Ouch!

Had my impacted tooth extracted last Tuesday afternoon. I thank myself for having the foresight to file for a vacation for last Wednesday a week before. That spared me a lot of sorrow. I was still in pain last Thursday, so I called in sick. Here's the day by day:

Day 1 - Went to the dentist by 2pm. He had already started drilling when I flinched real hard. He had hit a nerve. He had to inject me with another dose of anesthetic. I got a total of three shots. He drilled on. He eventually finished after an hour or drilling, pulling, cutting and sewing. By the time he finished, the right side of my lips were numb. Darned anesthetic was spreading. If only you could control where those blood vessel flowed. By the time I got home, I was bleeding a lot. The anesthetic was wearing thin. I had to place an icepack on my right jaw. I sipped on very cold water every now and then. By early evening, I had to eat cold oatemeal through a straw. It was the only way. Nothing more frustrating than to eat through a straw when you could smell the feast that awaited others.

Day 2 - Woke up in pain. When I got up, I realized that I had stained the pillow case with blood during the night. I started the day by gargling with a saline "cocktail" (actually, that's salt diluted in cold water). Helps kill the bacteria, heal the wound and so forth. I had to cook another batch of oatmeal to sip through the straw. By noon, I scrounged up a few packs of instant noodles. I cooked one pack, took a handheld blender and practically pureed the living daylights out of it. Again, I ate through the straw. But only after I put in a couple of ice cubes. It was still too hot, and I was already hungry. What was I supposed to do? By nightfall, I was feeling a bit better. The swelling was still there though. Painful too. Did I mention it hurt a lot???

Day 3 - I pretty much had to sleep off most of the day. Two days of moaning and groaning had exhausted me. My feeble attempts to chew were met with regarding cynicism by my nerve endings. They refused to be feeble even after three days of painkillers. I had to call in sick. I was too weak and in pain to go to work. Try eating around 30% of what you used to eat.

Day 4 - Went to work with oatmeal in hand. Still on Painkillers. Had to shell out the cash for that. My medical insurance only covers the first prescription for any treatment. Partial chewing is now possible. Darn it! I'm craving for a hamburger.

A Visit to Wil...

I was finally able to go to Wil Wheaton Dot Net. I will have to visit it a few more times to get a feel for Wil's writing. I can tell this much from 10 minutes of reading though - i like the way he says things.

For now though, I need to go to my dentist. I need to set an appointment to have my "impacted wisdom tooth" extracted. I really hope they have strong painkillers! A week away and I'm already worrying. But I've put this off for too long. Not having the money to pay for the minor surgery was a convenient excuse. My wife took an advance fro me. No excuses now, sonny. Arghhhhhhhhhhh!

Subservient Chicken???

Have you ever heard of the Subservient Chicken.Really funny what you can make the chicken do. But if you want to explore what the chicken can really do, check out what the people at boingboing.net have been up to.

Back me up, Scottie!

If you're in the habit of creating "back-up" CD's, you might want to check out jetAudio and Alcohol 120%. jetAudio is actually a media player that has the added functionality of being able to burn audio files onto CD's. The feature list is impressive and its compatible with most if not all media types. Check it out.

Alcohol 120% on the other hand is a just like Nero. It's "burn-centric" software, written to let you create ummmmmmm......ahemmm......."back-up's" of your software, CD's and DVD's.

Found both of these (free) gems featured on Call For Help. If its on Call For Help, it must be good. LOL.

Friendster....NOT!

If Friendster's take on the theory on degrees of seperation has got you looking for something better, then drop by this site for worthwhile alternatives: http://www.notfriendster.com/

Smart Wap Mail - Mobloggin'

Bloggin' while on the move used to be a dream of mine. Thank God I can now email posts to Blogger. With WAPmail I can post from my phone. I've got one gripe though. I can't access my Yahoo account from my SMART line. SMART's so intent on milking the sms cash cow that they blocked access to Yahoo's WAP site. I can only sms my way through Yahoo email. But what good would 160 characters do (character limit of sms-based email)? Hardly enough for a decent paragraph. At least WAPmail gives you 800 to 1,000 characters. So I'll have to make do with SMART's clunky WAPmail application. It gives me close to 850 characters for that added flexibility. Here's to mobile blogging!

Let's try this again!

This is my new blogchalk:
Philippines, Pampanga, Clarkfield, ., Philippine, English, Edu, Male, 26-30. :)

Cornik

One very interesting aspect of Pinoy food would be how often it is eaten and how extremely varied the fare can be. Filipinos eat often. That's a fact that most expats seem to wonder about. They can't believe that we can eat so much yet stay slimmer than they are. I'm actually overweight, but I still lok slimmer than many Americans (caucasians) I've seen. It could be the climate, heredity, or a combination of both and other factors.

Snacks are quite common. "Chichirya", or junk food (could also be used to mean snack), are indespensible to the average Filipino. Take for example the ubiquitous "cornik."  Everyone here has eaten cornik at least once in their lifetime. I get weird looks from expats when I try to explain to them exactly what those brown kernels of deep-fried corn are. Many can't believe we eat corn that way, sun-dried and irreverently fried in coconut oil.

In my younger days, cornik was sold by street vendors frying them in stoves sitting in improvised karitons. That's actually the norm till this day, but I remember a time when a chain called Baliuag Pasalubong tried sprucing up its product image by franchising. It actually worked for a few years. People generally bought cornik from them simply because they kept their stalls cleaner than the average tindero (street vendor). They also started the "MIX" craze. When I had 5 pesos to spare back then, I would ask for 5 pesos worth of MIX, to mean 2.50 pesos worth of cornik and 2.50 worth of fried peanuts. They would use a long-stemmed teaspoon to mix the stuff right in the paper bag, with the optional teaspoon of cooking oil spiked with hot peppers. They take that from a jar nearby filled with oil and what looked like a billion mashed hot peppers, the sight of which could make anyone salivate. Anticipating how hot it would turn out to be more fun than the actual eating. LOL!

Baliuag also made (actually they still do) sweetened kidney beans, my personal favorite. Imagine the dried tender candied beans dusted in powdered sugar. Yumm. Of course, Baliuag's popularity went down when the gossip spread that they were using vetsin (MSG) to season their cornik and fried peanuts instead of salt. Whether that was true, I could only speculate. Although Baliuag Pasalubong has shriveled as an island-wide chain, similar stores are still popular in Bulacan where it was born. I still buy the candied beans from the cornucopia of vaguely-named stores whenever I visit a cousin of mine in Baliuag.

The renaissance of cornik did come after that when they introduced Corn Bits - cornik cooked and packed in factories. They made cornik a mainstay in grocery shelves, all the more to the chagrin of parents. Anyway, the cornik of today is standard grocery store fare, ranging from the plain to flavored and the outragouesly mixed. You can now eat cornik that comes in a number of flavors which include adobo, hot and spicy. Mix now includes deep-fried peas.  As an offshoot, they now sell butung-pakwan and peas in similar packaging and peanuts now come packed with nitrogen. What good nitrogen does to peanuts, I have no idea. I wonder what's next?

Good thing I decided to check out Cat Schwartz's site. Her tagboard was filled with comments about COMCAST firing everyone in TechTV. Went to the personal websites of the TSS host's and read in horror what was to be left of TechTV after it's plundered by COMCAST. This is a sad day for TechTV fans! And there are a lot of angry fans out there.

Blogger has a spiffy new interface. Things ARE getting better in the A.G. (Anno Google) Blogger. A lot of features that used to be available only to paying Bloggers are now part of the free service as well. It'll take me a while to get through al the new features.

I've opted to go with a one of the newer standard templates. Did it for practical reasons. I will have to figure out how to incorporate my old stuff in the new page since I'm not very familiar with CSS. Help anyone?

I'll do a little tinkering here and there and I'll whine about what I can't get to work. You'll notice.

I'm currently in a blogging hiatus. I've got a lot on my mind to blog about but I can't seem to find any time to do it. I'll be in touch.

Oh, and I'm testing out Gmail. Blogger users get an "exclusive" first try. Who cares if it turns out to be crappy adn violates my privacy. It's still 1Gb of email storage space. Even if I get spammed, I won't be compulsively checking it all that often since I've got room to spare.

I'll keep you posted.