Ibyang
Ibyang

Charmed Life of a Mrs

My Weekend’s Happy List

Most of us are not so eager to back to work on Mondays, especially when we had so much fun over the weekend. And to add to that, we almost always feel that weekends are never enough–I couldn’t agree more. How I always wish that weekends would just go on forever.

So what do I do in order to start my week on a positive note and be more excited about it? Other than following my tips on ‘How to Get Along with “Monday”‘, I make a list of all the good things I was grateful for the weekend that passed, I call it “My Weekend’s Happy List”.

Here are some of the happy moments I had over the weekend:

Friday afternoon tea with my friend Cathy. This was an overdue reunion and finally, we found the time to catch up. Like me, she moved here to start a new life and a family. I’m so grateful I have someone from my childhood who lives here too (we attended the same school from elementary to high school). And a great bonus is that we live in the same area–we’re practically neighbors, yay!!!

It was great catching up with her…great to hear updates about our other friends from school and at the same time, there were a lot of remisning of the good old days. Made us miss our high school days *sigh*.

We had a chocolatey meryenda feast at Max Brenner and shared a plate of Tutti Frutti. I had my usual Max Brenner Cappuccino.

Breakfast with plurkmates/twitmates Jo and Pen on Saturday morning. Other than chitchatting via plurk and twitter and sharing stories via our blogs–yes, we never seem to get enough haha–we also enjoy hanging out in the flesh, even if it meant getting up early on a Saturday morning (instead of sleep in) to have breakfast together.

A trip to the park. Isn’t it relaxing to hang out at the park and be surrounded by lovely green and blue sceneries? I love going to the park all the time but on some weekends, our schedule does not allow us to. This weekend, my husband and I were fortunate to be able to hang out with friends as well–double fun!

Sunny weather on a winter’s day. So what do kids do when the sun is up? We play!!!! Other than play out in the sun, I’m always grateful for sunny weather on weekends because it is a big help to dry out the laundry.

Our laptop is now working!!!! After a year of “hibernation”, thinking that our laptop is dead (and in need of serious repair), lo and behold, the husband tried turning it on on Sunday afternoon and it worked! Holy guacamole 🙂

So there, a few of the happy highlights of my weekend.

What my Weekend’s Happy List does to me:

On days when I need cheering up, I open the pages of my journal and draw inspiration from my Happy Lists. I maintain a journal as well and it is there that I write down my Happy Lists–I have an Everyday Happy List and a Weekend’s Happy List.

Thinking about the happy moments of my weekend makes me more enthused to go to work on Monday. Since I started cherishing my weekends more, I seldom go to work on Monday unhappy and “un-ready”. It helped me overcome “Monday-itis syndrome”.

It made me look forward to another weekend with a smile.

Sometimes, I still have unsatisfactory and challenging moments during my weekend. But when I start counting the more favorable blessings that I’ve encountered over the weekend, the good always outweighs the bad.

So what about you? What’s in your Weekend’s Happy List?

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Afternoon Delight at Starbucks

The plan was just to get caramel sundae at McDonald’s but what was supposed to be just less than a 5-minute drive turned out to be more than an hour joyride that lead us to Starbucks, three suburbs away from where we live.

This Starbucks branch has a drive-thru…

During winter, I always order their Signature Hot Chocolate. The Husband ordered for the both of us and surprised me by requesting the barista to add marshmallows on top 🙂 How sweet. He knows that I love marshmallows.

Then he added a dash of chocolate powder on top before handing it over to me. 🙂

I brought along baon for our afternoon snack–Hopia Combi (queso and ube). We were supposed to really eat these had we stayed home so I brought it with me.

Other than eat, we just hung out there for a bit, enjoyed our drinks and cam whored. We were both in the mood to practice taking shots using the 50mm lens. I haven’t been using it lately as I primarily used the 18-55mm lens (that one I broke) for blogging. So now, I need to brush up my skills on the 50mm since I think I will be using this more often. Thru the use of this lens, I realized na lalo kong napa-practice ang pagtanggal ng camera shakes ko and for me, that’s one of the most important things in order to achieve a good photograph. One may know the technicalities of photography but if you are prone to camera shakes, the photos you’ve captured could be useless. I’ve had so many photos that was put to waste just because it was blurry due to camera shakes. After two years of doing photography and a lot of pang-aasar from the Husband (my best and worst critic), thank goodness, I’m improving.

Anyway, we went home with more than a hundred photographs just by hanging out for 45 minutes at Starbucks. That is quite normal for us. Pag nasa cafe kami at kung nasa mood kami, sometimes wala kaming ginawa kungdi mag-pose at mag-picture. It’s like a game to us–one becomes a photographer and the other a model. Pinagtri-tripan namin ang isa’t-isa actually hehe. For example, if I’m the one holding the camera, I’d ask the Husband poses such as “galit”, “masaya”, “excited”, “natatakot”, “gigil”, “nginig”…until the requests become weirder or funnier (“kunwari nakakita mo ang ex-girlfriend mo!”)–pa-kwelahan ng utos at pose. And we’d end up laughing our hearts out when we review our photos. While reviewing the photos, pa-kwelahan naman ng captions hehe. Kababawan ever! 🙂

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The Sunset During My ME Time

Last Friday, I was on a day-off and spent the whole afternoon reading “Babyproof” by Emily Giffin (will write a review soon) and lazing in bed. Around 4 o’clock, I stood up and hung out by the balcony (I can’t stay in our coffee nook coz it was freezing cold) with a glass of hot coffee and pancakes.

Other than finish the book and continue on my whole afternoon of ME time, I looked forward to the setting of the sun that afternoon since we had a sunny weather that day.

On sunny days, I always look forward to the beautiful setting of the sun. On days when I have work, I get more excited to be at home in time for an awesome sunset show. When I’m home in time for setting of the sun, I feel a certain warm welcome into my home. It’s all worth living in this 3rd floor apartment, in this old building with no elevators.

So let me share with you the awesome setting of the sun last Friday. No editing was done in the photos below so you can appreciate the changing of colors that took place.

Earlier, the horizon looked more purle-ish in color.


A little bit later the blue sky turned up with the sun turning yellow-orange…


Darker hues…and a flicker of pink lines.


Gradually, the sun sets…the horizon darkens and another beautiful sunset was over.

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Our Happy Christmas in July

In some areas of Australia, winter time is from June to August. And in those months, some parts of the country is blessed (to others it may seem as a curse hehe) with snow. So, it is only at this time of the year that people get to flock winter wonderlands to make snowmans, snow angels and ski to on snowy mountains. And when you say snowmans, it can only mean one thing–Christmas! Hence, some of us in the land down under greet each other “Merry Christmas in July!!” at this time of the year.

This winter season, instead of going to the Snowy Mountains like we did last year, the Husband and I decided to stay in snow-less Sydney and hibernate for most part of June–we just stayed home most weekends and rested after a hectic Autumn season.

This month, we finally went out and for the first time celebrated Christmas in July on 19 July 2009, a day before our 30th wedding monthsary.

We celebrated by having breakfast at the Aroma Festival at the Rocks…

and by watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at IMAX in Darling Harbour.

The Husband and I were very excited to watch this movie. We are a fan of this movie franchise!!! We’ve missed seeing an HP movie together coz when HP 4 and 5 came out in cinemas, he was still in Dubai then. So now that we are together, we decided to watch it in IMAX too because we both haven’t seen any films via IMAX here in Sydney.

We arrived in Darling Harbour at 11:15am and there was already a long queue towards the entrance of the cinema. When we bought the tickets a week prior to showing of the movie, the ticket person instructed us to be in IMAX at least an hour before show time in order to get good seats (no reserved seating kasi). Buti na lang din bumili na kami ng tickets beforehand because when we got there, sold out na lahat ng tickets for the whole day.

So we waited for like 40 minutes before we entered the cinema and true enough, it was jampacked.

Only the first 10 minutes of the film was in 3D, then the rest was in 2D. Nevertheless, we loved the film and to see it in a big screen was a bonus. It is the funniest and most romantic Harry Potter movie to-date. It made me look forward to the upcoming two HP movies.

After the film, we were both famished because we missed lunch (only had popcorn while we watched) so we decided to buy fish ‘n chips and hung out by the harbour while we ate our late lunch.

So there goes our Happy Christmas and pre-30th monthsary date this July.

In other news, feeling Christmas talaga ang aming July because of so many blessings this month:

(1) The 60th birthday of my dearest mommy which was celebrated with my in-laws and our friends.

(2) Birthday celebrations here in Aussieland: my aunt and cousin celebrated their special day.

(3) Parties with friends: Kolokoys Party on the first week of July and Wii Lunch Party with our other couple friends on the 2nd week where we discovered the amusing Wii Samba de Amigo game.

(4) Other than Harry Potter, we also watched Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen this month 🙂

(5) Christmas in July won’t be complete without gifts right? Here in also Australia, we have we what we call EOFYS or End of Financial Year Sale wherein stores nationwide mark down their prices in order to get rid of old/current stocks. Discount prices go up to 70%-80%. This is one of the best times to shop in Aussieland.

Two weeks ago, we found out that the Wii Fit is being sold for only AUD99.00. Since I’ve been wanting to own one for the longest time, but delaying it, hoping that maybe one day it will go on sale–well, it finally did 🙂 So voila, we now have our very own Wii Fit :).

We can always feel like Christmas in our hearts but setting a day or month to honor and celebrate Christmas in the middle of the year is such a wonderful experience too. Celebrating Christmas in July gave us that warm fuzzy feeling in the middle of winter season which surely gave us a lot of excitement even if we didn’t have to go somewhere far.

Now isn’t it wonderful to have two CHRIStmases in one year????

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Today is Marriage Sunday

After the communion in Sunday mass today, our parish priest announced that today is Marriage Sunday, a day of honoring Husbands and Wives married via the Sacrament of Matrimony. He called on a couple who is celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, offered a special prayer for them and blessed them.

I have always considered witnessing a couple say “I do” infront of God such a beautiful miracle, but seeing a couple who had been thru 25 years together and still look very happy is one extraordinary miracle.

When the mass was over, we had a moment to chitchat with our friend, Sister Clare, a nun who is also a part of the parish’s ministry whom we met during the World Youth Day in Sydney last year. For a short time, we were able to exchange stories of what’s happening in our respective lives and even acknowledged that it has been a year since WYD. How time flies.

Part of our update with Sister Clare was our story of “playing house, playing husband and wife for real” coz at the time we met, we told her we were looking for a place to stay. Since we touched on the subject of marriage, Sister Clare mentioned that she thought that since today is “Marriage Sunday”, the parish priest would ask all the married couples to stand up and be blessed. She reckon the parish priest changed his mind since there was also a baby that needed to be blessed (pre-christening rites).

Surprisingly, before we all said goodbye, Sister Clare held our (Chris and I’s) hands in her hands and said a short prayer for us. I didn’t realized it at first, but when she said “I hope God bless you more each day that you are together…”, I knew right there and then that she was blessing us due to today being Marriage Sunday. It was such an amazing moment. Chris and I walked out of the church feeling at peace and blessed more than ever. The prayer and blessing that Sister Clare gave us this morning is one surprise gift we will always treasure.

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