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Making an investment is a huge decision. We really need to make a lot of research before diving into a purchase because it involves spending a large sum of our hard-earned money. Here, I would like to talk about the situation of house investment in the US, which can serve as your guide in investing in the market.

Coffee is my gasoline. Yes, I am dead serious. I won't be able to function for a day (especially if it's a weekday) if I don't have my dose of caffeine. Most of my colleagues at work understand this, that's why one of our main bonding moments every morning is buying coffee at the cafes at the ground floor of our building.

This is the coffee beans at the grocery. And hello to my cat at the background.

I like adding ice cubes on my coffee to further dilute the taste. I noticed that cold brew coffee has a stronger flavor so I really need to add more water (or milk) to balance the taste.

I have never been into scented candles. I just tried some brands on BeautyMNL out of whim and curiosity. I was searching for items that I can use for some self-care and relaxation time (because you know, year 2020 😣). That's where I discovered this local business brand Life By Casa. I initially ordered their Lavender Bliss scented candle and I was amazed how aromatic it was. I observed that after at least an hour of lighting the candle, my room smelled like a lavender field. I super loved it.

Vanilla. Plain but sweet.

Suite Life. I think my room would smell like a posh hotel room with this!

Fresh Bamboo, before lighting up.

Fresh Bamboo, all lit up. This is the perfect vibe while listening to Taylor Swift's folkore and evermore albums.

I highly recommend their candles. Disclaimer, this is not a sponsored post! I just love their product that I had to really write a post about it. I hope more people discover them so that they can enjoy the relaxing effect of the scented candles. This is also my little way of showing support for small local businesses. 😊

• How the changes would affect the new records and the flow on how users interact with them (CRUD operations)

• How it will affect existing records (CRUD also)

• How it will indirectly affect other records (i.e. parent/child records, sourced fields, saved searches via the delete/inactivate dependencies list)
• How it will affect other scripts; compare if there would be conflicting logic flows compared to the other existing scripts

Just minutes ago, I pressed the send button of an email, addressed to that therapist I talked to some time last year. As I did so, I couldn't help but tear up a bit, because that person truly saved me during that time. I was in my lowest - a lot of changes were happening, a lot of adapting and learning of things on my own. I was scared and I was alone (initially), but good thing I realized I actually have close friends to help me get through everything.

I knew deep down that it's a win-win situation for me if I go and show up to the event, so even though I thought of changing my mind a hundred times, I still pushed through with attending. I'd say right now that no, I didn't get a match. There were interesting guys there, no doubt about that, but there was noone interesting enough that made me feel curious to know them more. There were some that stood out of course, aside from the lookers actually, like this one guy who is currently a full time student with 2 side jobs. He's working hard now because he plans to retire at the age of 27. 😮 Now that's some goal there (but thinking about that statement now, so how will he support his future family if he doesn't have a job?). He seems to be a rich kid, so I guess that's possible for him. With another one, he said he works in Finance, and since it was the end of month the previous day, he had to work for long extended hours, and confessed that he hasn't slept yet and has been awake for more than 24 hours. I told him good thing he was still able to attend the event, of which he replied that he'd still go no matter what. These are the kinds of events that shouldn't be missed. Work shouldn't interfere with once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Then the conversation got more serious with talking about work-life balance and knowing what to prioritize to make experiencing this life worthwhile. That was honestly a very nice sentiment that went straight to my soul coz I'm guilty as f*ck for dedicating my body to my day work. On another hand, I realized that I can get turned off by the simplest things, like not knowing how to correctly spell the word 'robbers' (like dude are you high on something?) I also realized I would never approach someone that I think I would like - I'll just let people who like me come to me.

There was some kind of relationship coaching also during the event, and I learned the 5 languages of love (Affirmation, Touch, Time, Gifts, Service) and the fact that my giving language is Service and my receiving language is Time.

Overall, even though I can say that the event was a blast, I can't help but see some major flaws with how the event went:

1) Based on what I have observed, there was no profile-matching done (contradicting to how the organizers marketed the event, because they even made us submit our answers to a list of personality questions beforehand). Couples were chosen by draw lots. Although all the guys that I was able to talk to were nice (in fairness our conversations were not awkward and there were no tensed pauses), I wasn't able to talk to someone whom I share the same background or interests. I don't know if that was the organizers' intent or what.

2) There were more ladies than men, so it did happen that some of the ladies didn't get to have a partner. I think their work-around was to have some "spare guys" around (I'm not entirely sure though, so don't quote me on this) because they had the guy doing videos and stuff at the venue, and also the host's friend, to join the crowd, when they realized that there were people left out.

3) The organizers allowed the male participants to reject the ladies face-to-face. OMG It was the most nerve-wracking moment, like real torture. I believe also that some of the matches made were one-sided. I hoped they just allowed both parties to choose who they liked discreetly by submitting this info to them, and those who gave mutual remarks would be notified a few days after the event (just like how it went with my friend's), together with the matchee's contact number. So it will be up to them if they want to contact their matched partner again. I saw that there were a lot of first-timers in the crowd there, so I hope they didn't get emotionally traumatized (like I did 😅).


That went to a rant real fast.😂But honestly it was a very interesting experience. It went not as bad as I thought it would. I was even surprised myself that I was not feeling nervous, but at the contrary just  nonchalant throughout the event (except from that one excruciating part). But well, all is good. Thank you Universe for letting me experience this kind of stuff. I felt like I've gained 100 Life points now. 😉

1. Build your connections; widen your network. Don't be afraid to introduce yourself to people. It's always helpful to have contacts in every department in the company - people you know you can trust to work well with. Of course, it is a give-and-take relationship. Connections will help you build your reputation, thus contributing to your success.
2. Work with all your heart. Give it your all. Don't turn over work that is done half-heartedly. In case your best was still not enough, ask for feedback and redo the work until you reach the quality of output that is needed.
3. Surround yourself with positive people. It's helpful to have positive reinforcement around you, helping you make a more favorable outlook in any situation in life.
4. Pray. We can't do all the work ourselves. We would always need a guide. Pray for the best outcome.

During my travels to more developed countries, I can't help but observe how disciplined people are, which got me thinking - does that play a major part for a nation to flourish?

[January 2016]

And so my journey in climbing mountains continues.

It's been around 7 months since I went up this famous mountain's crater. Almost all of us from the team went to this hike. I think the idea of doing this trip started with my other teammates wanting to do hiking with us (because they knew we did Batulao and Pico de Loro already) but to a mountain with just an easy trail. That's where we suggested going to Pinatubo, which is rated 2/10 by PinoyMountaineer.

And so our hiking adventure to Mt. Pinatubo began!

We arrived early morning on site. As a start, we rode these 4x4 jeeps up to the foot of the mountain.


Our group had to be divided onto different vehicles.

There was quite a view during that "shaky" ride on the 4x4s. A long mountainous horizon greeted us as we traveled across this wide space of land that once had been filled with lahar from the volcano's eruption.

This wide area of land has become useful today as the venue for 'balikatan' exercises by the armed forces.

The 4x4 ride lasted for around 2 hours. There were lots of uneven parts along the road and thus we were constantly being shaken all around the vehicle. Good thing I didn't have motion sickness! Only our 4x4 in that batch had no windows, thus the open space. It was more thrilling for me because I was able to feel the wind of the place (and the dust also unfortunately).

Me and my colleague on our 4x4 ride!

For the past several weeks, I have been hooked to watching this teen vampire drama titled The Vampire Diaries. Yes, I have been behind the times. It was just until recently that I got to watch this series which has become popular since its release in 2009.

The Vampire Diaries: Love sucks. :p

I got a copy of this series (from seasons 1-6) from a colleague (as of this writing, season 8 will start to air soon). She said she stopped watching the drama when Elena died. Oh. So she would eventually die, huh. I unintentionally got spoiled by that, but it was not a big deal because I had no idea of the story as of yet during that time.

So I got really hooked watching seasons 1 and 2 of this drama. I always tell my colleagues that I really wasn't into binge watching because I wanted to savor the emotions and reactions that each episode elicited on me. Obviously this habit didn't apply for this drama. There were episodes that are such cliffhangers that I was not able to stop myself from watching the next episode immediately. This ended up with me spending most of my weekend sitting in my room and just watching this drama for hours. （￣□￣；）

When I reached season 3, watching the series felt dragging already. The storyline was becoming more complicated already and I was starting to get fed up with the recurring problems of the characters because of conflict of interests. It was in season 4 when I gave up (when Elena became a vampire herself). I allowed myself to get spoiled by fast forwarding episodes. I would just then read episode summaries online just so I could get the gist of what happened in the previous episodes. Eventually it got to the point wherein I was not interested with the story anymore. And today, I decided to discontinue watching the series.

Although me watching the series came to an unexpected halt, I must say that I learned a lot of things from the show. Here are some points that I did and didn't like about the series - things that I will remember TVD about:

• "There must be another way" and "What should we do now?" are recurring statements throughout the series. 

I like it when a character says these lines. It opens up a course of actions that drives the plot. It just shows that these people are proactive and won't back down from any difficult situation (they sure did encounter a lot :p).

• Almost all the characters became traitors in one point in the series.

• The series is rich with awesome OSTs!

This is one aspect that I really got to like in this drama. There's always nice music playing during each moving scene. It sure adds to the dramatic effect. Fortunately if you want to reminisce those good times, the songs they've used in the drama can be found on Spotify, and are nicely grouped per TVD season where it got played.

• Couple shuffling was all over the place.

I saw it as a normal thing at first (besides there were only a number of regular characters in the series, and certain situations inevitably made some characters closer to each other). But after a while, I found it awkward already. On season 6 I learned that there would actually be a Stefan x Caroline pairing... like wtf.

• Damon Salvatore seems to have slept with all the female characters in the series. 

Except for Bonnie I guess? xD I know, this is all part of Damon's character of being that bad guy. Good thing he still has a special relationship with Elena though. My heart was bursting with happiness when Damon and Elena finally got together. I was in cloud nine when Elena finally gave into her emotions and kissed Damon when they were in the motel (wherein Jeremy unfortunately interrupted them haha). It adds up to the spice to know that there were real feelings between these two actors in real life. ♥（ﾉ´∀`）

I have always been Team Damon since the beginning of time. Don't ever doubt me on that.

• Some of the characters that I learned to love eventually (some almost) got killed in the series.

I think I cried the hardest when Jenna's character died after Klaus used him as the vampire in the ritual to destroy the Moon curse. I also was deeply moved on Rick's "death" (before he became that evil vampire hunter).



Watching The Vampire Diaries was a nice escape from reality. It kept me busy in a way that I didn't had to bury myself much with self-inflicted negative vibes when I am alone in my room. :P But I guess that's it, I'm done with the drama. This post is my closure for it. :)

I think I would be avoiding vampires for sometime now. I've had enough of them for a while. :B

One day I came across this reddit post with links to acapella versions of the songs in Taylor Swift's 1989 album. The moment I hit play on that first track, I was blown away. Those tracks contain Taylor's actual vocals used in the songs and they were just edited to have the vocals isolated. Cool, right?

I got really addicted listening to these versions. Just hearing Taylor Swift's voice made me feel all the raw emotions in it. I also got to hear some effects that I fail to absorb over all the instrumentals in the regular tracks. (special mention to the Out of the Woods track, which gave me goosebumps!)

Out of the Woods. The vocals blending is just so awesome.

I really wanted to learn how this editing is done, so I attempted to teach myself based on tutorials I found online. I already have experience editing tracks, but it was the other way around - removing the vocals so that what's left is the instrumental version of the song.

This is what I found out:

First, you need to have two versions of the song you want to edit: the original version, and the instrumental version. The latter one needs to be a good version, meaning it is as identical as possible to the backup instrumentals of the original track. This will determine how effective this method will be in isolating the vocals of the song.

Second, you need an audio-editing software to work on. For me, I used Audacity.

The process is actually very straightforward, with only that tricky part of aligning the waveforms of the two tracks in Audacity. You would need to be extra OC on that part for this process to be effective. For more on the details on how to do this in Audacity, click here. I used the same exact method described in that article in editing tracks that I have chosen from my music library.

Here are the results of those experiments:



These are songs from my all-time favorite KPOP group TVXQ (which the younger fans of today do not have the hell of an idea who they are). I especially liked how Try My Love turned out because I was able to hear very clearly their awesome vocals. ♥（ﾉ´∀`）

I also tried doing it on some of The 1975 songs that I have, but unfortunately I cannot seem to find decent instrumental versions of their tracks online, save for Girls. Listen here to result of my trial-and-errors in editing this track. I am satisfied on how this one turned out. I can hear in this version Matty's voice very clearly + the other backing vocals in the song. I really wanted to create a version for their Robbers song and just play it as my lullaby every night. Too bad though I cannot seem to find a good instrumental version online.

If you have a favorite song, I recommend you to try out this method. This will change the way you listen to it, and I bet you'll love it even more. :)

image credit: mysacredjourney.files.wordpress.com

It happened that today there was a Free Fortune Telling booth at our building because apparently it's Chinese New Year, and this was part of the celebration. I have never tried this before and honestly I was a bit anxious when we arrived there to line up and have our fortune revealed to us.

Apparently a lot of people are interested in knowing their fortune, as the line started to grow longer in that booth. The crowd was mostly composed of females. Even people who passed by had this curious look on their faces when they noticed the signboard of the Fortune Telling booth. There were four fortune tellers situated there, one in each table, with tarot cards in hand.

We had to wait for at least 45 minutes before we had our turn. When it finally came, I was assigned to a table with a lady in her forties sitting on the other end. Her name was May Anne (or that's how I heard her name). She asked for my birthday and while holding my hand, she asked for my name. Then she shuffled the cards and spread it out in front of me. "Pick one", she asked. And so I did. She picked up a set of cards and started to read my fortune:

You are very focused on your career. True. but that's a bit of a generic statement, I thought. She picked another card on the deck. "There are current challenges being faced on, and also it seems that you are having a hard time now, and it's leading to some doubts." Now we're talking. Funny thing is that I was supposed to post something related to that dilemma here in the blog, but because I was busy (I barely had time to sleep for the past weeks -___-), I was not able to even start a draft. I guess that uneasy feeling started weeks back. Fortunately things are getting better now. I actually have a work-around at hand for this problem, ready to be executed anytime I wanted. But meh, I still have not started anything. The days are just too short for me.

May Anne continued, "You need to persevere. Once you surpass this ordeal, things will run smoothy moving forward." Thanks. That's what I was planning anyway. I'm standing here for a lot of different reasons now, and I know those are what's most important. Plus these set of people that I'm with is hard to find. There are lots of things to learn from them, and I'm very honored to be part of the group actually. So yeah, I've learned to change my priorities. I'll just have to work on my own to get those other things that I wanted.

You currently have zero lovelife. Well you're wrong with that. I've got Chanyeol and the EXO gang, with the love-of-my-life Junsu from JYJ (though he has found his girl now *sob*), then there's Donghae and the Super Junior boys. Who says I haven't found love? 凸(｀△´＋） "But it's alright," she continued, "there's a person truly meant for you out there." (Don't feed my fantasies, woman :p). "Once you get your career going, love will follow. Marriage is sure to happen so you don't have to worry. The right time will come." Err right. I think I've heard that same line somewhere (sounds familiar, right?). Oh well then let things happen as they should. What I know is that I'm currently falling in love with Chanyeol. xD

Chanyeol, why you so handsome? (ღ˘⌣˘ღ)

There are some problems in the family that's bothering you. Well who doesn't have problems, right? I've mentioned that before in the blog. There are things you wouldn't able to change anymore because it's too late already. You'll just have to live with it. :)

After saying that last bit about my fortune, May Anne hurriedly excused herself to go to the bathroom. （゜◇゜）

One of my colleagues had an interesting experience in that booth. Even though she was still a few people behind the person in front of the line and that it was not yet her turn, she was singled-out by one fortune teller and requested for her to sit down on his table already because he wanted to read her fortune. However, the ushers in the booth requested to still follow the line sequence. In the end, my colleague still landed on that same fortune teller! They talked the longest time compared to our "consultations" with the other fortune tellers. After she was done (we were eager to know what they talked about!), she told us that she had to spill some secrets during that conversation. She was amazed herself that the fortune teller was able to point out some problems that she currently has. I bet that fortune teller was the best one among those in the booth.

Well I don't really know anything about this stuff, so I don't have to trust those predictions 100%. I understand why their statements are generic though. I wouldn't expect a psychic to be able to predict the lucky numbers in the lottery for the next day (because these are too specific information), but I would expect an interpretation if I ask them if it would be safe for me to return to a faraway place, alone this time. They only read information from a high-level perspective, not the specifics of what will happen in the future.

It was quite entertaining to have been able to experience this. I liked the part when our group started sharing our readings with each other. Fortune telling is fun! I'm just relieved that I did not receive any scary premonitions actually. Maybe I'll come pass by again next Chinese New Year. :D

To start the year, I'm having these songs in my morning playlist for the first quarter! Creating a morning playlist has been a part of my routine every quarter since 2012. These are the songs that I play upon waking up in the morning to prepare for work. It also serves as my timer to know when I already needed to get out of the house or else I'd be late for work.


It seems like Justin's latest album has a lot of good songs actually, and I got to love this one too, next to 'What Do You Mean?' which has been included in my previous quarter's morning playlist.
I recently rewatched A Walk To Remember and this is one of my favorite OSTs from that film. The story was as good as I remembered it. I still cried even if I knew the plot already. And Shane West? Damn he's such a fine man in that movie. ♥（ﾉ´∀`）

Another Justin is back in my morning playlist, and this is the original one that stole my heart. xD I cannot believe I have not included this on in my previous morning playlists actually. I reaaaally love this song! It also came with such a sweet music video.