Here's to the Memory of Café Schober

If given the chance to travel anywhere in December, I would choose to go to Zürich. Sigh. Zürich. Sigh. I'll have to blame Samantha Brown and her Passport to Europe show for this deep yearning to experience a Zürich winter. On the top of the list of things I'd do when I got there was have hot chocolate at Café Schober. The café was the oldest café in the city, which is fascinating in itself, and its interior looked absolutely enchanting (well, based on what I saw in Sam's show - oh, okay, I've also been googling images like an obsessive dork). I mean, really, LOOK (each letter links to a different picture). The place was famous for its pastries and absolutely decadent hot chocolate. It was a real trip watching Sam try to figure out how the thing was drunk. Supposedly, it was made with fresh milk, grated Swiss chocolates, and a thick topping of whipped cream. Getting past the thick whipped cream to the actual drink was the challenge, of course. Anyway, I recently found out that the original café closed down and has been replaced by another establishment called Café Felix (same owners, different location I believe). The pastries and hot chocolate are still there, but it's a different place. It is still gorgeous, but I'll never be able to claim that I've drunk hot chocolate at the Café Schober. Too late now. Anyway, I'm nowhere near Switzerland or even just winter in general right now, so I really shouldn't worry about it. No reason why I can't have a Swiss hot chocolate  experience though. :)

 

Well, one of them is a Swiss brand and the other has the word "Swiss" in its name, lol.

It's Your Choice Giveaway at Conversations with Moms

Contests just make the holiday season more fun, don't they? I wanted to let you know that Maria over at Conversations with Moms is hosting an "It's Your Choice" Giveaway to celebrate her One Year Blogversary. The winner gets a choice of one of the following: a $50 Target Gift Card, a $50 Amazon.ca Gift Card, OR a $50 Deposit into your PayPal Account. To enter, simply leave a comment here. You must do so to be eligible. To gain additional entries, you can tweet or blog about the contest, subscribe to her blog, add it to your Technorati favorites, etc. You can find all the details here.

Win a Php500 Gift Certificate or $10

Hi, all. Just wanted to let you know that Levy over at Living Life to the Fullest is sponsoring a contest in honor of her 5th wedding anniversary (December 12). The contest will run until December 15 and the winner will get either a Php500 gift certificate (for Metro Manila residents only - the store of your choice) or $10 through Paypal. She has a few simple tasks for you to do and each task is worth a specific number of points (so the more tasks you complete, the more raffle entries you get). There will be two winners. Go check it out! :)

An Annual Dose of Kenny and Dolly

I'd like to welcome the newest addition to the Goze clan, my nephew, Matthew (born on December 1). Congrats to proud parents Joi and Mike. We thank the Lord for the safe delivery of this joyous blessing.

***

Lately, I've been watching/listening via YouTube to a lot of the Christmas albums I was exposed to as a child. Thanks to my dad, who is a country music fan, Christmas wouldn't be complete without Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's "Once upon a Christmas".

Of course, we also had the Jackson 5 Christmas album. To date, my sister and I (actually, also my mom) still go through this exchange:

Merry Christmas everybody!
Yeah, Merry Christmas everybody, big deal...
Hey man, what's wrong with you Jermaine?
Yeah, that's no kind of attitude...
This only happens once a year!
Hey, fellas, don't bug him!
He and his girl just broke up, so get off his back!
Can't you see there's tears in his eyes?
Yeah, he's cryin'...
(and then scream) Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry!

And then there's my grandmother (Marguerite's bisabuela whom we miss so much) who was a huge fan of Karen Carpenter, so...

It's really not so hard to capture that excitement for Christmas you had as a child. Just keep those traditions (and the musical kind is always lovely) alive. :)

Knit-picking

I really do enjoy knitting. There's something about the activity that's kind of hypnotic. Anyway, I somehow lost the other half of my size 4 pair of needles, which was really annoying. I'm sure it'll turn up when I don't need it, lol. Anyway, I went to the Marikina public market yesterday (have I told you how much I love my hometown?). I went to the 2nd floor of the dry goods building to look for more knitting needles (I wasn't sure I'd find any as knitting isn't really popular here - people are more into crochet. I usually get my needles from specialty craft stores at the malls.). I was already convinced that I wouldn't find any when I took a wrong turn on my way out of the building (I seriously lack any sense of direction) and came across this stall that sold sewing thingies. Just for the sake of inquiry, I asked if they had knitting needles and the owner (an elderly woman) kind of spaced out to remember if she did have knitting needles. She finally decided to check and instructed her assistant to rummage through the bottom part of one of her display shelves, describing the needles as she did so (that's how unpopular knitting is here - they wouldn't even know what I was talking about - one clerk actually handed me crochet hooks when I asked if they had knitting needles). The woman told me that she knew she had stock from decades ago that never sold. Thankfully, she did still have them (they looked really vintage, lol) and I bought 3 more pairs. So, yeah, you can count on me to be knitting, baking, or making origami boxes in the following weeks. Ought to be fun. :)

Pick-up-sticks, anyone?

Sign Me a Song

Those who know me have a pretty good idea how much into signing I really am. I'd always been interested in it, but I never really took the time to learn it properly until I had Marguerite. My knowledge extended as far as the songs I learned to sign in camp and Sunday School. When I became a mom, it was a foregone conclusion that I would be signing to my baby. Marguerite learned to do her first sign at 8 months, but believe me, I started signing to her when she was but a newborn. That's just how much of a signing fool I really am. Thankfully, Marguerite didn't lose her signs when she became verbal. Talk about keeping those signs! She even signs (and talks) in her sleep. Marguerite doesn't sign all the time though. I notice that she does it to entertain herself or to drive home a point (like if she feels that I haven't been paying attention to her, she'll scream whatever it is that she wants, hands signing furiously). The plan is to just keep on signing away. Of course, I see videos like this (Pearl Jam's "Given to Fly" in a concert in Missouri) and I just get more inspired:

And then Glee comes up with this episode (The New Directions jamming with their competition from the Haverbrook School for the Deaf) and my commitment to signing is further reinforced. Sorry, couldn't embed a video as all of the videos I found had embedding disabled. Glee, sigh, Glee. It could prove to be lethal to the hormonal. In a split second, you switch from howling with laughter to bawling like a baby. And back. Just over and over until the hour is through. And maybe some more after that, like aftershocks of an earthquake.

Uh, Who Exactly Is Spencer?

Remember when I said I was going to learn calligraphy? Well, I still have to learn the workings of a fountain pen, but I have been practicing the Spencerian script. I'm going to make you suffer through pictures taken with my phone because I'm too lazy to bring out and then wield the Nikon, lol. The writing on the left is my normal cursive.

The following is supposed to be comparative, but since the image is as clear as cloudy skies, just take my word for it when I say that the first specimen is my regular writing and the second one is an attempt at Spencerian.

And finally, Spencerian using three lines (too big for my normal penmanship size).

* From wiki: "Spencerian Script is a script style that flourished in the United States from 1850 to 1925. Platt Rogers Spencer, whose name the style bears, was impressed with the idea that America needed a penmanship style that could be written quickly, legibly, and elegantly to aid in matters of business correspondence as well as personal letter-writing..."

Singles, You Rock My World

I think I've mentioned several times on this blog how much I love the movie "Singles". Set in Seattle during the peak of the grunge revolution, the movie revolves around the lives of twenty-something friends who live in one apartment complex. Anyway, it was on HBO last night and forget it, I'm still in full revertigo mode. The movie came out in 1992, when I was in high school and thought that was what life would be like in a decade (I'd live in rainy Seattle and watch bands every night). The main figures of the grunge era were in that movie (except for Nirvana, which some would argue to be very remiss - however, I was never into Nirvana, so who cares). That baby-faced (and remains to be beautiful) Eddie Vedder (with Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard - I think they were Matt Dillon's bandmates in Citizen Dick), Chris Cornell, Tad Doyle, Layne Staley (hair still long and in dreads - with Jerry Cantrell who's always had my dream hair, but mine has always been more like Eddie Vedder's or Chris Cornell's)... Husband certainly had a fine time calling out the names of the musicians. And doing air guitar. Or drums. There was a profusion of plaid and long floral dresses and the other staples of grunge fashion! I'd wish for all of it to come back, but it never really left me. Yeah, I still don grunge and think I can get away with it (and, yeah, as far as I'm concerned maroon matte lipstick never goes out of style!!!) - kind of like a great aunt of mine who wore '50s fashion with poodle skirts and bobby socks back in the '80s. I felt all weird watching the movie. I guess I was having a tough time reconciling being 33 with the revertigo. It does take you back, you know. Your inner 16-yr-old sees it as a portent of things to come, but the current you knows it didn't happen that way. Your twenties were spent welcoming the new millenium (remember when the modern woman was referred to as the woman of the '90s? harhar) and yeah, the number 1 hit according to Rick Dees when we exploded into 2000 (not the new millenium just yet, but that's when we all did those fireworks) was "Smooth", hardly even post-grunge although a post-grunge character was involved (and yeah, I had a crush on Rob Thomas back in the day). Gosh, remember when GenX was the hip, relevant age? Now, they've labeled the following group as GenY. That sucks. That's not how it works. It's not the freakin' alphabet. Why do I sound all whiney and angry and angst-ridden? That's probably just the revertigo talking. Anyway, the GenX stereotype is supposed to be that of a cynical and frustrated, grunge wearing, alternative music listening jobless slacker. Yeah, GenX! lol Going back to the movie, it was during a time when "Dyslexic Heart" was yet to be forever ruined by association with this local teen series called TGIS, which adopted it as its theme song (gag me with a spoon - okay, I don't really feel that strongly against it, but I haven't used that expression in the longest time and just decided to go for it anyway). Did you also know that the mime in the movie was Eric Stoltz? I had a crush on him back in the '80s - remember "Some Kind of Wonderful"? It had Mary Stuart Masterson too, who Husband thought he looked like back when he was a young girl (okay, he's not really a transgender, but he was a pretty little boy, lol)... That's an entirely different story. To reel myself in back from that particular digression, I'll talk about Jeremy Piven's bit role and how that Elvis Costello-Public Enemy mashup (excuse the non-vintage Glee terminology) has stuck with me through the years (What's so funny about... peace, peace, peace... love and under... peace, peace. / Death Row, what does a brother know? peace, peace...). Also, Victor Garber's role was the tiniest of cameos, but who cares? The fact that he was even there just made the movie even more adorable. Anyway, I leave you with a link to this "You Might Belong to Generation X If..." list (some of my faves: You're doing absolutely nothing with anything pertaining to your major degree... One word: Corduroy... You, yes you, sat down and memorized the entire lyric sheet to "It's the End of the World as We Know It"...) and this video excerpt from the movie. Look! It's Eddie!

Discount Surgical Stockings

Would you believe that I first came across the concept of surgical stockings while watching Glee? I knew stockings could be supportive, but I had no idea they could be used as part of a treatment. Apparently, surgical stockings are prescribed to help prevent a variety of life-threatening possibilities, deep vein thrombosis for one. They can also be used to manage conditions such as leg ulcers and edema. However, just because these stockings are worn for medical purposes, it does not mean that they cannot be fashionable. Jobst ultrasheer, for instance, come in various shades and sizes. They look and feel very soft and silky without taking away from their efficacy. They are also the sheerest physician-recommended surgical stockings there are. They are made of a blend of nylon, spandex, and silicone for optimum convenience and comfort. The material, which features Jobst Advanced Comfort, moves moisture from within to the outside of the stockings in aid of evaporation and a cooler feel to the skin. Knee-high versions come with a comfortable wide top band. There are actually many variations available. You can certainly find the length, toe design, color, support concentration, etc. combinations that suit your needs best and promote optimal leg health.

Experience Rice at SM MOA

Getting sick is such a pain. We missed church, we didn't get to see my family, we didn't get to do the groceries, and now I get to sound like such a whiner (hehe, like this is something I can't control.). Anyway, by God's grace, I know this week will be a healthy one for us. I have a couple of posts I want to do, but I don't have the energy for them just yet. Anyway, I'd like to remind those in the Philippines that this week there's the Experience Rice Exhibit at SM Mall of Asia. All the details can be found here. My beautiful friend, Chona, is one of the organizers, so please give the event a visit. :)