One thing I never thought about before moving to Australia was having a haircut. At the time I left my country, a haircut costs about fifty pesos (about $1.25), if I recall correctly. I would say to the barber to give me a “barber’s cut” or “gupit binata” (bachelor’s cut) and he’d know what to do. He would get out his electric razor and buzz cut the side and back of my head. Then cut off the extra hair on the top of my head and my bangs. For the finishing touch, the barber would take out a classic straight razor (all Filipino barbers have one), sharpen it on a leather strap and shave off smoothly the back of my head near the neck. Afterward, he would dab rubbing alcohol to the part he shaved with the straight razor. Probably to minimise the chance of infection.

When I got to Australia, I was shocked to discover that haircuts for men was typically $18 (about P700)! Fortunately, there were barbers that offer haircuts for only $10 (about P390). Well, it’s still quite expensive if you convert it back to pesos but it’s the cheapest price I could find. I don’t really mind the cost of a haircut anymore nowadays. What irks me about having a haircut here is that I can’t seem to get one that I end up liking.

The system here is a bit different. First, there aren’t a lot of old-fashioned barbershops around (as far as I know, at least). Men and women go to have their hair done in what we would call parlours in the Philippines. That meant that women typically do the haircutting. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just saying.

At the shop, I would tell my barber what type of cut I would like by saying a number (such as 1, 2 or 3). I’m not sure what it means even now but a “1″ is the shortest buzz cut I could get off the side and back of my head. The bigger the number, the longer the “stubble” on the back of my neck. The number could signify the size of the clip used on the electric razor or the length of hair left behind in millimeters. I’m just guessing here.

After the barber uses the electric razor, she’d use here scissors to “blend” the hair so that my hair at the top of my head would shorten gradually as you go down to my neck where the hair was shaved with the razor. She’d also cut short my fringe (it’s what they call “bangs” here).

Here now is the problem. My hair tends to stick out when cut short enough. I usually ask for a number 2 haircut and in their attempt to blend my hair, they end up cutting the hair at the back of my head too short. So, I keep instructing my various barbers to not cut my hair too short because I don’t want my hair to stick out. But do they listen to me? Never. They still proceed to cut my hair as short as they could. I don’t get it. Wasn’t I being clear? They must not be used to cutting straight black thick Asian hair or something.

I figured that the rest of my hair wouldn’t be cut too short if I ask for a bigger numbered haircut like a number 3 maybe. It sure did the trick but the downside was that it didn’t look like I even had a haircut afterwards. What was the point then?

Early today, I had a haircut again. I asked for a number 2 haircut and added that the barber keep the hair at the back of my head a bit long. No luck. I might as well have asked for a flat-top haircut or a crew-cut. The only way to keep my hair down now is to use hair gel. And I hate using hair gel.

I’ll just have to endure this ugly haircut until my hair grows long enough to keep my hair from standing up which would take a week or two. I can’t wait.

Warm or cold, I usually never stir from my deep sleep. That meant that when the temperature rises during the night, I’d start to perspire whilst I remain soundly asleep while Raquel is forced to get up to turn on the electric fan because she can’t go back to sleep due to the warmth. Same thing happens when it cools down in the middle of the night. Despite the drop in temperature, I just continue to sleep while Raquel is again forced to turn the heater on.

This morning though, it was so cold that I was forced to wake up and turn on the heater myself. The only reason Raquel didn’t notice the temperature drop was probably because she wore thicker clothes than me last night. After turning on the heater, I had to endure about ten minutes or so of freezing temperature before the warmth generated by the heater was able to overpower the coldness in the air.

I’m tempted to say that this is because winter is already upon us. However, the weather is a bit difficult to predict lately so maybe there’ll be warm nights yet before autumn ends. Just a couple of nights ago, it was so warm that we had to leave the electric fan turned on as we slept.

Now, because I had been exposed to the cold for a bit this morning, I think I may have caught the cold myself. I feel terrible right now. I couldn’t stop sneezing and my eye lids feel heavy and itchy. I’m very tempted to just take my leave from work and sleep this cold off at home.

The lesson for me here is that I should start to wear thicker clothes at night. I think it’s far better to wake up soaked in sweat in the morning (in case it was a very warm night) because I wore clothing that was too thick than to wake up with a cold for the rest of the day (in case it was a cold night) because I wore clothing meant for summer nights.

Wow. When Raquel nominated our site for the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards, we didn’t imagine that we’d become one out of five finalists for the Best OFW Blog category.

We just wanted some exposure for our site at the start. But, that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate being short listed. In fact, we think it’s a great honour! So, thank you to the judges of the Blog Awards for choosing our site as one of the finalists.

However, we have no illusion of winning this category as we’re competing with really popular blogs. I have a feeling that Batjay’s Kwentong Tambay already has this prize in the bag. Still, you never know. Good luck to all our co-finalists.

Best OFW Blog Finalists:

• Balikbayan Box
• Coffee With Amee
• francescanfrance
• Kwentong Tambay
• Palabok (yours truly)

We are long time TV junkies. Unfortunately for us, not a lot of people we know are so we don’t get to talk about our favourite TV shows with anybody that much (but hopefully, that’s about to change as we just met another couple who are also into TV shows). Anyway, not having a lot of friends to discuss our favourite shows didn’t stop us from watching.

In months past, our favourite TV show was Lost, which was co-created by Alias creator JJ Abrams. Since we were also fans of Alias, we decided to give Lost a go when it started showing here in Australia. We almost didn’t even watch it because it was advertised as a Survivor-like drama. Although we both enjoy Survivor, I wasn’t interested in watching a non-reality-TV version of Survivor. Fortunately, it wasn’t anything like that at all. It was actually a mystery/sci-fi show and we both loved it. Personally, I love it for the mystery and the numerous arcane references.

It started with a group of people in an airplane flying from Australia (funny enough) to the US. On the way, the plane crashed in a desert island in what could be somewhere in the Pacific. Soon enough, weird things started happening such as a wild polar bear on a tropical island, a mysterious black smoke, dead relatives appearing, people with sickness were healed, and a lot more. I was hooked with the show because I kept on looking forward to answers to the mysteries introduced in previous episodes.

The need to know the answers to the mysteries seemed to be Lost’s way of hooking people to keep watching the show. However, it’s now in its third season and a lot of questions are still far from being answered. Raquel has already started to get tired of it all. And unfortunately, so am I. I really wanted to see it through but the very slow pace of the story is starting to get to me.

Well, now we have a new favourite sci-fi TV show: Heroes! It’s a story of different ordinary people who suddenly gained superpowers (like comic book super heroes) and their ordeals in handling their newly found gifts/curses. The characterization is just as good as that in Lost and it has a lot of mysteries and cliffhangers in it too. But unlike Lost, Heroes at least doesn’t keep a mystery hanging for so long. Although it doesn’t reveal all the answers to questions it brings up, it dishes out answers enough to keep viewers from getting tired of waiting for some resolution to loose threads.

So, I’ll probably still continue to watch Lost because I’m always still hoping to get answers to mysteries it had presented in the past despite my growing impatience with it. But I no longer look forward to it as much as I do Heroes.

Being in the IT business, I’ve associated the term hacker to mean someone who thinks up of a clever way to work out a solution to a certain computer programming problem and executes it successfully. The word has somehow evolved and could now be applied to a number of things in the real world and not just confined to the world of computers.

I’ve recently discovered a blog called the Ikea hacker which focuses on using Ikea products to create customised furniture and decorations around the home. It’s fun to see how Ikea fans take bits and pieces of Ikea stuff and transform them into something personal, pretty and functional. If you’re an Ikea fan, it’s definitely worth checking out. Who knows, it might even give you inspiration to create your own hack!

With recent talks of stage 4 water restrictions being introduced by May 1 if the rains still don’t come, everyone is being encouraged to save water as much as they can. Australia, being a dry country in the grip of a drought, has a need for some good drenching (preferably soon).

We’ve been trying our best to do our bit by conserving water at home and had stopped watering the lawns way before the stage 3 restrictions (all lawns cannot be watered during stage 3 restrictions). What used to be green lawn in our backyard is now nothing more than brown, parched soil with patches of green, very resilient weeds. Most of our plants only get watered during the assigned days (Wednesdays and Sundays for us) and mostly with just greywater saved from the shower/bath. I also tried to harvest the waste water from the washing machine last weekend so that our plants would have more water to drink but that didn’t go well. How was I supposed to know that the hose had to be a certain height for it to empty the water from the machine?! Oh well, better luck next time then.

We’ve also tried taking shorter showers, with hubby having more success in this area than I do although I’ve also improved a bit. We also haven’t had our car washed in ages - hubby calls the current state of (un)cleanliness of our car a “badge of honour”. Aside from having the windscreen cleaned whenever we’re at the petrol station, we don’t really mind the dirt anyway. We’ve also long figured out that sweeping paved areas with a dry brush is both good exercise and quite effective.

We got our water bill last week and was pleasantly surprised that our household water use has continued to fall and way below the average water usage for a couple. Apart from lower water rates, it’s good to know that we’re doing our bit in conserving our precious water in whatever little way we can.

Apologies to regular readers of this blog for the lack of updates lately. Work commitments, managing our home, future travel planning and some vegetating in front of the television have filled most of our time off lately. Nothing exciting really except we’re nominated for The 2007 Philippine Blog Awards in both the Main: Personal and Special Awards: Best OFW Blog categories! Yay!

Some of the nominated blog owners have expressed surprise on having their blogs nominated but no such shock for us. Why? Well, because I nominated our site to both categories myself! Hubby and I have no illusions in winning either category as there are some heavyweights in the list that have a wider audience and better content. No harm in trying though and hey, it’s still free advertising to let other people know that our blog exists. A win-win situation, wouldn’t you say?