No Other Woman Movie: Realizations

The other day I downloaded the movie No Other Woman (sorry to those against piracy!) and I was watching it during break times at work.  I finished it and liked the movie, then asked hubby to watch it again with me two nights ago.  Surprisingly, I enjoyed the movie very much, and it may very well hit a spot in my top ten movies of my time (currently what's in my list are transformers - all three of them, and pretty woman - its a pretty short list now). I think the actors gave a superb performance. I'm not saying they can win best actors or actresses come awards night, but I personally think portrayed their characters very well.  The script was well written, with quite a few quotable quotes in there, and the plot was really so nice because it plays around what actually happens in real life.  That to me is the best thing.

(Spoiler Alert)
The movie plays around the lives of three individuals: Ram (Derek), Charmagne (Christine) and Cara (Anne).  Ram and Charmagne are married for 5 years, with Ram being a furniture salesman (or owner, wasn't clear in the movie) and Charmagne was a housewife.  Cara is the heiress of a successful businessman who happens to be developing a luxury resort, she's liberal and studied in NY.  Ram and Cara meet during one of the visits of Ram to the resort as he is one of the bidders for the furniture of the resort.  To cut the story short, they get into a relationship and Charmagne finds a way to confirm it, and in the end there was fighting, there was temporary separation, but all ends well as Cara leaves and Ram and Charmagne gets back together.

Being a wife myself, I feel the character of Charmagne.  And yet, I can't really blame Ram's character.  Ok, so you may think its all his fault.  I am not all for the getting into an affair is ok thing, but somehow I have come to accept the fact that men are not really that hard to spell.  An affair may not be the first thing on their minds, but offer them something in a silver platter (aka a girl saying that theirs is a non-committal relationship) and you have a guy sold.  Everyone wants freebies anyway.  So ok, in the end Cara falls in love, and apparently for the first time, and she decides to fight for Ram too.

There are soooo many realizations with this movie, I think I can't even spell them out in one post.  For one, wives can think theirs is an ideal marriage.  How do you know when there's something going on? Worse, how do you know something is amiss when your husband is acting normally anyway?  What is normal behavior?

When you're in the position of the wife who had been cheated on, how do you move on?  Or do you forgive at all?  This is a subject of discussion in the forum I'm in with mostly wives and moms.  You know what?  I've told myself over and over again that I don't mind one-night stands.  What I can't tolerate will be him getting into an affair.  I can't share him with anyone else.  But you know what, after watching that movie, I realize how much pain an affair can cause in a relationship.  I won't change my stand, but understand where the wife is coming from, having to leave the house to allow herself to heal.  I might have done the same thing, heal, then fight for him.  but that will only be after I see that he really commits to the marriage.  If he's staying just because and there is no love left, then why bother?  I'll show him what he's losing though?

In the end, I realize that more than preparing for a fight with the mistress, its important that a wife makes sure that she can be the other woman.  Be as desirable as you can be.  You can be a housewife (but not a boring housewife), a career woman, or a mom, but you have to also play the role of the mistress. That way, who would think to go astray?

Almost November!

The days are going by so fast nowadays.  Ever since we started the -ber months the days have been going on fast forward all of a sudden.  Not that I mind though.  I'm happy.  In two weeks we are already off to HK. Yey! Its a dream to see the excitement of my little girl on seeing the Disney characters, on seeing her happiness with the rides, stuff like that.  Last time we were there she was too young to know the characters except for Pooh, now that she's 4 years old she knows all the characters and I soooo look forward to her enjoying Disneyland.

They also declared two consecutive Mondays as holidays: October 31 and November 7. Yey for that. Time for rest and for me to fully prepare for my bazaar.

Then the bazaar weekend, Right now, at a little less than a month to go, I am down to only 17 more booths open for November and 20 for December.  Its the fastest so far, I expect bookings to flood in on the last two weeks of November, but at this point, I'm kinda hoping next week we can fill in the slots, or at least till we leave for HK.  Its not that far off anyway.  So happy.  December bazaar comes after, but I'm pretty confident about that too.

So the weekend will be spent packing up the bazaar flyers, ready for mailing by next week for most participants who did send in their address, and retrieving the addresses of those who didn't?

Overall its a happy time now.  The only downside I see right now is that unlike the past years, I'm not too keen on the halloween parties.  I guess this is mainly because we have something much more exciting to look forward to.  I don't have a costume yet for Jess.  And well, I'm not too excited about it at all.

Midweek - I want to destress!

Its only Wednesday and yet I feel like its been a long week and I can't wait for it to be over.  My Monday and Tuesday were really heavy days at work so today I just had to forget all the stress and (almost) did not any work done.  Well, part of it was having dinner with friends on a Tuesday night and getting home at 11pm to find Jess still up and wanting to play, so I really slept at past 12 already and woke up at 6am to cook food for the day.  Stress! At work I barely got anything done simply because I was way to tired to think.  My mind just hibernated.
So I'm on my way to bed now.  I got a bit of work done on the bazaar but I'm just not up to do any flyers designing this evening when I'm still on sleep mode. Hopefully tomorrow.

New Gadget Again!

This year has been a mixture of good and bad experiences for our family.  For one, I would like to think that this year was good for us financially and career-wise.  First we were able to get the company car, and since we had some savings, we were able to add some cash to upgrade the company car to an SUV (Ford Escape).  It makes us a bit more confident when it comes to heavy rains.

While we were drained financially when I miscarried last March, we were not exactly in a rut.  I'm really thankful that I had a great job that at least paid for all the bills, and hubby is able to save a bit while I cover most household expenses.  

Last month I was able to convince hubby to help me get a Macbook Pro.  Since my office laptop did not allow me to install Photoshop, I had to have a reliable laptop to use.  The laptop hubby was using had an LCD problem so he has to use it with a monitor, and that is not exactly handy.  The old netbook is being used by my college student-househelp, and its not also exactly the best in performance when it comes to Photoshop -- meaning it hangs a whole lot and is really frustrating (happened to me the first time I tried to make the backdrop for the bazaar).  Anyway, I digress. The MBP is now my home laptop.  The office laptop only goes home with me on weekends.  Its 12 months to pay at 0% interest so it isn't as heavy to pay.  Always been my dream gadget (yes, I've wanted this one ever since I can remember, and I can live without ever getting an iPhone but a Mac is one thing I've dreamed of owning).  

Now that the bazaar planning is already in the works, I've decided that the next business investment for me would be a DSLR.  

Background, since I started with organizing bazaars, I bought another business investment every run.  The past two years (2009 and 2010) it was for the digital printing business --- heat press last 2009 and the pvc card package in 2010.  This year we bought a DSLR.  Hopefully by 2012 we can already seriously start the digital printing business. Always told myself that I should make sure to teach the hubby how to do it in Photoshop since its not something I can do all by myself.  That's my target in 2012.  

This is what we got:  Bought it from Kimstore and although there was a slight glitch and I'm waiting for the replacement SD card, I'm happy with the ease in dealing with them.  Happy that we have this and hoping I can learn how to use this well soon!

Developing Jessica's Artistic side

This morning our family decided to go to Trinoma to have a little family time.  We had to leave early because we didn't want to have a hard time getting a parking space (QC malls are notorious to me for having limited parking spaces, no matter how big the malls are, same with SM Megamall).  We also had to drop by my mom and dad's house to give them some chicken nuggets so we went out early.  We did arrive at Trinoma around five minutes to 10am so we got a great parking space but the mall was still closed, we had to wait around 10minutes or so.  It wasn't too bad, except Jessica wasn't in much of a mood to go around walking.  We first let her play at Kevin's playroom at the Kids Zone.  The one hour there will give me and hubby some time to walk around the mall by ourselves, plus it lets Jess interact with other kids there.  I saw the Gymboree there also offered an hourly rate, but it costs a whopping Php 320 an hour, so I had to beg off on that, I should get a trial class instead. hahaha :-p  Anyway, we ate lunch after fetching Jessica when the hour was done, and so her wearing a pirate's hat and a sword.  Really cute but she removed it even before I got to take her picture. duh.

We decided to eat first before going around again, and unfortunately Jessica requested to eat at Jollibee and we didn't have much of a choice.  Gave her a jolly kiddie meal and she was happy for a while until she requested for something we couldn't understand (except for a word: yellow!).  After she was done crying we just told her we're going to the toy store and it improved her mood. We  went to Toys R Us and Jessica would point at so many toys she wants which I would reject because they seem pretty useless to me: stuffed toys, barbie dolls, pink wand, etc etc.  But she did point some stuff that would be useful like Megablocks, but she had those already and won't need new ones.  She then got this one and for me its pretty useful and would be something good to develop her artistic and creative side, which I think really has potential (hubby draws well and is good at this, I AM NOT! hahaha).  And its handy enough to bring anywhere. I may just need to replenish paints and crayons (and lots of paper) but essentially its easier to lug around because of the compartments and the retractable legs.  It costs Php 1,399.  But hubby agrees its worth the money.  So I went for it.  We also bought some drawing notebooks, more markers, poster paint and glitter paint (Jessica wanted these) at National bookstore.  I'm happy she loved it and used it immediately after we unpacked it.

 This looks like a laptop table.  She can sit on the floor or couch when the legs are used or use the table on top of a table when the legs are folded.

The paper can be locked in so it won't move while she's working on her artworks.  Notice too the slots above so she can easily place the watercolors in separate compartments.  I see these watercolor types in Japan home for 88 bucks so I know I have a problem once the first set runs out.

Under the blue cover comes separate compartments and free art materials: 8 watercolors, 2 containers for water, one of which has this great cover of using a brush, 5 markers (the ones we bought from National are already included here), two brushes and 12 crayons.  I was also able to sneak in the scissors - Jessica loves to cut paper.  

Clean up is pretty easy since we can easily wash or wipe it, whichever would be applicable.  I love it! 

I think this is more effective than the megasketch we bought just a week ago, which can be used by our next child anyway so I'm not too sad she doesn't use it much -- she was back to asking for bond paper after a day! :-D

And then my recurring thought is this.  I am glad and thankful that I have a good career that allows me to buy these things for her.  When she starts studying and we're spending 2x what we spend now on tuition fees, these gifts won't come off as easily. 

Car Maintenance

Ok, so today I had the new car scheduled for maintenance, its actually the third maintenance schedule for the 10,000km or 6months PMS (whichever comes first).  The sad thing about it is the mileage is only at 3,000 km. But since this is something we have to deal with because of the warranty, then it has to be done at the dealership.  Good thing about it is that hubby told the service advisor to use mineral oil instead of synthetic oil.  I mean, who needs expensive oil for 3 months use and like another 1000 km?  We barely use the car, I use it daily for a 4km trip to and from the office, so really, by how much can you really tire the car out, right.  So anyway, from the initial quotation of P 8,960, the actual bill came out at P5,894.47.  Whew, that's a whopping P2,000 off by just using mineral oil instead of synthetic oil.  The joys of having a husband who knows he's way around cars.  Now what I have to prepare for next is the next PMS, which comes around December. Whew another 5000 I think. :-(  Looking on the positive side, at least I am not paying for any amortization.  So this is enough I guess. :-)  Count your blessings, right?

Fixed!

Whew. That was a scare.  Ok updating my previous post.  I deleted some widgets and removed that hacked script. Whew.  Irritated.  Can't believe someone would hack my page.  Now more than ever I want to get my own domain.  But that's too much to ask now that I still have a lot on my plate.
Maybe some other time. :-)

Where'd my blog go??

Drat, someone might have hacked into my account and got through my blog.  I'm quite irritated.  I still do not know how it happened and what to do with it but I am posting anyway.  Not in a mood to check on it today, but believe me, I am sooo pissed!