No rest for the wicked

The past two weeks I spent running around outside of town. This week, more specifically the later part of this week, I spent at the PAWS Animal Rehabilitation Center.

Again, this is not a complaint, in fact, it was a very welcome though exhausting break. I'm actually amazed I am this tired considering I was a mere supporting character to the star of the show, Dr. Wilford Almoro, and the team of volunteer veterinarians assisting in the Spay Day yesterday, 24 February 2012.

Blog Maintenance #3: Image Clean Up Continued

Okay, so I'm still editing the images. I don't know why. I'm just really so obsessed with making everything as uniform as I can manage.

I'm trying to take the automatic copyright thing from the photos so I can just put on the appropriate signatures, watermarks, what have you. I realise too that I've used some images from Shutterstock.com (I don't have an account but it's okay because I wanted to retain their watermark on each of the borrowed images) which I've resized to fit the 500px width of my own photos. In cases where things get oddly cropped, I opt to keep that little bit at the bottom where they have the image number so people can refer to that when searching for the images I showed.

All that said, I'll likely only be able to continue my post series on Monday. My volunteer work at one of the local shelters, the Philippine Animal Welfare Society, will be taking me out of the house for the next two days so I won't really have the time or opportunity to sit down and collect my thoughts properly.

This also means an increase in my entries backlog but who's counting, right?

Who am I kidding, I am counting.

I've got Sunday, I suppose. It doesn't really take me that long to write. What does take long is the image editing and I have a lot of those. Oy vey.

Well, just for the sake of cuteness, I shall leave you with the image of the real boss at the PAWS Animal Rehabilitation Center office. Here's to a weekend of finalizing edits and updates!

Fleur thinks the lowly human looking at her picture should approach with offerings.

Blog Maintenance #2: Image Clean Up

Here we go again with my constant fiddling.

You may have noticed some images have gone missing. That's because I'm trying to fix up the album/s where the images are stored. I like having all my images be just a single size and I'm working on putting a better signature/copyright/watermark (however you prefer to call it) on each of the photos so I'll be re-editing those too.

I'm slowly learning more and more HTML so you  might witness a few more tweaks here and there as I go along. Despite all appearances, I do have a life offline so I can't devote as much time to learning HTML as I'd like.

Anyway, patience, patience as I've always asked. ^_^

Weekend Work Retreat #2: At First Sight

Any friend of mine will tell you with great certainty that I will not survive a real camping trip. I'm too spoiled and love my creature comforts too much to want to rough it. I can't even take a bath if there's no hot water. I freak out over insects and anything that falls under the category of either amphibians or reptiles. I consider 2"-high grass as "tall" because it's tall enough to hide any number of creatures among its blades.

So when an opportunity came to try out something close to camping but with a good balance of creature comforts (hello, restaurant-quality meals, flushing toilets and hot bath water), did I look forward to it?

Are you kidding me? Of course not!

Weekend Work Retreat #1: Introduction

Physical experiences can count quite a great deal towards life lesson analogies. I have the aching muscles to prove it.

I've never really been one to push myself to go beyond the boundaries I've set in my mind but this weekend has completely broken down all the walls and while I can't say that the walls no longer exist, I can at least go through them now instead of working around them.

Blog Envy

I'm looking at everyone's blogs and I just can't help thinking "I want my blog to be as pretty!" So I'm going to work on doing precisely that: customising my blog to look, well, different from the auto-themes and designs.

My main inspiration is IHeart Organizing. I just think her blog is so neat and pretty. Fat Mum Slim is also an excellent inspiration. And of course, one of my favourite Tumblogs, What I Wore.

Busy Bee

We are back to that again, yes. I am losing yet another weekend to work-related activities.

Mind, this is not precisely a complaint; it is a mere statement of fact.

The secret is in the details #5: Through Faith, Hope, and Love

Allow me to end the week's posts with a cliffhanger.

(c) Noel Salazar, Imagine Nation Photography

I've shown this image before in this entry.

The last line of this prayer encapsulates our entire journey planning for our wedding. I have been slowly sharing what I've been calling the "secret details" of our wedding.

Every single person involved in our year-long preparation was an enormous blessing and many of them have become new friends, something that I had not expected at all.

So far I've blogged about Tito Boy albeit slightly incompletely since I really want to share the sketches he made for the attire of the entire entourage, plus photos of all my lovely ladies in their dresses.

I've also blogged about Noel although that is probably just about a third of what I actually wanted to say about him, the remaining two-thirds being things that I still need to write about and put together.

Most importantly, I've blogged about the beginning of how everything just started falling into place, beginning with that single prayer for a sign to show that we had chosen the right year to seal our relationship.

This has been the core of our relationship for the past three years: Faith, Hope, Love and prayers. Everything with guidance, as we usually say, and our wedding is probably the biggest example of how much stronger and more perfect everything becomes when it is done with complete trust in the Lord's Grace and guidance.

Throughout all the preparations, we were constantly showered by God's blessings and so grateful are we for each and every single one be it in the form of an object or a person. And there are truly so many people we continue to be thankful to have had with us on the day.

I'll continue the stories some time next week. After all, we are talking about one entire year of preparations and there are so many things that I would love to share with everyone, I just need to put them all together bit.

The secret is in the details #4: Time and Place

Even those who are aware of how my thought processing works will find that my thought processes are quite messed up.

Image on the left found via afodltd.com while the
image on the right was found via spot.ph. Both
images are for visualization purposes only. No
copyright infringement is intended.

I have found out, over the years, that the way my thoughts flow isn't always as logical to others as it is to me. One of my favourite stories comes from my days in Architecture when, while having a snack with my friends, I suddenly exclaimed, "The answer to my problem is Chiz Curls!"

Of course, this earned me some very strange looks from my friends--we were talking about something else entirely as we ate.

So I proceeded to take a clean sheet from my sketchpad and laid out some pieces of Chiz Curls on top of it then carefully raised the sheet so light would pass through.

"Imagine the shadows the shapes will create. It's going to be just like a canopy of tree branches!"

And suddenly, everything made sense and all was right in the world again.

I am admittedly a little spacey so one would seriously wonder how I could have managed wedding planning so calmly given my obsession with the little details. The answer is simple: I prayed. A lot.

The secret is in the details #3: Noel Salazar

A former professor, Ms. Charlene Fernandez-Bobis, left this comment on my Facebook wall post featuring a photo from the Valentine's post I made here:

See, this is what a lot of brides fail to take into consideration: it's the happiness that makes you look good, not the makeup, not the gown, not the venue! :)

I agree with her completely and I was so thrilled when, despite the nervous smiles and lip-biting, I could see that the love and happiness that permeated the entire celebration was documented perfectly. I am the type of person who obsessively documents events of import, whether in writing or in images so yes, the documentation was indeed very important to me.

Hence, secret #3 in this series of wedding-related blog entries: the art of documentation.

Hallmark Holiday #1: Valentine's Day 2012

I am an incredibly lucky chica to be able to say that the number of people I know I can trust with my life number more than the twenty digits the Lord has blessed me to count with.

I was reminded of this while going over our wedding pictures--no, I'm still not done looking through them--and I saw something I missed whilst merely skimming over the images, recalling the day's events.

The secret is in the details #2: Boy Domingo

There were three suppliers that were at the top of our list when we first decided on our date: the designer, the photographer, and the make-up artist.

This one is about our designer: a very close family friend, Mr. Boy Domingo.

Pooped

Seriously.

But I do want to share this before I crawl into bed: frogs aside, camping out is actually quite fun. One should never underestimate the beauty of the Lord's creation, no matter how fearful one is of creepy crawlers and hoppers.

Yesterday's adventure was truly a blessing.

Good riddance to bad rubbish

Those who know me also know that I am very slow on the cleaning uptake. Believe me, I have rubbish in my boxes and shelves and whatnot that date all the way back to pre-school!

Now before anyone gets huffy on me for admitting this, I will point out now that it is not a matter of pride for me. I am merely stating a fact.

I hold on to a lot of things hoping to hold on to the memories, hoping I can reuse those things one day. Most of them fall under the first category.

Long Distance Inspiration

As happily as 2011 ended for me, 2012 has, thus far, been very difficult to deal with.

This makes me immensely grateful for Lismore Mama sharing this link to the Lismore Bible Church. I've just started listening to the audios of the sermons and so far, I've heard nothing but comforting words and reminders of all the things that, despite all my complaints, I am very much blessed and grateful for.

I'll probably listen to the same sermon twice each time. It just takes that time for it all to really sink in and I'm so happy that there are audio downloads in case I missed something the first time around.

Best of all, thanks to this, I'm actually getting to know the Bible better. We'll leave the irony of that a secret. ^_~

The beauty of automation

Let's face it, hardly anyone who does a bazillion things each day of the week will ever still bother doing laundry by hand.

Admittedly, I feel guilty about this because clothes last longer and just feel ever so much more comfortable when they're done by hand. But I've chosen, rather than spend my time washing clothes that way, mechanical help would be welcome and if I need two dozen laundry bags to keep all the delicates safe from getting caught on other materials, by golly I will get two dozen laundry bags!

Just one of those things #3: When the help is away...

Grateful as I am for having household help (I've complained about some nasty help habits here), it's when the help is unavailable that you can really see the measure of a man.

The secret is in the details #1: The Invitation

There are a number of "secrets" that only my husband and I, sometimes a few others, were privy to during our wedding. I swore I would blog about it and actually attempted to create a full blog page on the subject but somehow, it just made it all the more difficult to tell the story that way.

So I'm trying again here. At the very least, there are tags and all related posts will be fairly easy to find.

Shelter Volunteering #1: Don't just say it--do it!

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this entry are purely my own and do not reflect those of other volunteers or the organization. Just so we're clear on that.

I spent last Saturday at a local animal shelter where I have been volunteering for the past year now and the kinds of people we encounter daily continue to amaze me.

I honestly think that one way to gauge the kind of person you're dealing with is how they deal with and/or react to animals. Not everyone likes animals, I know, but you don't have to like animals to treat them well as fellow creations of God.

Just typing that made me feel rather wishy-washy, I'll be honest. But I have seen people express concern over the situation of "poor animals on the street" and in the same breath go "why don't you do something about it?"

Comfort Food

I don't know why but for someone who actually knows how to cook and bake, I can't help but enjoy more the food that was made by someone else.

I mentioned before that I was having a really bad week which, looking back at the week, makes me laugh a bit because that was the same week I'd renamed my blog "My Happily Ever After." Well, no one said "happily ever after" would be perfect and there is a lot of happiness to be found in growing and learning.

Blog Maintenance #1: Widgets

Hmm. I may need to put at least one photo each for my posts for that little widget I finally managed to attach to the bottom/in between my posts. It would be so much prettier if it had thumbnails each. But now that I've done it, the previous posts still don't seem to register the thumbnails. I'm not sure if it was worth the effort to have looked for those photos.

I also need to figure out how to automatically insert a signature. Or maybe I have to do it manually, I don't know yet. But I really would like to have a "real" signature at the end of each post instead of that little automatic post signature.

I have some ideas for what I want out of this blog I just haven't managed to put everything together yet. But I'll get there eventually.

The day's events

It's the day after our return from the countryside. Nearly midnight and I'm sure my husband will be upset to find me awake still but one of my sisters needs me and I need to stay awake to hear her out.

We, my husband and I, spent yesterday morning on "field duties." That is, we went to visit and check on some rice fields and mango orchards belonging to our family.

Wow, that sounded fancier than it actually is!