In Pinay's footsteps

Sunday, January 6, 2013

WAITING FOR THE NEW YEAR 2013!

A bit delayed since it is past Epiphany today, but, I do want to share my New Year's Eve in pictures!

I arrived a bit late already for the New Year's Eve rendezvous (work seems to follow me 'til evening|!)... just before 11 p.m. and the raindrops were starting to fall!

Apprehensive was I! I am driving alone now to the "mountains" (but just about 10 km from the city!) where my family was waiting. But since the roads were completely dark except for the car lights and weren't concrete yet, so I was praying really hard it wouldn't rain! I also couldn't go up if it rained and they were all there already!!!

with a panoramic view of Zamboanga City

But, with a view like this, I guess you now understand why I want to go up to our place, too.

Here we are with family and friends!

Those little lights are the lights of Zamboanga City!

Monette and Ailish prepare the Shabu-Shabu!

This table is filled with ingredients for Shabu-Shabu! The hot soup so fitting for the cool breeze we are already experiencing! And the noodles and everything else were really filling!!!

We loved the Shabu-Shabu and lovinly served by "Tita Auring"!

But we also had barbecue, dinuguan and puto, brownies, biko and hotdogs!

My sister-in-law brought sky lanterns but the windy night wasn't so convenient for sky lanterns.

Good, we were so far away from "civilization" so we know we wouldn't be causing any fire hazards for the houses... but it was mentioned, what if we would cause forest fires? Luckily, it was drizzling so we know the forest wouldn't be too dry!

But our first sky lantern went down instead of up! And bumped on the swing... and burned!

Our second sky lantern indeed flew to the sky, but it flew too fast because of the strong winds!

Can you seen the sky lantern in the right upper hand corner of the picture and just looks like one of the lights?

This is Zamboanga City panorama before the New Year fireworks!

viewing Veteran's Avenue, Nunez Extension and Sta. Maria

Of course, we waited for midnight! There were already fireworks even before midnight and went on even up to about 2 a.m. and a few more until dawn!
We even appreciated the fireworks in Basilan from afar, but, that was really too difficult to photograph!

But later, it seemed so dark... we were wondering if the smoke was the cause of the dark cloud over the City or if there really were brown outs in some areas!

and it was really cold!!!

but sometimes, the gadgets make us forget everything
and everyone else!

Well, we all welcomed the New Year with happy hearts, spontaneous smiles and l♥ve all around!!!

♥♥♥HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013!!!♥♥♥

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

2012: THE YEAR THAT WAS (AS A BLOGGER)!

2012 was a very exciting year for me since I had too many challenges in my life...all at once!
1. Entered into the Administrative life (Execom level) for the first time...

a. with the EXTRA CHALLENGE of vying for EXCELLENCE!

b. and the EXTRA CHALLENGE of dealing with all kinds of problems and situations.

c. and having to attend too many meetings, seminars, conventions out of town

d. BUT, just lucky to have a great team working with me... I hope the whole team stays while I am still here!

2. PLUS, addition of new major services namely: Digital Mammography and MRI as reader
3. PLUS, continue with my previous work!!
4. PLUS, I am a wife and mom!!!

5. PLUS, an even greater challenge was that I wanted to continue blogging amidst all my activities and commenting, especially with BC Bloggers Commex ... so a day each day may not be enough!

This is my second year as a Blogger!

I have less blogposts this year for this site: 100 posts compared to 131 posts last year but I am still so happy that I was still able to write them inspite of my SUPER DUPER busy schedule.
But, I have two other sites now: In Pinay's Eyes and In Pinay's Tummy.

Last December 2011, we went on a roadtrip from Zamboanga to Dapitan to Ozamis to Cagayan De Oro through Bu-Da to Davao and on the way back, through Davao Del Norte to Compostela Valley to Agusan to Misamis Occidental back to Cagayan De Oro to Iligan and back to Zamboanga City... more than 1000 kilometers since we went the long way!

However, I was only able to post about Lolong, the largest crocodile in captivity and about Typhoon Sendong in Iligan. I had so much blog lags about the rest of the trip!!!

We were about to take another trip somewhere this December but with Typhoon Pablo, I guess it wasn't that exciting anymore, because I felt I would be depressed just like seeing the aftermath of Sendong!

I thought I would be traveling less with my new endeavors, but opportunities have been knocking and so I was able to travel to mainland Europe, particularly, Paris, France to Zurich, Switzerland to Milan and Rome in Italy! I was able to post all this in Facebook since this was my most rewarding experience this 2012, but yes, blog lags, too!

I went to Bangkok, Thailand twice for conferences related to my medical field and I realized I have met many colleagues along the way... some of them in more than one seminar. I was able to post about Bangkok, though! This was when I started appreciating about GIFs (graphics interchange format) or "moving pictures".

My family also had vacations twice this year (aside from the roadtrip last December 2011) to very beautiful places in the Philippines: Bohol (a must place to visit!) and Davao again! I wasn't able to blog about Bohol and Davao, too... more blog lags!!!

But, I was able to share so much about my beloved, Zamboanga City especially, from September to December! So, I still feel redeemed with all I failed to blog about! I really hope more people would be given the chance to read my posts about Zamboanga City!

Among the Gadgets that interests me are:
1) Topblogs: It is hard to reach the 100 level so it helps if we have a blog community who visits or comments on our posts.

a. Charm (of Promding Chamimay) invited me to join Zamboanga Bloggers 9 months ago, about March 2012 and many are very young bloggers and they might not be able to relate with me that much!

b. Charm also invited me to join the BC Bloggers Community for the Commex and I learned a lot with this group!

i. here I have to be a Buzz Beater to finish reading all posts and commenting too!

ii. but the posts really interests me and I enjoy commenting on every post!

iii. This really helped improve my Stats to reach the 100 to 150 level!

2) Blogspot Stats: Audience
a. Top Ten Countries: Philippines, United States, Singapore, HongKong, United Arab Emirates, Canada, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany and Saudi Arabia = = the top three remain the same! Where is Russia and Malaysia now?
Interesting to see Poland in the list!

3) Flag Counter: I have now 129 flags from 114 in 2011, but I am not expecting this to rise anymore.

4) Maploco: From 286 countries in 2011, there are now 1945 places mapped which are the locations of the site visitors.

5) Total Pageviews: 61,087

6) Adsense: Nothing much happened to Adsense since I only have $ 7.00 from $0.98 to my name! I am still not really optimistic that I am going to earn from blogging but this doesn't matter to me so much now!

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