Diet day 1

I’m 5’2″, weighing my heaviest ever at 161lbs (73kgs) and I badly want to regain my fitness. Today is day 1 of my supposed Biggest Loser challenge with my husband. I started the day with an ACV capsule, then for breakfast I had coffee, granola and milk.

I’m at the office right now and for dinner I had quite a feast at Go!Salads after learning there’s a branch that’s walking distance from here. I got my favorite combo – Sweet Caroline salad and Guzzler, and also added Chicken Kebab Panini cos I was hungry.

I’m trying to practice eating before I get hungry, so I don’t overeat. But I don’t know when exactly I get hungry so today’s quite a dry run.

Apparently I’m already too hungry at 5pm after having breakfast at 2:30pm. Okay let’s work on that haha.

I really hate how I look right now. Despite my husband always saying I’m beautiful and not that fat, I can’t feel secure right when I can’t fit into XL clothes anymore. I fit a bunch of clothes at Uniqlo the other day and I look big in all of them. Well, I am pretty big right now no denying that haha.

The goal with this challenge is to lose weight (at least for me), and our strategy is to eliminate added salt and sugar in our daily meals. Our menu for the week is just boiled chicken and airfried veggies every day, no additional seasoning. Cereals and milk for breakfast, peanuts or apples for snacks. Also lots of water, lemon, and chia seeds haha.

Hope it works! I really want to get in shape this year! It’s been difficult just getting up from the bed huhu.

2023 recap: highlights and stuff

The good, the bad, and the ugly in no particular order:

✱ I got injured playing badminton

✱ I saved a total of Php4,500 worth of 50s! Pamasko rin yan!

✱ I got an award at work for passing the software support new hire onboarding exams, which apparently only 2 people passed. I always thought it was weird to get an award for it but it came at a point I was struggling with imposter syndrome so it sure validated me!

✱ I opened a GoTrade account and started putting small amounts at a time

✱ My sister got a total thyroidectomy and I was her watcher for a few days

✱ Celebrated Jeckie’s birthday in Angeles where we blew a tire on the way to haha #adventure

✱ I got an annual incentive, additional bonus, and an unexpected salary increase of 6.5k/mo just for meeting expectations

✱ I bought a Hurom juicer ♥

✱ And a pretty office chair from IKEA ♥

✱ Stayed at Nobu Hotel, Martingaled the roulette, and squandered our earnings on food, our accommodation, and more food.

✱ Welcomed Koomi in our lives 🐾

… which spiraled out on control for a while

✱ Back to my badminton injury, I got reinjured at the gym, and had to undergo ACL reconstruction and meniscus repair surgery. To date, I’m still trying to recover full flexion and extension. It’s been largely depressing how slow my progress is, but I’m hopeful.

✱ Started going to rehab

✱ Moved to a bigger unit and spent over 300k furnishing the place

✱ Gifted myself with a lot of stuff this year… starting with new rubber shoes

✱ New fitness watch

✱ New piano

✱ A double induction cooker…

✱ And finally a new vacuum. My dream vacuum! ♥

✱ 2 of my cards got auto-CLIed. One got 100% more and the other was given 50% more. Right when I’m not using them much recently. I wish I knew how to use my credit properly cos right now I’m just spending it on purchases. Hope to maybe learn to do business with it?

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Anyway that’s it! I don’t know how much I spent this year but I know it’s a lot more than we used to (because of the move). It’s a pretty abundant year for us and I’m thankful! ♥

2023 recap: films, series, and books

It’s that time of the year! In total I watched 13 films, 17 series, and read just 4 books. I’m particularly disappointed with my book count. I was heavily distracted with taking care of Koomi that I lost time to read. Yeah, I blame Koomi haha.

My favorite movie of 2023 would be Oppenheimer, hands down. It’s too epic and too masterfully made. A genius portrayal of intense calm and deafening silence. Just recalling the film gives me goosebumps!

John Wick was wildly entertaining, as usual.

Howl’s Moving Castle is beautiful, surreal; I don’t know with Ghibli but I find myself more immersed in the animation than the story itself. It’s so magical. Never fails to delight.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 is Marvel’s best movie installment of 2023. There’s not much competition though. Good Lord, Marvel Studios has been spiraling downwards big time ever since it put politics ahead of entertainment. There’s QuantuMEHnia, The lackluster Marvels, and an unimpressive Secret Invasion. Loki Season 2 was dragging up until the last episodes when everything finally gets held together (quite literally) and Loki gets an epic character arc. I loved that. Should’ve turned that into a movie instead.

My love for Mythic Quest and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia remains the same. Great writing as always.

Emily in Paris ended on an intriguing note.

Selling Sunset released 2 seasons in a year, and as usual, I live more for the drama than the houses. Chrishell kicked ass this season, not rolling over for anyone and defending herself eloquently. When I say that I mean she explains herself well. She listens and makes sure she’s listened to as well. Whereas Nicole stutters, Amanza panders, Mary walks out, Brie couldn’t care less, Chelsea backstabs. At least Emma is frank.

Mary-lou, on the other hand, I feel bad for. I don’t know what the real deal is with her but it seems like she’s struggling to make a scene with Chrishell because production says so, and she needs to bring drama to the table if she wants screen time. Just a hunch. And Chrishell saw through that and quickly calls off her BS. There’s no stopping Chrishell. She’s super focused this year no one can break her peace. Love her!

I forgot to add this in the collage but we started watching Impractical Jokers and got hooked! It’s so hillarious!

As for books…

I don’t even want to talk about it cos I didn’t read much. The Lottery (dark) and The Communist Manifesto (idealistic) are very short and I’ll be honest, I read them because I wanted to get a quick book count. They’ve been on my list anyway, but yeah. The Hating Game is a re-read which I re-enjoyed, and Book Lovers… I can’t even remember what it’s about. Urgh.

Still stuck reading A Little Life. I don’t want to give up on it because of my pride. I’m more than 50% in! Just 10 more hours to go lol. People have so much regard for this book that’s why I wanted to read it. And for the first few chapters I liked it. But the pace is so slow, author is really taking the time fleshing out the characters, introducing them properly, which is good. I love how it’s written. It’s just that there’s not much of a conflict apart from the mystery that is Jude’s childhood. I feel so bad for him I cried so hard at one point in the book. But it’s just that… it’s too slow and I don’t see an end to it haha. But I’ll power through. For the sake of my abovementioned pride lol.

♥

Success!!!

Oh my goodness I can finally say I’ve COMPLETELY migrated my domain from the overly outdated platform that is Blogger/Blogspot whatever, to WordPress!

Somebody give me a pat on the back, I freaking toiled over this for weeeeks!

Now if I die and nobody renews my domain and hosting, my online diary is gone forever.

Whereas if I kept blogging under free hosting, even if my domain doesn’t get renewed, my blog will still be alive under a subdomain so it will outlive me.

Anyway, I decided not to care because I don’t intend for my legacy to be a treasure trove of embarrasment and bad grammar. I will not be remembered that way.

I will not be remembered.

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Anywhooo. The biggest challenge with this whole migration thing is THE COMMENTS. Half the battle was trying to make Disqus appear. If I hadn’t read this article I wouldn’t have learned why it’s not showing no matter what I do. And it took me days to figure out how to describe my problem exactly, cos there were freaking layers to it.

Layers I’m proud to have peeled off as I dug deeper (into my skin) about the impossibility of one of the most popular commenting systems not integrating with one of the most popular blogging platforms. It just doesn’t make sense. So I knew I needed to refine my problem statement.

The development of my searches went this way…

• Disqus not showing on wordpress blog
• Disqus not replacing native wordpress commenting system
• Disqus not replacing default wordpress comment form
• Disqus and wpDiscuz not showing
• Disqus not working on new wordpress themes
• Disqus not showing on full site editor block editor wordpress site
• How to install wpdiscuz on modern wordpress theme

And then finally I chanced upon the abovementioned article saying you should do away with the native comments block and replace it with a shortcode instead. AAAARGGHHH.

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So yeah. When that was done, what’s left to do is map the comments to their respective posts, specially that the URL format has changed. And that’s another deal in itself.

I had to scour through all of the comments made in Disqus and made sure the post URLs is Disqus is the same as the URLs in this blog, otherwise the comments won’t load. It was such a tedious job, and I was already halfway into it when I realized I could automate the part where I check if the URL returns a 404. Wth, I could’ve saved myself a looot of time.

But now that it’s all good, I can rest!

It was both tiring and fun working on this project. Definitely a trip down memory lane looking at my old posts and everyone’s comments. Made me feel nostalgic. I miss the times when I would just write and write and write without any care for cohesion or good grammar. And miss the days when I have an actual blog list I can read and friends who check on me through my blog.

I miss it. It was fun. I miss my friends!

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Happy Holidays!

Major move

 I finally decided to move The Blahger from Blogspot to WordPress.

Note to self: Start fixing at 2019

This was so messy and I must admit I kinda did it on a whim. I was actually encouraged by one of my latest youtube comments saying she found my vlog through one of my blog post and was feeling nostaglic about reading blogs because no one write blogs anymore. Everyone’s moved to other platforms. And that’s true.

So I decided I wanted to continue blogging at The Blahger.

And so I started. I created a new domain, installed WordPress, and updated the DNS. I imported all of my posts and so far…

• I’m missing all of my comments lol
• and all of my posts for 2004 haha
• and some months from 2005 omg
• and I’m also looking at each freaking post to fix the layout because the images aren’t wrapping properly urgh

Oh wait maybe I can fix that through CSS..

Anyway. I’m tired.

But welcome to my new home!

If you landed here from a search page and couldn’t find what you’re looking for, try the search bar cos the links are probably messed up and Google hasn’t started reindexing yet 😊.

Life Lately

I’ve changed the layout again. I realized I didn’t need a sidebar because I couldn’t care less what I’m currently reading, and the recent posts is kindof redundant if you’re coming from the homepage. And it’s not like people would want to know what I’ve posted recently if they came from a specific landing page. So yeah, I just needed a search bar so I placed that with the footer.

What’s up lately?

I just made another big purchase, probably my last for this year cos it’s practically the last thing I can afford this time lol.

I finally bought a Dyson. A v12 submarine that has a mop attachment so I can finally eliminate the mop and bucket thing.

So far it’s been great. It vacuums better, feels lighter, and even though there’s a learning curve with using the mop, it’s still heaps better than having to haul a bucket of water around the house and scrub the floor for hardened dirt. My Dyson does that for me. Although it’s slower, because I have to go over one place over and over to soak it and scrub it, it takes less effort so I don’t find myself sweating after a cleaning session.

It basically made my cleaning experience less tiring.

But we’ll see in the long run. I bought a dock at Lazada that allows me to place it conveniently near the charger, where the attachments are easily accessible, and I’m loving it!

The fluffy floor brush with the laser feature is also very cool. It illuminates dust from the floor, making me clean more obsessively lol.

Aaand, because of this Dyson purchase, I got qualified for SMAC Prestige. Cool! Didn’t think I need the perks but thanks anyway!

Annoying horizonal scrollbar

Been trying to fix the comment section on my blog after discovering that it’s causing a wide white space causing a horizontal scrollbar to show. Disabling the comment section removes the white space (that’s how I discovered it) but I need my comments section so I’m still trying to figure it out. I tried replacing the comments section with Disquz, even wpDiscuz but they’re both not integrating well.

Until I decided to make this post and what have you… I just found the right words to google and found CSS workaround to fix my problem.

Turns out I just needed to hide the horizonal scrollbar by adding this to the Additional CSS in Customize.php page

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html, body {     max-width: 100%;     overflow-x: hidden; }

Alright, great!