I called up our favourite AMF bowling centre the other day to book a couple of lanes for tonight’s game with the gang.

The person who answered my phone call greeted me in a fast Aussie accent (of course!) that I didn’t quite catch what he just said. I wasn’t sure if I indeed called up AMF so I had to clarify.

“Hi. Is this the AMF bowling centre?” I asked the AMF employee. Let’s just call him John because I really didn’t catch his name when he introduced himself

“Yeritis (Yeah, it is),” Peter replied in a mumble. “Huhcanoihelpya? (How can I help you?)”

“Ah, yes. I’d like to book two lanes for Friday 8 o’clock. Thanks.”

“Roight. Huhmanypeople? (Right. How many people?)”

I paused a bit to count in my head the number of people going tonight but then decided just to pick any even number. It wouldn’t matter in the end anyway. “Twelve,” I replied.

“Thisfohtuhwlines? (This for two lanes?)”

“Yeah. Two lanes.”

“Huhmanyguys?”

Huh? How many guys? Why should it matter how many guys are there in proportion to the number of gals that are going to play bowling? Is there like a battle of the sexes that night or something? I quickly recounted the number of people going tonight at the same time counting how many are the guys in the group. I fear I was taking too long so I just picked any number again.

“Uh, I dunno. I think there’s like six guys and six gals,” I said. I continued to mutter along the same lines when the employee stopped me.

“Mate. Mate. How many games?” he asked more slowly this time.

This time round, he pronounced the word “games” more clearly. Or maybe I should say, more American with the A in GAMES pronounced like EI instead of AYE. I swear I heard him say GUYS instead. It’s probably due to the phone reception that I didn’t hear the mmm sound in games but if I did, I probably would’ve known he said “games” and not “guys.”

“Two games!” I hastily said. “Sorry about that. I thought you said guys instead of games.”

The employee was humourless about it though. Ah, well, that was embarassing. Anyway, he reiterated the number of lanes, the number of games and the booked time. I concurred and we said our good-byes and I thanked him.

Whew. This is why I kinda dread talking to Aussies over the phone. There’s always that chance that I’ll mishear what they’re saying, specially if he or she is the type of Aussie who talks real fast in a thick Aussie accent. In person, at the very least, I could try reading their lips to help me figure out what the words being said were.

Fortunately, most Aussies speak slower and more clearly (most consonants in words are enunciated). I just need to get used to some Aussies who speak faster and enunciates consonants less. I’ll get there one of these days.

At Chadstone’s AMF Bowling, they have a Saturday night unlimited bowling promo that starts 11 pm (that’s right, an hour before midnight) and ends 1:30 am (that’s right, after midnight) for only $21. One round of bowling is normally $19 and $23 for two games. So, $21 for potentially four games (if we bowl real fast) seems like a good deal.

The Saturday before last, I and other Pinoy pals had three lanes of unlimited bowling. I wasn’t able to write about it earlier because I was preoccupied with other stuff during the past few days at work and at home.

Anyway, we had fun and we had improved since the last two times we went out for bowling. The other high point of that get together was that we met three new Pinoys again. And they were also living proof that it’s easy to get somebody a fiance permanent residency visa. I know that it was supposed to be ok but I’ve never really met anybody who had done it. They said that as long as you have documentation (dating receipts, love letters, etc…), you shouldn’t have any problems. No need to get married first just to get a girlfriend or boyfriend from the Philippines.

Back to the bowling, by the third game, everybody was getting tired. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the playing or because it was getting very late. Still, we had our fun in the end. Too bad not everybody was able to come along. Maybe next time.

Last week saw the start of our attempt to incorporate 2 fruits and 5 vegetables in our diet. I’ve borrowed the Eating for Life book by Bill Phillips and have tried several breakfast and dinner recipes from it. The dishes we’ve tried were filling, tasty and easy to prepare.

We also had different vegetables with minced chicken/beef such as guisadong toge, guisadong repolyo, guisadong beans(beans with minced meat) on separate nights for dinner. Not forgetting the fruit, we bought our week’s supply of grapes, bananas and tinned peaches in juice. Looking at our grocery trolley last week, you’d think it belonged to another couple since never before had so many vegetables and fruits graced our cart at one time. By the time we reached the checkout counter, I was worried that we’d blow our budget but we didn’t overshoot our budget at all(it stayed the same).

This week, we thought we’d try some more recipes from the Bill Phillips book and would be having chicken and vegetable soup, an Asian beef stir fry and another noodle and vegetable dish. We also bought bananas, kiwis and avocados for the fruit portion of our new diet.

With all this emphasis on putting more fruits and vegetables in our refrigerator and tummies, I had to get re-acquainted with my vegetables. For example, are potatoes classified as vegetables? How about corn, is it a grain or a vegetable? I would have said vegetable straight away because I usually see them added in with other vegetables (carrots, peas, etc) in frozen packages and baby corn does look more like a vegetable than a grain, doesn’t it? On the other hand, it is also a grain. What about mushrooms, aren’t they actually fungi?

Consulting these vegetable and fruit lists somehow cleared my confusion and also educated me on some of the alternate names used by Australians, Americans and British for the same vegetable. I remember I was craving for some guisadong upo(sauteed bottle gourd) when Sassy featured it in her Pinoycook site and read that sayote(chayote) would be a good substitute. The following week, I was trying to find chayote in the vegetable section of the grocery but didn’t find any. It was only later that I found out that this particular gourd goes by the name of choko here in Australia. D’oh!

I also worried about the store life of these vegetables and fruits since we only do grocery shopping once a week, two at the most. We certainly won’t benefit from any of these goodies if they get spoiled first. Here’s a list of the recommended method and storage times for most produce that I’ve found, for those who’re interested.

Could you tell I’m having fun? In our own way, we’re having our mini-food trip, discovering and trying out new food and sorting out which ones would be keepers or goners. There’s still a lot of room for improvement though, like making better food choices when eating out and not blowing our grocery budget like we did this week!

We went out again yesterday for another get-together with the Pinoy gang. We met around 7:30 pm at the Crown Casino foodcourt to have lunch. There were a few more faces that night. RChristian brought his American friend Ted, Irar brought her friend’s friend Efrain and Milkshake brought his officemate Rani. Well, the more the merrier.

Before dinner, Chinita checked to see what time is the next showing of Mr and Mrs Smith. After she saw that the queue for the movie was very long, we decided to just skip the movie and just play ten-bowling instead of watching a movie first then play bowling next.

After dinner, at around 8 pm, we went to the bowling alley to book ourselves a couple of lanes. The bowling attendant told Chinita, our de-facto activities coordinator, that the earliest time we could get a lane would be at 11:45 pm. So, what were we supposed to do between 8 to 11:45?

We ended up buying tickets for the Mr and Mrs Smith movie anyway. Since there were a lot of us, we were able to get a discount for the tickets. Unfortunately, the showing we got was for the 10:45 pm one. That meant that we still had to wait for about two hours.

It wasn’t a total waste of time though. We first chatted with each other near the cinema box office until we noticed that maybe we were getting in the way of the people wanting to queue to buy movie tickets. We continued our chat by the coffee shop a level down. The time actually flew by rather quickly when you’re having fun.

Soon, it was 10:30 and we went on our way to the cinema. Jacky who wasn’t going to be joining us managed to catch up. Unluckily, she wasn’t able to get a ticket to the same show we were about to watch so she just bought a ticket to watch Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith instead. We decided that we could just meet up with her after the movies were done.

By the time the movie ended (the movie was good and quite funny in my opinion, by the way), it was already past 1 am! So we hurried to the bowling alley to find out if the bowling attendant already gave away the lanes we had reserved for 11:45. I’m not really sure as to what happened then (because Chinita and the girls were the ones talking to the bowling people) but in the end, we still got three lanes. We divided into three teams and played till 3 am.

I sucked bad that night but it was all good. We were there to have fun and that’s what we had. Maybe next time though, we could choose a bowling alley that didn’t allow smoking as cigarette smoke really irritates my eyes and throat.

Anyway, it was a long time ago since I stayed out that late with friends having fun. All though it was tiring, it was well worth it.

Or, the Two Minute Workout. Sounds hokey, I know, but while in a train on the way home from work last Monday (June 6), I’ve read in the free daily Melbourne-based newspaper MX a short article titled Get fit in two minutes. It immediately got my attention.

Here is a quote from the MX newspaper article:

Only two minutes of intense exercise a day does as much to improve fitness levels as two hours of moderate training, according to research.

The article suggests that the workout is aimed at average healthy men and women between the ages of 25 and 35. Given that, here is the workout, also called the “Sprint Interval Training”: You need a stationary bike and you must cycle as fast and as hard as you can for 30 seconds. This is followed by four minutes of rest. Then repeat the process three more times so that in the end, you would’ve cycled a total of two minutes for a total session time of 14 minutes (by my calculations).

This is certainly welcome news for me as I definitely need to exercise but don’t want to spare a lot of time to do so. Right now, I have a 45-minute workout riding our stationary bike while playing a game on the PS2. I play a game at the same time to take my mind of the fact that I’m exercising.

I looked up the workout on the web to get more details about it before I get myself into it. Here are some links that turned up the same story:

• Fitness in 6 Minutes a Week from the WebMD Health website.
• Six minutes of exercise a week ‘is as good as six hours’ from the Telegragh UK website.

If you intend to do this workout though, be sure to read the WebMD article at least so that you will get a better idea of its intricacies first.

And be warned, according to the same article, “If you’re going to try this technique, remember that it’s important to consult your doctor before beginning any kind of exercise.”

The government has recently launched the 2 fruits and 5 vegetables television ad, promoting the benefits of consuming more fruits and vegetables on a daily basis. According to their website, adults need to eat at least 2 servings of fruit and 5 serves of vegetables not only for good health but also as a preventative measure against a number of diseases.

The website also states that since most Australians already eat half that amount, it won’t be that hard to consume the recommended amount because most people are already halfway there. On our part, I think that getting the recommended servings in our diets would take some conscious effort since we rarely have fruits or vegies. Not the best diet in the world, I know, and it seems like years of consuming more meat than fruits or vegetables are catching up on us. The needle in the bathroom scale has been steadily climbing with no signs of ever going down (at least if we continue our present eating habits).

So fruits and vegies, here we come. But how to do it? Gabriel’s not a big fan of vegetables so any dish I prepare would have to feature some meat, with the vegetables acting as extenders or side dishes. I browsed through the 2 fruit and 5 vegetables site for recipes but only found a very short list. Not to worry though, there is another government campaign called Go For Your Life, which promotes exercise as well as healthy eating and their website features hundreds of recipes for anyone to try.

But wait, won’t this lifestyle change wreak havoc to our budget? Fruits and vegetables could be a tad expensive after all and since I’m not really familiar with what’s in season (and thus cheaper) or not, this may very well blow our budget. Going back to the 2 fruit and 5 vegetables site, I found a consumer information pamphlet stating just that - go for value buy buying in season goods but it didn’t feature a list of what is in season when anywhere in the site. Google saved the day when I came across the Better Health Channel and found a page featuring the in-season fruits and vegetables for the month. As a bonus, clicking on a radio button next to the fruit or vegetable you’re interested in refreshes the page and a short list of recipes featuring that fruit or vegetable is displayed. Note however that this is a Victorian site and in-season fruits and vegetables may vary between states so this list may not be accurate for other states.

Now that the research part is over, there’s still menu planning, grocery shopping and actual food preparation to do before any of those fruit or vegies grace our plates. It certainly sounds like a lot of work. I guess it’s true what they say, anything worth doing is difficult. Well, at least at the beginning.

I visited a nearby General Practitioner (GP) yesterday to get an Influenza flu vaccine shot. It was the first time I visited a GP since moving from Canberra to Melbourne last year. I looked for a GP that will be near where I work so that I can easily drop by for a visit during lunch breaks on a weekday if I need to. In the end, I settled for the same GP clinic Raquel goes to. I didn’t get the same doctor though.

I was worried that the flu vaccine injection would hurt quite a bit but it was actually relatively painless. It was like being bitten by an ant, as it were.

But before the actual flu vaccine shot, my new GP, Dr H, asked me some questions regarding my health and medical history including those of my family. I guess it should be expected as I was a new patient. The two major problems I had in the past were benign polyps found in my colon and an incident with kidney stones. Unfortunately, I forgot to mention the kidney stone episode so I’ll just bring her up to speed on that when I come back in two to three weeks for another check-up.

She weighed me and she calculated my Body Mass Index (BMI). A BMI of 18.5 and below means you’re underweight. A BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 is normal. A BMI of 25 to 29.9 means you’re overweight. A BMI of 30 or more means you’re considered obese. Unfortunately for me, I had a BMI of 31 and that makes me obese! I’m sure it was just because my pants weighed me down but of course the doctor wasn’t convinced.

She wanted me to lose 15kg in all. She didn’t want to rush me though as she said I should at least lose 2kg for now. She didn’t recommend any special diet or anything but she did tell me to lessen my food intake by a third and to increase my stationary bike excercise routine from 30 minutes per day to 45 minutes per day. Fair enough, I thought. Shouldn’t be too difficult to do.

After that, she also took my blood pressure. The first time she tried taking it, she couldn’t believe the result so she tried a second time and a third time. Then she told me that I have a slightly high blood pressure. Uh oh. She then stressed that I lose weight soon or I may get some heart-related problems in the near future.

It’s one of those things you wouldn’t want to hear but needed to hear from someone anyway. And as my family knows, I tend to be very frightened at the possibility of being afflicted with serious health problems.

Well, at least now that I’m more “motivated” to lose some weight, maybe I can finally fit in my old jeans again.