Week 1 - Theory of Blue Cheese, Flash Freeze

Not pictured: The brother, fetching the food.

So this is a relatively short post, as the first week of the year has been a muddled haze of food comas, catching up on books and video games (still didn't get around to finish reading any graphic novel) and exchanging stories with friends and family - each of which may or not be mutually inclusive.

Anyway, I've been to a couple of new places (read: lost) this past week, and I happened to stumble upon a new haunt somewhere which, quite ironically, has been under my nose all along.

There's probably just a couple of stretches of road where I could say I'm a bit of a regular (at least in Manila) - one is in Maginhawa (but I'm no hipster, honest) and the other, well, let's just say there's a lot of Chinese restaurants and tea shops in it (amidst the occasional car shop and whatnot). The third is the Centris Sunday Market, so it doesn't really count, I guess.

In any case, I'm going to go ahead and say that the highlight of the week was that the old crew finally managed to pull through with that buffet lunch that we've been planning for a stupid amount of time. Take it from me, it's a feat in itself. I'm not sure why, but it's always fun exchanging stories in person, even if we've already heard them via the sporadic channels that social networking provides - especially if a lot of the said stories are too ridiculous to be true (but as is often the case, they actually are).

And then there's the matter of what we jokingly refer to as the theoreticals, where we toss around increasingly out-of-the-box ideas in the guise of providing actual advice to our mundane problems in life. Or it's probably the other way around.

With everyone coming from a background in IT (although many have gone pretty wayward since), think of it as a group of folks trying to come up with solutions that move away from the age old KISS principle, ergo into something Rube Goldberg-esque.

The craziest thing is that no matter how silly the ideas are, they're mostly grounded in reality and to some extent pretty viable, albeit in varying degrees. Heaven knows how weird the stuff I suggest could sound beyond the default but still honest-to-God responses like You'll Live or It Gets Better.

Eh, I'm getting too far ahead of myself.

All in all, it was a decent start for the year.