It’s been forever since my last update. More than a month! *eep* I’ve been that busy with school and life. And I’m moving to a new domain soon! I love the new name I chose. I’ll keep you guys updated. Oh, this is going to be a quite a long post, really!

I’ll start with Valentines. This year’s landed on a Monday which is a school night. Coincidentally, hunbun had a long test on that day itself. Cruel, heartless teacher. *hmph* Also, I was a bit sick that time so we decided to have a nice romantic evening and advance celebration on February 13, 2005. He bought me gorgeous flowers, with his signature red roses. He is such a sweetie. *hehe* And I surprised him with a custom made chocolate house! It has 24 edible chocolate hearts inside as a symbol for our anniversary which is on the 24th of April. I ordered it months before as a special request to one of my friends. It was so hard keeping it as a secret from him!

We ate at the Tivoli - a “New Asian” fine dining restaurant inside Mandarin Oriental Manila. It’s beautiful inside and the gourmet food was delicious! (Actually, hunbun kept teasing me that we were dining at a pizza parlor. Only because I haven’t been to that restaurant before.) It was service deluxe there. We even had complimentary chocolate desserts on frosted glass with powdered sugar. And the Tivoli gave me a single red rose. How thoughtful!

The Celadon annual Valentines rose sale takes place during this love season soo. Hunbun and I co-headed last year’s “Petal Attraction” which was a success. This year’s is entitled “Say It With Roses” and I’m once again a project manager. It’s one of the projects I really enjoy handling. *hehe* We sold roses obviously, teddy bears, stuffed toys, cards, chocolates, and Valentines paraphernalia. I gave hunbun a Humor Post Tatty Bear doll holding six red roses. It now sits with all the other stuffed toys I’ve given him. This year, we had an added gimik which was a voting game. Other Ateneo students had the chance to vote for their favorite “Campus Heartthrobs”, “Valentines Couples”, etc etc - at a price of course. We had a lot of fun with it and earned a good amount of money too! Our harana was also really popular. You can have your special someone serenaded with the song of your choice. I had hunbun serenaded twice with single red roses. Once with “Grow Old With You” and the other with our theme song “At The Beginning”. He, of course, surprise me with an “At The Beginning” harana - which was really unexpected because I was extremely busy that time managing the booth. Due to a slight miscalculation of the amount of roses. In a good way though because too many people ordered. More demand than the actual product itself. But we dealt with the situation well and eventually satisfied all the customers. A job well done!

The following weeks seemed blurred out from my memory. Due to too much stressed I suppose. I was juggling four major projects in addition to the daily quizzes, long exams, and homework. I didn’t have any rest days at all. Because all the spare time I had was devoted to project making - even after class and weekends. Three of the projects were due on a same day - March 2, 2005 (Wednesday)! I think it’s more of a bad omen than a coincidence. *lol* The three were for Asian History - Hi16, Physics Circuits - Ps141, and Modern Jazz - PE. One right after another!

My groupmates in History (Athens, Steph, Robin, Neal, and Neill) were all Chinese and we were lucky to pick China as the topic for our final project. It was a random drawing thing. We focused on Chinese Weddings utilizing the timeline starting with the Warring States Period to the contemporary era. Oh, ours was a video documentary - similar to the ones shown in the Discovery Channel but of course not as professional. We used some clips from Mulan especially the match making part and some scenes from The Wedding Banquet especially the wedding reception. Our group really bonded since we needed quite some time for this project to turn out well. We stayed at Robin’s cute apartment at Eastwood for the voice dubbing and acting. Good thing we had four laptops at our disposal since I borrowed hunbun’s. *hehe* One was used by Athens and Robin to edit the script and search for pictures. One was solely for dubbing. Neill tweaked the recordings while Neal delivered the lines. Steph and I had a laptop each since we were in charge of the movie presentations. I’m proud to say that we managed to learn Swish in within a short time period. Well, its a pretty user-friendly application. We did encounter a few difficulties especially with editing and merging the actual video itself. But we did well and the teacher praised us for being well-prepared. Oh, we were all wearing red on the presentation day for an added effect. *lol*

We were quite a big group for Physics since our project was such an ambitious one. I made a documentary website as one of the project requirements. You can see there the incredibly numerous wires and chips we used. We broke a lot of them and caused several to elicit smoke. It’s a scary job being an electrician. *hehe* Well in summary, we created a pc-controlled panda that follows a sound source. Imagine two persons were clapping at the same time, the panda will “walk” towards the direction of the stronger clapper. It was a success at the very last minute. All of us were pessimistic that it wouldn’t work. But thanks to a so-called program fluke, the panda did what it was supposed to. *heavy sigh of relief*

PE is not actually included in the QPI but I still want a good grade on it. The finals was held inside the Covered Courts at around 5:30pm. All of Mrs. Caringal’s classes were there - both ballroom and modern jazz. Our all-girl group (Dianne, Nika, Diega, Raissa, Gabby, and I) got number 6. We were in full costume thanks to Diega and her friends. We had on matching royal blue tops with a light blue silk accent. The props we used were: blue sequined hats, white scarves, canes (arnis sticks), and monoblock chairs. Our choreograph was very girly and very suggestive so all the props fit in well. We danced to Heartburn by Alicia Keys and got an A (99%)! Yay!

Oh, I even had to buy black jazz pants for our dance presentation. I bought a pair of nice fitting ones at Yvonne’s and that was on February 27, 2005. Hunbun also bought me this pretty pair of Hello Kitty bedroom slippers! Aren’t they cute? *hehe*

After that Wednesday with the back-to-back presentations, I still had one major project left. My semestral-long database project for Cs122! This is absolutely the most time-consuming and most brutal project I’ve ever experienced. We had the first few meetings over at Athens’ house, a failed attempt at Seattle’s Best Coffee, and the rest over at my house. These were our only choices which had an available wifi. *hehe* It is definitely easier to work while connected to the internet. My groupmates and I survived a lot of days without sleep. We finished our third deliverable, the Implementation output, just in time. It was due on March 7, 2005 at 8:30 in the morning. And I’m ecstatic that we got a 96 - the highest score ever. I think that compensated most of our extreme hard work. The working project itself (in VB6 and MySQL) was due on our defense which was on March 11, 2005 at 3:30 in the afternoon. The program was really buggy when we presented it. Even though we thought everything was fullproof just hours before. *sigh* Good thing that due to time constraints we were able to skip the buggy parts. Luck was still on our side. Our group is done with the academic side of the project but since this is going to be implemented in real life, we still have a lot of tweaking to do.

I had my last Math 22 long test after the database defense. I barely had time to study for it. *lol* I was either too busy working on the project or worrying about it. This was the determining factor whether or not I was going to be exempted from the finals. I was so nervous the whole weekend waiting for the results. I even sent him an email of query and browsed through my notes since the finals was scheduled on Monday. My teacher was going to send me an SMS but he only sent it on Sunday at 10pm. His text thankfully brought great news! I got a 99 on my long test so that means I get an A final mark! Yay! This is my very first A in Mathematics in my whole Ateneo life. I also got “exempted A” from all my other classes except Cs122 because there was no exemption.

We had a block outing on Tuesday, March 15, 2005. Actually, it was a pre-final celebration. *lol* We (Jv, Marge, Cla, James, Jaime, J, and I) all met up at school. Then we headed to Rockwell and had lunch at Dencio’s Bar and Grill. Yummy yummy food especially appetizing with the addition of good conversation. Actually, we just kept teasing Jaime about his kilig moments. And he was kind enough to treat all of us to bottomless iced tea. Of course, we went to Power Station afterwards. Cla showed off her dance moves while Jaime wowed us with his target shooting prowess. Me? I just watched. *lol* We also watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. It was a very good movie. Very refreshing and you can’t help but feel sorry for the Baudelaire orphans. Oh, I hate that Count Olaf villain. Anyway, I treated some of my blockmates to Jollibee ice cream. *hehe* It was for being exempted from the math finals.

Hunbun finally came around 6pm since he had finals that afternoon. We all split ways by then so hunbun and I window shopped a little. Then, he dragged me to the arcade again to play Taiko: Drum Master - his new craze. It was somewhat fun but I couldn’t follow the beat. Yes, I have no hand-eye coordination. *sniff* Hunbun’s great at it though. For dinner, we ate at Kaya Express. Yummy Korean food! I had my favorite chocolate pralines from Leonidas as my after dinner sweets courtesy of hunbun.

After the Cs122 finals on Friday, I had lunch with hunbun and his blockmates. We ate at Bento Box at around 2pm. They were a really upbeat group. But a little too much banterring for my comfort. *hehe*

March 19, 2005, a Saturday, was the official first day of summer break! *yay* But first we had to entertain Henry, my auntie’s nephew who just came from Hong Kong. It was no trouble at all because he was such a nice, well-mannered gentleman. Mommy treated him, well hunbun and I came along, to Red Crab. Because we heard that he loves to eat crabs. Then, we brought him to SM MegaMall to do a little shopping. Hunbun accompanied him while mommy and I went to Ricky Reyes. I had my hair cut there but I wasn’t too satisfied with it. I much much prefer Bench Fix Salon. Hunbun canvassed different laptops for me since I’m finally getting one! At first, I really wanted the Fujitsu Lifebook P7010 but I found it was way too small. *hehe* I needed a very very light but durable 12″ laptop. And so far this Asus S5n Dothan Notebook fits all my specifications. Hope I get it soon. *cross fingers*