Spending time offline

Happy new year to all! Random bits over here.

Had a refreshing break with my family, and away from the keyboard. Cooked a mean pasta dish (memo to self: tone down on the tarragon) for Christmas eve dinner. Did some serious garden and household work (fixing leaky taps, pulling weeds in my wife's garden, drilling a new towel bar). Spent quality and quantity time with the wife and kid, too.

In our trip to the metro for my niece's baptism, my wife and I took our four-year old son, Gabriel, on a ride on the LRT. Yey. Jeepney ride from Caloocan to LRT Monumento: Php7.00. Single-journey card from Monumento to LRT Central Terminal Taft: Php15.00. The look on Gabriel's face when the train started to move: priceless. :)

. . .

And: will somebody please remind me in a few years why reunions suck? High school reunions, I mean. Okay, so I go there, raring to meet old faces. Then as the night progresses (or degrades, depending on one's viewpoint), things start to get boring. I learned a few things, though:

1. People don't change; job titles and salaries do.


2. You can choose your friends, but not your classmates. The last quarter's math grades and the bell curve do that for you.


3. If you want meaningful conversation, try email or SMS. Face-to-face encounters are overrated, specially if you're talking to someone who's ego is bigger than the room.


4. Wanna prick someone's ego bubble? Remind him how he used to drool when the teacher starts doing matrix manipulations in Advanced Algebra.


5. But after a few rounds of beer, everything's just fine and dandy, so long as you don't listen in on the hot-air, er, conversation.

. . .

Hope 2006 will be fun.