Goddess, I Am.

I didn’t think I should own a planner for next year because the Starbucks ones I got in years past always ended up gathering dust. But when I saw the 2010 Moleskine Colour-a-Month Daily Planner, I changed my mind faster than you can say “fickle!” And when I saw that Avalon.ph is giving away the last one in existence (okay, I’m exaggerating – it’s actually the last one they have on stock), I just HAD to join. It would be remiss of me not to! Seriously, look how cute it is!

So what am I thankful for for the year that’s almost ending?

Golly, where do I start? It was – and still is! – a fantastic and very eventful year that saw me marry the man of my dreams, get to know my adorable nephew, bond with the family again after being gone for some time, land the job that any freelancer will kill for, buy a house that we will be moving into in two years or less, reconnect with friends, finally able to afford a Macbook Pro and bid goodbye to the computer woes that have plagued me for the past 10 years or so (Windows, duh!), learn photography, discover Ancient Rome, help my sister launch a business that I completely believe in, and finally grow up.

Yes, the list of things I’m thankful for this year could go on and on, but I think what it all boils down to is the thing that I’m most thankful for this year, the years that have passed, and the years that are yet to come: L-O-V-E.

Love made it possible for my relationship with The Husband to transition from the almost constant turmoil and drama to the joyful, blissful, and peaceful companionship we enjoy now.

Love makes it possible for me to enjoy every minute I spend with my nephew, even when I have a serious aversion to most children and can only handle them in small quantities.

Love gives me the energy to work from sunup to the next day’s sunrise practically every day, just so I can make time for The Husband, make time for the family, and meet my scary deadlines.

Love makes me indulge The Husband’s expensive Blu-ray habit, even if does make me want to weep sometimes. And I suppose it’s love that makes him look the other way, too, whenever I get a new gadget, or buy too many clothes and shoes and books.

Love keeps me supportive of Mum’s goals, even when most of them will eventually take her far away from us.

Love had me voluntarily buy the domain and the hosting for my sister’s clothing line. Not only that, it’ll be love that will make me finish and launch said site, hopefully before the year ends. It’s also love that’s made me spend the last couple of weeks in a stuffy little booth, hawking swimwear to all and sundry.

Love has me bending over backwards for my bosses, not because I have to, but because I genuinely want to. They’re great people, and I love my job even more because of them. The fact that they love me enough to pay me extremely well is a welcome bonus. And it’s awesome that I don’t have to do a job search after every project ends – a freelancer’s nightmare.

Love (or something very close to it) keeps what few friends I have still speaking to me, even when I’m a horrible correspondent.

Love for my Mac has me taking care of him like he’s my first born and a real person, and I daresay that Octavian loves me, too, because he has never let me down!

Love of life and memories got me to buy Caesar, my camera, and it’s my newfound love of the craft that has me reading photography books aplenty and taking countless pictures.

Again, I could go on and on about why I’m thankful to and for love – but then, it’s probably going to take me another year! If this doesn’t win me a Moleskine planner, I don’t know what will, tee hee.

What about you? What are you thankful for this year? Who knows? It might win you a Moleskine. (Though nasty little me hopes not!)

UPDATE: I didn’t win the planner. I hope I can find one for sale!

If you like to shop as much as I do, never EVER voluntarily mind a booth in a popular bazaar. Really, it’s not healthy coming home with an armful of purchases every night when you’re supposed to be minding the shop. So far, I’ve bought dresses aplenty, swoon-worthy accessories, shirts for The Husband, and a bunch of other odds and ends.

But my absolute favorite is this pair of chocolate brown Gucci loafers that I got really cheap.

They’re knock-offs, of course (I’m not silly enough to presume that I can afford the real thing – yet). Why, I’m not even sure if the design is really part of an actual Gucci collection. They could be MBT shoes, for all I know – I don’t really care about stuff like that.

The only thing that matters to me is that the pair is cute, fairly basic, and uber comfortable. In fact, they’re so comfortable that I haven’t stopped wearing them since I bought them last night.

Best of all, they actually fit. I’m a size 5 (35 in Europe), and for some strange reason, I’m finding it harder and harder to find my size ’round these parts. This makes me think I’ve died and gone to loafer heaven.

Honestly, what’s not to love about bazaars?

P.S. Has anyone noticed that I now know how to put watermarks on my pictures? Lame, I know.

I honestly don’t know anyone who can multi-task better than me. Not that I have any choice in the matter, what with deadlines that never seem to want to get caught, a family that always seems to be doing something or another together, and a husband who refuses to get cheated out of quality time with his wife. Still, I cope very well under the circumstances, probably because I hate being idle and I actually enjoy working my bum off, believe it or not.

The past week alone, however, has seen my coping mechanism take a beating when we decided to showcase and market my sister’s swimwear and clothing line in the IT Park Christmas Nights Bazaar. With my mum about to take the nursing board exam (which ended yesterday), who else gets to mind the shop with my sister but me?

The bazaar is open from 4PM to 12MN. This means hours and hours spent dealing with the most fickle shoppers this side of the equator, hours and hours away from my work, and hours and hours not spent with a very cranky husband.

But really, I wouldn’t be The Queen of Multi-Tasking for nothing. I’ve been taking Octavian with me every day – with a fully loaded Smart Bro prepaid dongle to boot! – so I can surreptitiously run my posting/bookmarking/RSS aggregator software in between dealing with women who haggle with a zeal that borders between ruthlessness and downright mania. Yes, I’m working while I’m “working”, and if I wasn’t having so much fun dealing with people face to face for a change, I wouldn’t be doing it.

Thank heavens, though, that we only signed up for 2 weeks (we’re open only until December 10), and not through the entire month that the bazaar runs for (it’s on until December 23). Fun or not, I will be quite happy when this bizarre bazaar business is over and I can go back to my usual routine. But what I really look forward to most is the chance to spend time having my muscles kneaded into blissful oblivion with the spa filter gurgling soothingly in the background to lull me to sleep.

Yep, the 10th of December can’t come enough! But for now, come see Innuendo Fashion at the Christmas Nights Bazaar in Asiatown IT Park for gorgeous swimsuits, lovely dresses, and oh-so cute sleepwear. You can even get your swimsuits custom made, too, for extremely (and I mean really) reasonable prices. (FYI, the only other “company” we know of that offers such a service in Cebu charges ridiculous prices.)

Or, you can just come over for a chat with yours truly. I don’t bite. And I give discounts.

It can’t be any fun being my laptop. I don’t spend my days surfing, or watching videos on YouTube, or even playing games on Facebook. All I do is work, work, and work some more. And don’t get me started on the amount of work I do. Let’s just say that in any given day, I have about 3 days’ worth of work to do IF I do everything manually. Fortunately for me, my boss loves buying me software, so most of my tasks are automated, which is definitely the only reason why I actually manage to do everything that I’m supposed to do every day.

Now, most of these software run on – surprise, surprise! – Windows. My darling Octavian, however, runs on Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard). This means that to be able to run these software, I have to run Windows on a Macbook Pro somehow. One way to do is to install it in something called Boot Camp and choose Windows when I boot up Octavian . . . Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen! Running Windows on its own on a Macbook Pro is like playing a shitty VCD on a perfectly good Blu-ray player – it’s sacrilegious, to say the least.

So as an alternative, I’ve chosen to purchase a software called VMWare Fusion, and this is, by far, one of my best investments yet. VMWare Fusion allows me to run Windows as a virtual machine (I named it Lucius Cornelius Sulla, tee hee) so I won’t have to leave OS X to run Windows applications. This means that I’m actually running two computers simultaneously on one. Add the fact that I’m also running another half a dozen apps on the native OS X system, and I’ve got an extremely overworked laptop. Very few laptops will be able survive such a beating without crashing, and Octavian’s one of those – he’s never crashed once. Rather, he valiantly takes whatever demands I put to him without complaint. Yes, he’s a good boy, that’s why I love him to bits (no pun intended).

Octavian came with a 2GB DDR3 RAM, which was a big deal for me, considering the crap that I had to put up with before I bought my first Mac. Though it’s sufficient to run both my systems simultaneously, I do suffer lags every now and again, which is really a bit annoying when you’re trying to get things done yesterday. I knew a RAM upgrade to 4GB would take care of this, but since the DDR3 technology is fairly new, the chips weren’t readily available locally – and I felt that I had to purchase it from an authorized Apple store/service center to get their techs to install it for me. Unfortunately, there was a 2-month waiting list to order ‘em chips, plus it would be about twice the price of getting it from somewhere like TipidPC or eBay.

Now, for as long as I can remember, the guys at the PhilMUG forums have been insisting that a DIY RAM and hard-disk upgrade was as easy as pie. It’s so easy, in fact, that these sort of upgrades do not even void the warranty! I’ve been toying with the idea of doing it for the longest time. I’ve even watched videos of how it was done, and they all made it look so easy! I’ve always chickened out at the last minute, though. I don’t know what came over me this week, but I suddenly fancied that my poor Octavian was coming down with asthma from all the hard work (the real Octavian was asthmatic, after all) and that I needed to do a RAM upgrade stat! So I ordered a couple of 2GB Team Elite chips from a TipidPC seller, who came highly recommended from ‘em forum guys, on Tuesday. I paid P4,700 (about $100) for both chips plus shipping on the same day, and got confirmation that it was en route to Cebu.

The chips turned up the next day, Wednesday. The idea of opening up poor Octavian sickened me so much, though, that The Husband ended up doing it for me that afternoon. First, he tried to get the screws off with a really old #00 screwdriver that he found buried amidst his old junk. That didn’t really work – 3 of the screws won’t come off!

So we hurriedly took a trip to True Value in Ayala to get a new screwdriver and ended up with a set. This time, Octavian was successfully opened up. The Husband removed the old 1GB sticks and replaced ‘em with the new 2GB ones (there’s two of each). The process took no more than a couple of minutes. He then closed up Octavian, and I re-booted. To my horror, it showed that I only had 1GB of RAM from the 4GB I was expecting! I nearly cried. I did a test using memtest, and yep, there’s definitely only 1GB.

So The Husband opened up poor Octavian again, and sure enough, one of the chips was loose. He fiddled with them somewhat, and they were finally in nice and tight. I booted up Octavian again, and scarily enough, he only had 3GB! By this time, I was definitely in a panic. The Husband opened up Octavian again and removed the chips. We both checked if they were identical, and they were, right down to their 2GB DDR3 warranty stickers.

The Husband had the brilliant idea of trying to isolate problem. He installed just one chip, rebooted, and checked the system – definitely a 2GB. Off came Octavian’s back case yet again, and this time, he installed just the other chip. Lo and behold – it was a 1GB!

So it seemed that the problem was with that second chip. I thought it might have been mislabeled or something, but the guys on the forums believe it’s a faulty chip. I contacted the seller – who was really nice, by the way – and he asked me to send in the faulty chip yesterday so he can replace it. I thought he was going to wait until the chip got there before he sent me a new one so I was resigned to the fact that I’ll have to wait a couple more days, but no, he sent it straight away, the moment I confirmed that I’ve sent the faulty chip. I’m expecting it sometime today.

Right now, Octavian is running on 3GB RAM – the new, working 2GB chip and one of the original 1GB sticks. I have not experienced a single lag since, even when I’ve got Windows running, too. It takes a bit longer to start up (about 30 seconds), though, but that’s perfectly understandable. It’s the actual working time that matters to me, anyway, and a longer start-up time just means that I have more time to get breakfast ready.

With the favorable experience that I’ve had with the 3GB RAM so far, I can’t wait to see what the 4GB would be like! I’m getting stuff done even quicker than usual, too. A happy Octavian means a happy Mommy Iris.

Now, if only LBC would turn up with that chip already . . .

LBC turned up just as we were about to head to the mall to watch New Moon. Once again, Octavian was reopened, and in less than 2 minutes, he was sporting a spanking new 4GB RAM. (Check out the wallpaper. Cute, huh?)

I’m depressed. I am now down to my last two Masters of Rome books, and though they’re both thick enough to keep me occupied for the next couple of months, it still makes me sad knowing that in approximately 700 pages or so, my beloved Caesar will be dead. That, and knowing that there will be no more books forthcoming in the series now that Colleen McCullough is losing her eyesight to macular degeneration.

Anybody who’s been reading my blog would probably know by now that I’m completely obsessed with Julius Caesar and all things Roman. I can say with all honesty that Ancient Rome is definitely one of my life’s greatest passions, even if it’s one that I only found less than a year ago.

So in my current despondent state, I find myself wondering what my life would’ve been like if the whole Roman thing was something that I’ve been into since childhood. Would I have chosen to become a Roman historian? Would I have taken an online teaching degree with a major in Roman History? Would I have pursued it, even if it seemed too impractical and useless for one living in the Philippines? Would I be writing in Latin right now, maybe even annotating Caesar’s Commentaries myself, rather than ordering an English-translated one from Amazon?

Yes, how’s that for an alternate universe? The thought of myself leading a scholarly existence is strangely interesting, if not a tad disconcerting.

So will my Roman obsession end with the death of my beloved Caesar, the end of the Roman Republic, and the last of Colleen McCullough’s books? Definitely not! There are more books to read, more stories to enjoy, and more great Romans to get to know and love. And no, I – or anyone else, for that matter – don’t need an online degree for that.

Indeed, my Roman romance is far from over. And that thought, at least, cheers me up somewhat.