Cool Weather in a Tropical Country

Living in a tropical country, we certainly get tired of the heat. Our normal temperature is at 30 degrees Celcius which means we have to keep our fans turned on 24/7. Sometimes when it gets too hot to bear, we rely on our air conditioner to tide us over the hot weather.

That’s why we look forward to December when the temperature goes down a bit. Temperatures can hit as low as below 20 degrees celcius in the morning. During times like this we reach for our blankets in the wee hours of the morning. The temperature is not low enough for us to invest on heated mattress pads but who knows, maybe in the future it will be. In the meantime, we take advantage of this cool weather by giving our air conditioning units a break. It also lowers down our electricity bills. How I wish our weather is like this for the whole year but I’m glad that at least for a few months we experience some coolness in our tropical country.

Christmas Celebration 2011

Christmas has come and gone. Time really flies fast!

We were fortunate to have some quality bonding time for Christmas. For the first time, I was not on a shifting schedule unlike the past Christmases when I was still working in a call center. Back then, I had to choose between Christmas and New Year when to take my holiday. Since my birthday falls on January 1, I always choose to work during Christmas. This year, I can choose not to work for the whole week after Christmas. Although I still worked by choice after Christmas, I feel fortunate to be able to rest for three days straight.

We had enough time to shop for gifts for my wife and my children. We opened our gifts on the night before Christmas. I got an extra fully pillow from my wife. My wife got a set of earrings from me. My eldest got himself another toy. I know in a few years he won’t be asking for toys anymore and would prefer clothes and jansport bags so I’m spoiling him while he’s little. After opening our presents, we proceeded to my mother’s house for the Noche Buena. The next day, we went to Church to say our prayers and to greet Jesus a Happy birthday.

And that’s how we celebrated our Christmas for 2011. How about you? How was your Christmas?

Insurance

My wife and I finally decided on a good life insurance policy for me. Its called I-insure 65. It’s cheap and at the same time provides enough coverage as advised by most finance books.

We have also been regularly doing mutual funds investments instead of wasting our extra money. It’s too bad that we are only able to do these things now, but I believe that God’s timing is always perfect, so we should do the best that we can do with what we currently know. We are looking for other methods of better managing our finances and hopefully make our extra money work for us better.

Nice Jam

Enjoyed a number of awesome jams this month. The latest was with the band called Ten to Midnight, which in my humble opinion, have some of the most memorable and well written original music in the indie circuit. Since I usually play solo gigs, its nice to be gigging with a band from time to time.

Good thing we have a schooled drummer because my ears can’t take hard hitting on cymbals. Some drummers tend to have uncontrolled use of cymbals which eats up too much of the available frequencies that are supposed to be for other instruments. You can easily tell if a drummer is good by the way he hits his cymbals.

All in all it was a nice gig, and we are scheduled for some more this month.