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How to Green Your Holidays

Christmas is upon us and with the joy and celebrations come the piles of torn wrapping paper, mounds of food waste, busted string lights,and other stresses that will make Mother Nature shout “Bah humbug!”. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s possible to celebrate Christmas without creating a trash pile for Santa’s elves.

  • Collect your coffee (and planner stickers) in a For Here mug or your own reusable tumbler. 

How many coffees do you need to buy to get a free planner? How many thousands of people want the same planner you do? Multiply the two and you have an idea how many paper cups are thrown in landfills just this Christmas season to get that free planner. But it doesn’t have to be this way!

Bring your own mug and save the planet. As a bonus, many coffee shops (both chain and independent) give you a discount for bringing your own mug. Chances are, by the time you collect enough stickers for that planner, you’d have saved enough from the cup discount to buy yourself a bonus coffee.

  • Unplug your Christmas lights before you go to sleep.

If you’ve had your Christmas lights installed since November 1st, you’re probably already feeling the monetary pinch from keeping them running all the time. Remember to unplug your lights before you go to sleep. Anyway, no one’s awake to appreciate them. If you can, invest in LED lights too. While they cost more in the beginning, they also last longer and are safer to use.

Christmas Spirit

  • Unplug appliances before you leave town.

Appliances left plugged in still use electricity – often called “phantom energy” – so unplug them when not in use, and especially when you’re about to leave on a long trip.

genius invention: why didn't I think of this?

  • Say no to food waste.

Food waste – whether it’s the waste from food preparation (think peelings) or waste from your plate – almost always also ends up in landfills. Once there, they decompose without air and produce methane.  Methane is an even worse greenhouse gas compared to carbon dioxide, trapping 28 to 36 times more heat compared to CO2.

Reduce food waste by planning properly so that there are no leftovers. If there are leftovers, give them away or eat them right away before they spoil.

Compost the food prep waste. If you have even a small garden, you can compost at home using the Bokashi method. If you need to compost food waste from a large party (your company party maybe?), consider hiring a composting service like Green Space.

The aftermath 3

  • Go for greener gifting.

Everybody loves gifts. We love getting them and we love giving them (to people we actually like). But to soften the blow to the environment and avoid all the messy post-unwrapping cleanup, consider:

  • Gifts that don’t need to be wrapped, like tickets to concerts or classes and store gift certificates. One of my friends gave me gift certificate for classes with Writer’s Block Philippines and it’s one of my favorite things ever.
  •  

  • Gifts that keep on giving, like donations to charity on behalf of your recipient
  • Buying gifts from environmentally and socially conscious SMEs. Buying locally made items from local companies supports more jobs and keeps the money inside our economy. Last year, I gave away bottles of tea concentrate from Bayani Brew. The tea leaves come from small Filipino farmers who are paid fairly, the price is right, and the tea itself is damned good. I’m also a big fan of SGD Coffee, who buys their beans directly from small farmers in Sagada,
  • Placing gifts in reusable gift bags. I save all the paper gift bags from the previous Christmas so I can reuse them for the next year. If you don’t like paper gift bags, maybe you can learn the art of furoshiki instead.

For this year’s gifts, I’ve gone for the following:

  • Bath and Home Care gift sets from Messy Bessy for the family titos and titas. Messy Bessy’s corporate gift guide, Christmas catalog, and regular catalog are available for download:

Messy Bessy Corporate Gift Guide 2018

Messy Bessy CATALOG 2018

They offer free shipping within Metro Manila for orders worth at least Php 5,000. If you’re getting items from the regular catalog, they offer 5% discount and free shipping for orders worth at least Php 5,000.

  • Baby-safe liquid laundry detergent from Messy Bessy for my brother and sister-in-law (and super cute niece)
  • Books from Adarna House and Tahanan Books for my inaanaks. Support local authors and publishers!
  • Homemade goodies for my friends and cousins. Yes, they are my (unwilling) test subjects for my baking.

 Merry Christmas everyone!

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Book Review: “One Day in December”by Josie Silver

A novel just in time for Christmas

What do you do when you spot The One, fall irrevocably in love in the span of 60 seconds, lose them right after, spend the next year searching for them in every bus stop in London, then finally meet them again when they’re introduced as your best friend’s new boyfriend? Thus begins One Day in December and the love story of Laurie and Jack, spanning ten years of heartbreak, choosing to be happy, loss, what-might-have-beens, and finding happiness again.

Laurie James meets, or doesn’t meet, Jack O’Mara at the bus stop on December 21, 2008. She’son an overcrowded bus, on the way home from a long shift at a hotel reception desk – a job she’s working while she’s trying to get a job as a staff writer at a magazine. She looks out the window and sees the most beautiful man sitting at the bus stop. He looks up, their eyes meet, and something shifts in the universe. But as fate would have it, Laurie’s bus pulls away just as Jack gets up. Laurie spends a year looking for “Bus Boy” throughout London, roping in her best friend Sarah to help with the search. She doesn’t find him, not until that fateful day when Sarah introduces the new boyfriend that she’s head-over-heels for. “Bus Boy” is Jack, Sarah’s boyfriend.

Romance novels live and die by their characters, and One Day passes with flying colors. Laurie and Jack are fully formed and relatable: good people who genuinely care for each other and the people around them but are deeply flawed as well. The story is told from Laurie and Jack’s alternating point of views, which gives us a lot of insight into their motivations. The downside of this is that Sarah’s characterization gets lost in the shuffle. As Laurie’s BFF and Jack’s girlfriend, Sarah becomes the ultimate example of virtue and success, and any flaws she has is told to us,not shown.

The story also benefits from the longer time span. The ten years it takes for Laurie and Jack to finally be together are caused by both circumstances and their personal choices, which makes their journey all the better for it. There’s some pining to be sure, but neither one fully depends on the other for their personal growth. Josie Silver handles their will they-won’t they with a deft hand, making sure that there are no irredeemable bad guys.

One frustration of mine with regard sto romance novels is when the characters are at the mercy of the plot, where they have no agency and every roadblock to their happily ever after is an external force. I’m happy that it wasn’t the case here.

My only major regret is that the resolution happens so quickly. Laurie and Jack were separated for so long.Surely Ms. Silver could have devoted more page time to their happily ever after? As someone who got sucked into this story, I would have appreciated a longer and more substantial final act.

All in all, One Day in December is highly recommended for believers in love at first sight. And even if you don’t,it’s still recommended for its depiction of supportive female friendships and the importance of finding your own happiness and way in life even without The One.

This review was first published as part of Fully Booked’s First Look Club. Thank you very much to Fully Booked (and Ilia!) for the opportunity 🙂

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My long absence and Christmas Eve on the island

My long absence from this blog is due to my graduate thesis. It’s all my thesis’ fault! I took 2.5 months off work so that I could work on it full-time in Manila. Unfortunately, those 2.5 months were not enough as my adviser had me do more analysis work to get the results we wanted. Even more unfortunately, I really had to go back to work this December (before Christmas!) because I work for a resort and Christmas-New Year’s is our busiest time of the year. Good luck if I can finish my thesis now.

Anyway, here are some photos from our little island celebration. These photos are the result of weeks to months of prep work, including turning our conference room into Santa’s workshop. This post is all about the finished product. I’ll post the behind-the-scenes photos afterwards 🙂

The belen (Nativity scene) made by the guides. Simple but effective.
The belen (Nativity scene) made by the guides. Simple but effective.

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The books I gave for Christmas

I admit it: I love giving books as gifts because 1) it’s always a challenge to come up with something that the recipient will like, and 2) getting it right is a huge rush. And hey, books are gifts that keep on giving because you can always pass them around when you’re done with them 🙂

The books I gave this Christmas:

“Something Borrowed” by Emily Giffin

  • To whom: Mom
  • Why: My mom loves her rom-com novels. After a long day at the bakery, all she wants to do when she gets home is relax AKA no thinking involved. I’ll probably give her a Julia Quinn novel next year.

“Dog Tricks” by Mary Ray and Justine Harding

  • To whom: Dad
  • Why: because we have two American Cocker Spaniels at home who my dad loves as much as his (human) children 😛

“1,000 Places to See Before You Die” (2nd edition) by Patricia Schultz

  • To whom: Mom and Dad
  • Why: because these two folks love to travel. Upon browsing the book, they were tickled to find out that they’ve already been to quite a few places on the list. Mom always says that we (her children) are way luckier than she was because we started traveling while we were still young. (My parents took me on my trip out of the country when I was 12, compared to my mom first going abroad when she was almost 30.) My mom also believes in spending her hard-earned money on experiences like traveling instead of on stuff.

“Leviathan” by Scott Westerfeld

  • To whom: my younger-younger brother
  • Why: because he likes to read (OMG IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY TO WRITE THAT). After successfully getting him hooked on Harry Potter (after many years of trying!), I steered him towards Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book gets a thumbs-up), then Eoin Colfer (he says Artemis Fowl is okay), then Rick Riordan (he loves Percy Jackson). For my encore, I figured I couldn’t go wrong with an Aurealis Award-winning steampunk novel that was also listed by YALSA as one of their “2010 Best Books for Young Adults”. Will be borrowing this book from him once he’s done with it.

“That Summer” by Sarah Dessen

  • To whom: my younger sister
  • Why: because I needed a novel targeted towards teenage girls that did not feature 1) vampires, 2) werewolves, 3) angels, 4) demons, 5) shapeshifters, or 6) some other supernatural thing. Seriously. I asked the guy at the Customer Service counter in Fully Booked if he could recommend something and all he could say was “Uhhhh….”. *facepalm* Thankfully, I remembered that Danes lent me some Sarah Dessen books via Kindle (that I haven’t read yet >_<) and Danes would never give me anything shitty.

For my other brother, my Christmas gift was doing all of his Christmas shopping and gift wrapping plus a Doctor Who shirt 😛

Happy holidays everyone and have an awesome 2012!

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Merry Christmas from Buffy the Fluffy Reindeer!

Subjecting the cutest dog ever to the ignominy of antlers. With bells.

Seeing as I wouldn’t be able to spend Christmas at home, I decided to indulge in a little Christmas spirit while I was still at home. Meet Buffy: our family dog of some seven years. She’s normally an easy-going dog – the epitome of what a guard dog should NOT be 😛 – but she draws the line at antlers. She did not appreciate the tinkling headband at all. She stayed put whenever my brother held the antlers in place but shook them off the moment he let go. So yeah, that’s Robbie’s hand holding the antlers.

May this vision of cuteness add to your Christmas happiness. Merry Christmas everyone! 🙂

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my Christmas 2008 wishlist

The Christmas 2008 wishlist AKA the stuff I’ve been wanting to get but have not found them and/or have no way of getting them 

BOOKS

  • “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems” – Val Jones
  • “Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage” – Daniel Esty, Andrew Winston
  • “Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox” – Eoin Colfer
  • Chrestomanci series – Dianne Wynne Jones (though I have “Witch Week”)
  • “Coraline” – Neil Gaiman (because my copy is missing )
  • “Neverwhere” – Neil Gaiman
  • “Star Wars, Legacy of the Force: Invincible” – Troy Denning
  • “A Guide to the Birds of the Philippines” – Kennedy et al.
  • any of the Roald Dahl books except for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, “The Great Glass Elevator”, and “The BFG”

MUSIC

  • “Fragmented” and “Bipolar” – Up Dharma Down
  • “Endings of a New Kind” – Taken by Cars
  • “All Seats are Taken” – The Pin-Up Girls
  • “Sugarfree Live with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra” – Sugarfree
  • “Sa Wakas” – Sugarfree (because my copy is missing. Waaaahhh )

RANDOM STUFF

  • the plastic thing where you wrap your earbuds cord around so that it doesn’t get tangled
  • non-foam earbud covers (do they come in anything other than foam though?) because the foam covers make my ears itch
  • socks. As a great man once said, “One can never have enough socks“. Ankle socks please in different colors

EXPENSIVE STUFF

  • a new laptop. Because my IBM Thinkpad R50e (1.5 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HD, no battery life whatsoever) is begging to be replaced.
  • external hard drive. Funny how 160 GB sounds huuuuge until a notice pops up that you only have 15 GB left.
  • external DVD burner (my brother’s unit stopped working. Sob)
  • new lenses (in my dreams! Hahaha). I’ve been dreaming of a 10-22 mm lens (is there one with IS?) and a 70-300 mm one. Whooo.

So there. Hahaha. Anyway, a little bit of wishful thinking never hurt anyone