december 17 or the day I went to the Lantern parade carrying a big box of presents

I spent my Saturday afternoon with the child residents of Hospicio de San Jose talking
about peace, war and climate change.

my first AIDS candlelight memorial.

Day 2 was island hopping day.

I've been very busy with sudden work both paying and non-paying. At least I get to practice photography again.

First year is finally over. Second sem has been kinder than the first but I know that's just to make up for the B*tch goddess that is LU4. Still busy though and I have to finalize my summer schedule. Unfortunately, making money is not included.

been busy giving birth to writing our research paper and being such a med student.

anyway, we visited DAMAS which is a shelter/orphanage in Manila.

medgroove 2010

Is it my fault I was sitting in that location?

Medrhythmia 2010

Love love the stage lights.

Hating on multiply and its broken import function. They're really trying hard to discourage users from uploading pictures first at dedicated photo hosting sites such as Flickr and Photobucket. And right when the Photobucket bulk uploader has started working for me.

Anyway, here are some photos of things from december...

It looks like I'm not going to make my 500th post by the end of the year which is fine. I don't want to make it look like I'm having too much free time in med school. Totally untrue...

And people who made med school not too sucky...

We do have a proper group pic in case you're wondering.

Walking along the oval...

The weather didn't cooperate and turned cloudy just as the parade was passing by Engineering. It pains me to see how crappy the parade photos turned out.

And trees! Oh glorious trees!

When I was a kid, I liked watching my parents brush their teeth. They don't have real teeth though, dentures. It only occured to me that I didn't find them having dentures at a "young" age weird. I only asked once and only when I was older. I guess I just assumed by the time one is thirty, they lose their teeth. Hm... Hopefully, the cause of their predicament is poor dental hygiene and not some hereditary factor. I really love eating with my real teeth.

Ended up editing the first final draft of our report. OMG. It sucks. So bad. There were paragraphs, there were non-paragraphs, there were even non-sentences. And worse, wrong trends and analyses! Shit! At least for the first third. The rest, which is the part the prof would most likely read, is cleaner and is better written. Of course there is still that issue of overlapping topics among paragraphs. I think I can remove at least 5 pages from our report after editing.

---
I still have plenty of Laiya pics and some more San Juan pics (that I haven't finished processing yet). After that will be tons of Japan pics. JAPAN BAYBEH!

I couldn't resist.






Textures by sanami276 and certain-romance.

I got to buy new lens before the japan trip.
Japan! 7 days to go!

I hate this. Unfair. The other groups received feedback regarding their theses and how they wrote it. We didn't and now we have a graded thesis with a MISTAKE on it. It was a really obvious mistake but what hurts more is that the committee didn't even point it out to us during the open forum. Granted we could have done a better job writing that part but it is also the committee's job to point out our mistakes. We even submitted a not to be graded version of our paper, a scientific poster and even presented it yet these mistakes went unnoticed by all. Really? Why? It's on the freakin' abstract for crap's sake!

The mistakes of the other groups were pointed out. Mistakes that could have led to the demise of their theses and these were pointed out and subsequently corrected. Now they didn't receive any deductions in their grades. I'm being GC but it is still unfair. We are undergraduate students writing research papers for the first time. We needed guidance and you didn't give us any when we expected it. My suspicion that nobody among the committee managed to read our paper thoroughly is true.

---
To be clear, I agree with the comments and understand that it will make our thesis better but from a GC student POV, it really sucks. Maybe I should brace myself for more comments from the other members tomorrow. And if we were just being caught in a political play occurring in the college, argh!

---
My dad's becoming stupider. Or may more stubborn. Or both. I really should be over the hating the parents thing but he's really pushing it. One thing is that they tell me to plan our vacation to Japan and when I demand certain stuff they won't give it to me because they think it's illegal. uh... hello? anybody there? And he believes that eating this weird salt solution will lower his blood pressure. Salt. Sodium. Lower blood pressure? He also doesn't believe when I tell him that ingesting two tablespoons of oil (regardless of plant source) is bad and will make him gain weight. Hahaha! Good thing I have my mother to call unto to help me fight his belief in quackery. I blame you Jaime Galvez Tan!

---
Some old photos revisited...

I'm liking the colors and movement in these two. I guess I should thank the poor lighting conditions.

New Year pictures. The Christmas season is such a good time to practice using flash and bokeh.

----
In other news, we just passed our thesis for grading. I was forced to weedle through an issue we had to resolve. I somehow managed to not give a straight answer. Which is really not a good thing for science and technical writing.

And my clock is slowly resetting itself. My bed time comes at a later stage. I'm now both a very early morning and night(before 12pm) person. I'm least coherent during the unholy hours(1-4pm).

I got my driver's license renewed. Maybe I'll try driving on Christams...

Some more pictures. These are some of the good ones I managed to upload before my camera fainted from exhaustion.

slightly crooked "cross-processed" photoshopped photo


for the requisite Oblation photos


should be rotated but it's fine the way it is right now.


good thing I didn't delete this even though it is a bit soft



reg you're the best!

No watermark yet, as I'm using my PC to edit still I'd appreciate it if nobody steals these(assuming they're good enough). And the subtitles are not coming out right... hm...

Collected data.
Walked around the Oval alone.
Met with high school friends and acquaintances.
Walked roughly around the same distance of the Oval, again.
Took pictures(mostly crappy ones) of the Lantern parade while standing on a precarious position.
The era of the SLR is really coming.
Noted how surreal the order of the parade is. Activists then Military group. Christian group then LGBT group.
Become amazed with the Fine Arts floats.
Went to the Ampitheatre and waited for the parade to end.
Moved to another location and watched the fireworks display.
Wow!
Went to SM, bought dinner and went home.
Sleep all day. Drat! my thesis!

Pictures soon... will be really late as I lost my battery charger.