To our favorite baby boy.
Can't believe you're turning 6, and I'm not there to be at the farty! Hope your Mama Kat gets you tacos and a big fat burrito cake for you to stuff your face on. I bet that'd make you happy :)
I love you!!!
I was about to take a massive dump when a big brown Chamorro Cockroach greeted me in the corner of the toilet.
I ran to the kitchen to grab a can of Raid I bought last trip, and pointed warily at the bugger. As soon as that mystic white cloud hit the mark, it ran like a bat out of hell towards me, outside across the hallway and into my bedroom, fluttering its wings in preparation to wreak havoc before dying an ignominious death. It hung out under the bed for a few seconds before disappearing into the dark crevices of the night, probably waiting for me to fall asleep and crawl into my mouth.
Now my prairie dogs are back in the pad, the turtle is back in the shell, the kids are away from the pool. What a total mood killer. FML.
Yesterday's marathon started 2pm at best friend Cyrus's house, where I met baby Via for the first time and proceeded to polish off their baby Heiny keg and a case and a half of San Mig light with his brother in law and friends. After replacing my blood with alcohol after 8 full hours of drinking, I took a quick shower and headed out to Establishment with the conyo crowd for TFlo's birthday bash, and joked about my life long dream to appear in the society pages with Maurice Arcache. True enough, he was there! Other highlights were catching up with Ramon and Karlo Miguel, and capped it out when TFlo and ate Mia introduce me to the concert queen Pops Fernandez. Party till 4am, just like how Manila does it.
Music is the love that never betrays you, the one that will always understand the beat of your heart.
Today's sunset is brought to you, by the world.
I dropped off Kate at LAX for her flight back to Manila, and headed to Singaporean Express (LMU-era comfort food) in Marina del Rey and proceed to polish off my Nasi Goreng.
Just as I crack my fortune cookie open, Kate calls and says her flight got cancelled. As she's asking me if she can stay for the rest of the weekend, I pull out my fortune which reads: "Luck will be yours when you least expect it."
Today's lesson number one. When working with filtered columns in Excel, doing a "Paste Value" will also plow over the hidden rows. Which you won't see until you unfilter the column. Hurrah!
Today's lesson number two. When you save a document right after doing something incredibly awesome, it wipes out the Undo cache which makes it impossible for you to get back to the version before saving it. Hooray!
Life's lesson: Don't save, and don't save often. Stop working and go buy vinyl records instead.
Sundays mean that Monday is coming. So you try to squeeze in as much as you can out of the weekend.
Sort of like finding out that you've been slacking your entire life, and realize that you need to get out of all your comfort zones before it traps you into the inescapable void of your typical. Any drastic action should still be weighed against the occasion, but with so much to lose, why drown in the details? Everything to venture, everything to gain.
Well, that "comfort behind the wheel" turned out to be 7 hours on my butt each way, fighting strong head winds and praying that the bus could make it up the next big hill, cursing myself for taking the 5 northbound where I was bound to hit two enormous cow factories that instantaneously filled the cabin with methane and other toxic ass fumes. FUN TIMES!
And, an old problem resurfaced. The dreaded 'hot start' problem manifests after long journeys, characterized by idiot lights firing up on the dash but the starter not engaging when the trigger is pulled. Fortunately, previous experience with this demon left me adequately prepared with the correct tools (a remote starter, flashlight, and a nice rug to lay on) and a calm collected consciousness. I will admit though, that I miss the days when I would have Ms. Kat crawl underneath the bus and have passer-bys gawk in horror as they find out I made my girl crawl under the car, not me. This time, people just gawk at the dog as he paws on the windows in a valiant attempt to get some fresh air and prevent himself from pissing all over the driver seat. Which, as it turns out, is another story that only a few close friends shall ever know the real deal about. Hooray.
Taking the bus for a long trip to San Francisco this weekend, possibly through the 101. Looking forward to that certain magic behind the wheel, a comforting lull that brings me closer to the salt of the earth. Always a guaranteed break from the routine, which I find myself needing more often as I age. Instead of accepting everything as you've decided them to be - ask yourself more questions, and the world will give you even better answers.
Just don't die on us, or catch on fire - and we will love you forever. Guaranteed.
One of the few things that I really love about LA (aside from the weather, KBBQ and Kogi BBQ), are the big names that come through town and play great venues like the Hollywood Bowl, Santa Barbara Bowl, Hotel Cafe, the Troubadour. And this time of the year, after the dust of Coachella has passed, we usually find the bands hanging around to play shows this side of the planet.
I found out this morning through The Scene Star (I love you), about all the bands going on pre-sale. Without you, I'd be SOL. Muse (lower level @ Staples), Phoenix (box seats at the Bowl), Pavement (terrace seats at the Bowl), Vampire Weekend (terrace seats at the Bowl). I totally would've gotten LCD Soundsystem also, but it's on Pepel and Pat's wedding weekend. Miike Snow is also on sale this weekend.
I just charged more than $1,200 on concert tickets, and the fraud department kicked the doors down! Granted I was buying blocks of 4-6 tickets, one gig after another, I would be suspicious of my activity as well. However, I always feel like this is a chance of a lifetime. Each day at a time!
Just got back from the desert.
Friday
Hockey
Ra Ra Riot
She and Him
Passion Pit
Them Crooked Vultures
LCD Soundsystem
Vampire Weekend
Benny Benassi
Ceu
Whitest Boy Alive
Saturday
The Temper Trap
Band of Skulls
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
The XX
Corinne Bailey Rae
Hot Chip
MGMT
Muse
The Deadweather
Die Antwoord
Devo
Sunday
Deerhunter
Matt and Kim
Florence and the Machine
Julian Casablancas
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Phoenix
Pavement
The Big Pink
Sly Stone
Gorillaz
2010 is a good year. With a lineup like this, it's hard to get my head wrapped around the fact that I saw and heard what I did.
Music is life. Life, is music.
... is going to be epic.
I usually am not agreeable with desert summer heat (although the weather report of high 80's will be a ten degree drop from the usual hell), but I have come to the realization that music can save me from any misery and turn it over to the other side of imminent awesomeness. And I will be lying if I deny the pleasure of wearing pekpek shorts over the weekend.
There really is nothing like exhausting yourself with amazing music, from the best artists of our time. See all you cool kids at the party. :)
An excerpt from Indulgence, by Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker (Apr 19, 2010 issue).
The Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution, modeled on the political structures of the Roman Empire and medieval Europe. It is better at transmitting instructions downward than at facilitating accountability upward. It is monolithic. It claims the unique legitimacy of a line of succession going back to the apostolic circle of Jesus Christ. Its leaders are protected by a nimbus of mystery, pomp, holiness, and, in the case of the Pope, infallibility-to be sure, only in certain doctrinal matters, not administrative ones, but the aura is not so selective. The hierarchy of such an institution naturally resists admitting to moral turpitude and sees squalid scandal as a mortal threat. Equally important, the government of the Church is entirely male.
It is not "anti-Catholic" to hypothesize that these things may have something to do with the Church's extraordinary difficulty in coming to terms with clerical sexual abuse. The iniquities now roiling the Catholic Church are more shocking than the ones that so outraged Martin Luther. But the broader society in which the Church is embedded has grown incomparably freer. To the extent that the Church manages to purge itself of its shame - its sins, its crime - it will owe a debt of gratitude to the lawyers, the journalists, and, above all, the victims and families who have had the courage to persevere, against formidable resistance, in holding it to account. Without their efforts, the suffering of tens of thousands of children would still be a secret. Our largely democratic, secularist, liberal, pluralist modern world, against which the Church has so often set its face, turns out to be its best teacher - and the savior, you might say, of its most vulnerable, most trusting communicants.
Rudy came by yesterday and we bolted up the entire exhaust into place. I spent a good part of two days trying to fit everything correctly, and couldn't have done it without help. Worming myself under the bus for the past few days trying to line up heavy iron pieces of exhaust that are meant to be placed in order, quickly reduced me into a tired, mumbling idiot. And to think, I thought it would take only a few hours to get everything together. More like, a few days. Anyway we finally got her off the jackstands and fired her up for a little maiden voyage around the village. And turned on the non-smelly heater (hooray).
Since I had the bus exhaust out for a few months, I haven't driven her in awhile. As soon as we started her up and tried to back out of the garage, my heart skipped a beat when I popped it into reverse, but the bus didn't budge. It didn't feel like the transmission bit into gear,and when I slowly release the clutch, it would inch forward. It took me a few seconds to realize I was shifting into 4th, which is the typical spot for reverse on 5-speed transmissions, instead of pushing the stick down and back towards me, as it should be... Yay.
You can view the rest of the project here: https://lovine.com/photo/2010/vw/heating-system/
Hey Vanessa, we need a lot of catching up to do. :)
