Tuesday, February 19

Commercial muna

i'm back in manila taking a ten-day break from my couchwife life (as if it was so stressful!). actually, it's a more like an errand break -- i have a marriage license and college diploma to pick up, both of which i need to make the shift from tourist to resident in singapore.

apart from those two must-do's, the other major must on my list is spending time with my mom. we got off to a roaring start when i arrived sunday -- trying on her latest ukay finds (unused zara and h&m goddess dresses!), looking at wedding photos together, getting a "status report" on the home front, and talking about plans for the future.

speaking of future plans, this showbiz-starved kapuso loyalist also plans to drag her with me to see richard gutierrez and marian rivera's my best friend's girlfriend (bfgf) tomorrow.

the rest of my to-do list for this trip is wonderfully mindless.
  • buy funky paper and envelopes for my portfolio
  • buy new levi's
  • buy a blowdryer, doormat, bath mats, everyday cutlery and a bathroom organizer at landmark
  • buy bloom lipgloss and prestige liquid liner at beauty bar
  • buy true match foundation
  • buy mascara from the face shop
  • buy photo paper (teka, puro buy na yata ito)
  • stop by lime to check out dresses (ayan, kunyari hindi daw buy)
  • visit gene and tatat at lfia
  • visit gma friends
  • visit acs at rehearsals
  • close citibank account
  • pay off bpi mastercard
  • give out thank-you cards
  • pick up last paycheck from gma
  • print wedding pics in bulk for mom
  • have miniature paintings from udaipur framed
  • re-do clearance at ateneo
  • discuss house plans with mom
  • buy birthday gift for marlon (and figure out how to smuggle it past him)
oh, and i'm seeing endo on friday with jeline! that i thought of watching bfgf before this critically acclaimed indie movie speaks volumes about my innate and deep-seated kabakyaan.

(i remember attending the creatives' briefing for gma's marimar launch last year and shocking everyone with my intimate knowledge of the original series on rpn-9. i giddily referenced minor characters and subplots that left even the program manager just blinking at me. "bakit mo alam 'yan? akala namin sosyal ka!" one of the corp comm girls said accusingly. for the record, it was my sister who faithfully recorded each after-school episode of marimar on our vhs. juskolord vhs!!!)

anyway. should i still attempt to swing by swap meet on kamuning? hmmm.

Friday, February 15

Home sweet home

i figured before i fly back to manila tomorrow, i should write about life in singapore so far. i don't know why i feel like i should -- although the manila trip is just for ten days to pick up my marriage license and do other odd errands (more on which later), i have the sense of it being kind of a no-man's land between two places. the first place is my life of leisure here in singapore for the past three weeks. the second place is still unknown.

maybe it's because i feel like i'm not going to have this kind of life for long. yes, feeling ko magkakatrabaho na ako. yan naman eh. so what i've had for the past couple of weeks is worth documenting. starting off with where i live with marlon -- former boyf, now current husband.

we rent a three-bedroom condo unit north of the city (which is what they call the main cbd around orchard). back when we first sealed the deal on it, there were already things we loved about the place -- the relatively spacious kitchen, the kitchen counter, the newly renovated feel, the bedroom-turned-tv-room, and not least of all the walk-in closet in the master's.

but living here now, i totally love it. i love the airiness and the big windows, and that it's so bare. i love having three rooms all to myself during the day, which is why i often wander through them doing my little odd things (watching tv, doing chores, surfing) while marlon is at work. lately i've come to love that we have two bathrooms, which is great when we come home from dinner out and both have to poop. romantic, i know.

this is the living room... so far. we have a huge custom-made daybed from tagaytay, outfitted with a mattress and gorgeous white cutwork sheets from india. i tell you, sheets were the heart-racing splurge of our honeymoon (heart-racing refers to us in relation to our present credit card bill). we also got lovely white-on-white block printed cotton as pamalit for the daybed.

the kilim rugs are a gift from my mom, which she's had since i was about eight or nine years old. i hated them back then, because they were twiny and scratchy, not plush and soft like other "normal" carpets. now that i'm grown up i totally love them, and i asked my mom for them last year. four of them are now layered on the living room floor.

oh, right, the bubble wrap on the floor. we had an insane amount of bubble wrap from all the stuff we shipped. having it in the house was fun for a while, but it's all gone now.

not all the stuff we shipped had to be bubble-wrapped though.


my tamad meals consist of vienna sausage (straight out of the can, no cooking, with lots of ketchup), lucky me pancit canton chilimansi, and century tuna spanish style. marlon threw in a couple of bottles of bangus in olive oil for himself.

but back to the living room.

remember this mirror? after being safely shipped all the way from manila, marlon put a nail through it as he was attempting to hang it up with a homemade rig of nylon rope and heavy-duty 3M hooks.

then we found out we could make paalam from our supernice landlady michelle to drill holes in the wall. so we had the cracked glass replaced, a hole drilled above the daybed, and voila!


i have happily organized our conjugal book collection by color, just as i was inspired to do by the domino blog many months ago. isn't it lovely?

marlon is ecstatic about acquiring my library. he started off beautifully with the last unicorn, and says he may even read my christopher pikes and sweet valley twins one day. i can't believe he hasn't read the griffin and sabine books, which he gave me for my birthday when we first started going out.

this is what the master bedroom looked like about two weeks ago.


it has improved by leaps and bounds since then, pretty much because we got a bed and lost the boxes. i've unpacked all my clothes, bags and shoes and put them into the lovely walk-in closet. i've also realized that i want to chuck a lot of my tops.

ikea is discontinuing the whole malm line of bedroom furniture, which we wanted at first. so we went with the noresund instead and spent two days spray-painting it white. that was fun, although cleaning up the white paint dust from 6.5 cans of paint was not. we also had streaky white kulangot for about two hours afterwards. but worth the effort, don't you think?

we relegated marlon's bachelorhood bedsheets to the guest bedroom and gave our (ehem) nuptial bed the royal treatment. when i mentioned that bedsheets were the big splurge of the honeymoon, i'm mostly talking about the pashmina bedspread in that photo. those babies (we got a couple of other colors and designs) deserve a whole blog post of their own. the indigo-and-white block-printed cotton sheets from jaipur (under the bedspread) are but a distant second in the splurge category. we also got nice white paisley quilt covers and pillowcases from ikea.

speaking of ikea, our tv room is a mini ikea showcase. however, it's way comfy and is probably the most furnished room in the house so far. on the left is the very first piece of furniture i assembled myself. i'm quite proud of it. on the right is the catchall for everything that should belong in a desk or dresser, which i don't have at the moment. for photo purposes, i covered it all up with the sheepskin throw.

the guest room, which we vacated just a couple of days ago to move into the master's, is a bleeding disaster. you really don't want to see it right now.

so that's the house, basically. there's still quite a bit of furniture we don't have plus a couple that are on their way from india. still, it's a huge improvement over when i first arrived and was shocked to realize that we had... no wastebaskets. the goal is to have it ready for a housewarming party sometime in late march or early april. plus, the guest room has to be in shape in time for my sister's and mom's visit in mid-april.

a peek outside our doorstep and around cactus drive, next up!

Thursday, February 14

A Valentine first

as i put on my makeup earlier this evening, it hit me: for the first time in my life, i have a date on valentines' day. i love that this first is a first i'm having with marlon. my husband! yes, i was (and still am kilig).

i was actually a little nonchalant about valentines' day, mentally shrugging to myself and inwardly dubbing our plans "simple": juno at cathay cineleisure on orchard road, where we typically watch movies, a light dinner somewhere on boat quay, and a nightcap at harry's, where we like to go for live jazz (for that old married couple feeling). nothing elaborate, since both he and i don't buy the commercial hype.

then i realized we had never gone out on valentines' day. that i had never gone out on valentines' day. suddenly it no longer mattered what we were going out to do. just that we were going to finally go out.

this occasion deserves a zigzag part!

i loved dressing up and looking forward to the end of the workday. ganun pala ang feeling. sarap!

--

grabe rumaket ang mga tao dito pag valentines' day. i found out how decent/date restaurants do it when i tried to make reservations for an italian dinner. they ban regular a la carte dining for one night and thrust overpriced set meals in your face. a hundred and eighty bucks for a three-course dinner? noooo thank you.

then marlon found out how florists cash in on v-day when he tried to buy me flowers.

marlon joins the queue of procastinating boyfriends and husbands

i said if he was going to get me something, then i wouldn't mind something a little offbeat like a big sunflower, which he got me a couple of years back. but apparently florists don't let you buy single blooms -- your flower of choice must be grouped with a whole bunch of other flowers, and wrapped with purple or white paper. which is how all the girls end up with identical flowers.. and i mean all, i saw dozens of them today.

lookit! they all have the same paper wrapping! *shudders*

our ninangs had lilac cabbage roses for the wedding.
why would you want to give them to your girlfriend?

finally marlon saw a student hawking flowers on boat quay who only had single blooms left to sell. we seized the lone pink gerbera left in the nearly empty basket.

it didn't quite work behind the ear, so i stuck it in my purse.

it occurred to me that my single flower might have seemed kind of sad to the girls who were walking around with giant teddy bears and factory-issue flowers. only marlon and i knew that i was happy to have exactly what i wanted.

Tuesday, February 12

Da who???

okay. so the reason i haven't blogged about the wedding yet is that i want to select and upload all the photos first. which is way, way harder than it sounds. with four 4.7-gig dvds full of keepers from the dastardly dynamic dagooc brothers of mangored, it's taking marlon and myself days to plow through everything.

there are tons of beautiful shots, and we're having a hard time keeping it down to the 250 we're allotted for the album. what i'm enjoying most, though, and find irrestible to blog, are the shots that definitely won't make it into the album. and although i know you want to see pictures of the white dress, my glowing gorgeousness, etc etc, i know i won't be able to sleep tonight without blogging about this mystery.

picture this: it's a beautiful december afternoon in our little chapel in batangas, and our phenomenal photographers are attempting to take a lovely portrait of the mother of the bride in her gleaming golden dress.


or of little alexa tamayo, the pretenatually photogenic baby sister of my two flower girls dani and ela.


ngunit umihip ang masamang hangin. because instead, they wind up with a snap of...


MYSTERY CREATURE!!!


she's not related to me. she's not related to marlon. not a friend, and as far as i know, not a supplier.

SO WHO IN F*CK'S NAME IS THIS WOMAN????? ANSWER MEEEEE!!!!

in need of eye relief? check out some of the official wedding photos on mangored's blog.

Tuesday, February 5

The day that was

before i start blogging, a sneak peek. switch on your speakers or put on your earphones -- although i don't expect anybody to know the song, it's a gorgeous one.



on-site avp by mg digital video.

Monday, February 4

Comparing notes

a ym exchange with eena, one of my favorite friends from high school. she's married to julien, a jolly, lovable swiss-french bear, and works as a flight attendant in dubai.
Eena: so i m sure you're busy fixing your new apoartment
Deepa: yeah! unpacking boxes, kind of putting everything in order and dealing with marlon's bachelor habits haha
Deepa: we just spray-painted our bed yesterday
Eena: hahha messy?
Deepa: with clothes, super
Deepa: he tends to leave clothes all over the apartment
Eena: men are like that
Eena: parang snake! i know!
Deepa: exactly!!!
Eena: oh my god! welcome na talaga to da club!
Deepa: i bought him a hamper last year and he doesn't use it
Eena: and you need to remind him...PUT IT IN THE HAMPER. promise it will go on till you guys are 70
Deepa: i was so ticked off today when i found... socks on the dining room chairs, jocks on the floor of our walkin closet, a t-shirt on the daybed in the living room, another t-shirt in the bathroom and... shorts on the floor of our bedroom. TWO FEET from the hamper!!!!
Deepa: ang lapit lapit na lang diba????
Eena: oo hahahah!
Eena: matututo din yan
Deepa: training training! in fairness, na-train ko na siya to buy matching things for our kitchen. we have a red frying pan kasi so he bought red and black cooking utensils
Deepa: kasi he knows i like to match stuff
Eena: oh my god hahahaha!
Deepa: diba? moderate success
Eena: pwede pwede. he's learning..your new pet..haha
Deepa: and then he has this habit of emptying his pockets when he comes home... and leaving the contents anywhere: coins, keys, receipts etc
Deepa: so i figured i just need like a bowl in the living room where he can dump everything
Eena: SAME!!! OMG
Eena: yeah ang mahiwagang bowl is the ANSWER. but like the hamper, you have to remind him ALL the time
questions for reflection: are men really like that? if married, what house habits of the spouse did (or do) you find most difficult to break? and will my proposed multipurpose bowl simply go the way of our ill-fated laundry hamper?

discuss.