of the wrong side of the bed! Or crossed a black cat. Or walked under a ladder. Eh.


I am glad I didn't volunteer to help with the "money" burning this year. Given the way my luck has been going, I would probably have singed a finger, or set my hair on fire or something. It's not money as in peso/dollar/whatever currency, BTW, but paper with the appropriate design folded into the appropriate shapes.



I wouldn't remember the first two incidents except for this third one. (What's that about things coming in threes? Oh right, superstition). I am really grateful for this burn ointment my mom has. I don't know what it is, but it's pearlescent, smells like menthol once applied, reduces the heat and swelling of any minor burn to a pleasant cool numbness, and it comes in a small jam jar.

...okay that last one is because we put it there for ease of use. I don't actually know what the original container looks like.


It occurs to me that some things I use strictly western medicine, some things I use strictly chinese medicine, some things it doesn't matter.

For stomach aches (and their messier cousins), sore throats, burns, menstrual issues, muscle aches*, I only trust the chinese medicine my mom uses.

* If Hirudoid counts as chinese medicine


For headaches, fever, colds, I rely on western medicine.

Less mundane stuff is probably western medicine, but I'd consult with my mom first just in case she knows something I don't.



My fingers feel okay when they're still, but they start tingling once I start typing, so I will lie low today. From experience, the ointment will have everything fine by tomorrow; I won't even have blisters to show for my lack of attention ;-)
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
OMG OMG OMG. So my mom is encouraging me to make a shawl for my grandma, for me to finish in time for her yearly mother's day visit. She doesn't see grandma so much, because of our being in different countries and all, so she really tries to make these visits count.

Anyway, mom wants the shawl to be in cashmere because it's warm and really really light, and on our recent trip to Hong Kong, she went and bought the yarn for me *_* I wanted to save up the experience a bit because I can't afford to work with cashmere unless it's my mom paying, but with the deadline coming up, I knew I'd need to start soon and tonight I took it out and chose a pattern (hello Travelling Woman ♥ And, BTW, the paid PDF is worth all the money and the hassle).

This yarn -- it is so soft and light, it feels almost weightless in my hands. It is like knitting kitten whiskers, or soft fluffy clouds. Unicorn manes! Puppy paws! The soft down on a baby's cheek! Soft and tender hopes and dreams! I know I sound ridiculous, but somehow when I touch this yarn I don't really care *_*

A bit more about the pattern: I'd been looking for something that would showcase the softness of the cashmere without overworking the yarn. So no cables (though I guess I see those more in scarves than shawls!), and nothing too lacey, because I want to retain the plush feel of solid knit sections.

The pattern didn't leap out at me until my mom pointed it out to me, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it. It has a nice broad swatch of stockinette at the top which will just be ultra soft and warm when my grandma lays it against her shoulders , and it ends with a nice broad swatch of lacey border which makes the shawl interesting in a pattern which is not too delicate, not too structured. I am excited, and I hope this pairing of yarn and pattern will work as well as I want it to.

home safe!

Sunday, January 30th, 2011 01:49 pm
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
I will be catching up on stuff that happened while I was away, but first I need to go to the hospital to visit my grandpa.

Nothing to panic about: it's $minor_thing that was caught early and he's just in for observation so it doesn't blow up into $major_thing, but I shall go and show him some of the pictures I took. Make kuwento there before I come back and try to type up stuff here.

(no subject)

Saturday, December 25th, 2010 03:24 am
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Drove my brother and sister home in my sister's car after Noche Buena and presents opening. Usually it's my sister who drives, or my brother who drives, but both of them were really sleepy.

Despite the fact that they made me drive because they were too sleepy to drive, both of them were too tense the entire time to fall asleep, ahhahaah. I think my sister regrets putting me behind the wheel :x

Anyway, presents successfully exchanged, cookies happily shared, people safely home. S'all good ♥
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Just baked cookies, and they're edible, even!

Twenty minutes to shower, dress, and pack up all the foodstuff/gifts, and then we go to my grandpa's place :-)
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
...somebody please steal my shoes and run away with them (run very very far away).

Today was my cousin's engagement party, so I put on a dress, borrowed heels from my sister, and went to attend the ceremony plus lunch. It's an elaborate, elegant ceremony, involving lots of shiny dresses, lots of shiny stuff, and lots of the bride-to-be walking around and offering the right shiny stuff to the right people in shiny clothes. Really gorgeous and fun to watch.

It was also a lot of people (some of whom I enjoyed spending time with), and a lot of good food (all of which I agreed with at the time, but some of which is currently disagreeing with me).

Afterwards, I headed to the mall in my heels with my brother to buy my mom's Christmas present. Her bag was getting pretty worn out, so I knew what I was going to get her. It was just a matter of finding the perfect one.

We blitzed through all the shops which carried bags, and we found one that was almost perfect! It would be perfect if it were red, but I am happy with what we found.

Somewhere in between the lunch and the mall though, the shoes started rubbing my toes raw, and my pace went from going "*tok* *tok* *tok*" to "*awkward clomp* *pause* *thwonk* *pause* *big gallumphing blonk*" (Something about the shoes being half a size too big and my walk being really really fast because we needed to head home soon)

Isasauli ko ang sapatos sa kapatid ko pag-uwi. Sa kaniya na lang :-) (I'm giving back the shoes to my sister when I get home. She can have them)
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
I just found a box of live worms in the back of the refrigerator.

Store-bought, not ones my dad dug out of the ground, and the box calls them "beneficial nematodes". Plus I'm not sure they're still alive, from what I can tell they've been in there for over a year.

But still!

(I'm just grateful they're not chemical pesticides, as that was the first word that caught my attention on the box *g*)
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
I originally meant to talk about combined knitting, which I've been playing with over the weekend, but instead you get this.

This has been building up for a long time now. Before you click through, I have to warn you that I'm bitter and angry and cynical, and this isn't happy reading. It isn't even productive ranting, and if you only met me recently, this may not make sense to you. I tried to explain, but the more I tried to explain, the more detached I started to feel, so I deleted that part half-done.

Please don't feel that you have to read this: I just feel like I have to write it.


potentially triggery for talk of medical stuff + death + grieving )

boo cold

Saturday, October 30th, 2010 07:34 pm
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
I appear to have caught a bit of a cold, and have spent today slightly out of it (in the best way possible: relaxed and not feeling too horrible, but am feeling drifty and detached from myself)

I have discovered via Google that coughs can be worse when lying down; I thought I was just imagining it, but no :D Couldn't sleep last night because every time I tried to go to bed, I'd be jolted up awake again by coughing, so I spent it playing with the code for my Chrome extension to copy link text: have added JS tests (qunit is awesome!) and also added options for formatting. Basically, worked myself until I was so worn out, no amount of coughing could jolt me awake again, and fell asleep as the sky was lightening.

I am not sure whether my detachment today is caused by my cold, or whether it's caused by my lack of sleep. Either way, it's a good enough way to spend a Saturday while ill (better than feeling every moment of being ill while ill).


Other things I should remember to search on Google: what it's called when you have a low fever or just about to start a fever, and you can tell because your skin is super sensitive and the hair on your head hurts. I mean if I can find out about information about how lying down can aggravate coughing, maybe I can find out information about this, too?


I will probably miss the weekly family get-together this Sunday :( Don't want to get worse (honestly I'm okay; just taking advantage of the weekend to sleep in), and also don't want to spread my cold to my grandpa. I shall send over the brownies I baked though :D Maybe they'll enjoy it still.



I owe people comments! I will respond, but maybe not today, maybe tomorrow. Going to turn the lights down low so I'm not squinting against the glare of the monitor <3

Mooooooooooom

Monday, October 4th, 2010 11:28 pm
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (with friends like these)
OMG.

My mom over dinner: "Hey, so you're knitting right? I don't suppose that you'd have a shawl ready for Tuesday"

Me: *hopeful look, trying to play it cool*
Mom: "...for the birthday of this old lady I know. I don't know what else I can give her. I'll buy it from you."

Burn. BURN! Each sentence as it came out! A knife! Through my heart! A BURNING KNIFE.

Doggie News

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 02:17 pm
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Brought Charlie, our mini-schnauzer to the vet on Monday.

I don't have many photos of him because he moves around too much for my phone camera to capture. His head is almost always blurry. *G* But lately I've been worried about him -- he's been listless, low appetite, and had been throwing up occasionally. We chalked up some of the listlessness to a tick infestation and concentrated on trying to get rid of the ticks. When we took him to our then-veterinarian, we told the vet about the listlessness, lack of appetite, and vomiting but the vet didn't listen to us at all :/ He gave Charlie a cursory once-over, injected something (didn't tell us what/why), made us buy supplements (didn't tell us what those were for), told us Charlie's resistance was low (maybe because of the weather?), charged us and that was it.

Charlie seemed to stabilize after that visit: maybe became a bit better, at least didn't seem to get any worse. Still listless and had little appetite, but was eating a tiny bit and not vomiting. Then we noticed that his eyes were clouding over, and then the vomiting came back :(

At that point, I decided that I did not trust our now-former veterinarian, and pushed to get a more professional one that my cousins had recommended, and that was where we went on Monday. Within twenty minutes of this vet getting his hands on Charlie, we had a tentative diagnosis of ehrlichia, likely from the tick infestation; within the day, we had confirmed that Charlie had a high level of infection. We're giving Charlie meds now and have adjusted his diet.

I am angry at the now-former-and-good-riddance veterinarian, but you know what? I am angrier still at myself for doubting myself and delaying further action. It's a good thing that we brought Charlie in to this second veterinarian when we did. He's young, and healthy, and still alert (growing more alert by the day \o/). But given a few more days or weeks, well who knows? He might still have been able to shrug it off on his own, or he might just have gotten slowly and steadily worse. There are no guarantees that we were early enough even now, but the vet tells us that he has seen dogs in worse shape than Charlie recover, so I've been crossing my fingers and holding onto hope.

So yeah. We're feeding him wet dogfood right now, and it smells just like liverspread x_x We give him about half a can a day, stick the other half in the refrigerator to keep until the next. I fear that someone will open the refrigerator, somehow overlook the label, and spread it on a sandwich :D

Before each meal are eyedrops. After each meal are three different meds.

And and and -- Today I looked into Charlie's eyes and they are unclouded, or well, are barely clouded. They are brown instead of milky blue. Eeek :) And he is jumping around a whole lot more, and playing too, and he doesn't appear to hate me for changing his diet or making him take pills, and I'm just so \o/
afuna: Cat under a blanket. Text: "Cats are just little people with Fur and Fangs" (Default)
Riding when my sister is driving makes me feel so much better about my own driving (especially when gong over humps).

Unfortunately it does not make the rest of me any more comfortable. Ahhahaha.