TheFranciscos.Net

Storms and Power Outages



It’s a wonder how much of our lives center around the existence of electricity. When the huge “mini-storm” hit our area last Friday, and I found that we didn’t have electricity at home, my first reaction was “Aw shit!”. I had plans to watch the two NBA playoff games (Nets and Lakers won as I found out the next day), finish watching the rest of the Sex & The City Season 3 episodes, and watch Howard Stern’s Stuttering John vs. Crazy Cabbie fight on E!. Needless to say, doing these things involved having the use of a TV, which in turn needed electricity which we DIDN’T have. I was pissed! On top of all that, I couldn’t cook my dinner because we were using an ELECTRIC stove. I ended up eating some Skyflakes crackers with peanut butter. On top of all that, I didn’t even know where I could find candles to light up our place!

After pouting about having my night ruined because of the blackout, Aileen called me up. She was on duty last Friday night when the storm hit. She told me that they were on alert because there was a disaster at Kennywood, a local amusement park. The roof of one of their attractions collapsed due to the strong winds and landed on the riders. There was a person killed and dozens injured (many of them children) and Aileen and the rest of the hospital’s residents were to take care of some of them. All over the city, many people were hurt, and several of them lost their homes. Suddenly, missing a couple of TV shows and not eating a proper dinner didn’t seem so bad.

It wasn’t even a big storm…. the day started out as very nice and sunny. People at work were saying that there was supposed to be a storm that day, but I didn’t really get involved with those conversations because frankly, talking about the weather bores the hell out of me. The only time when it looked like it was gonna be raining a bit was at about 4 in the afternoon, when everybody was preparing to go home. After work, I drove home towards the Pittsburgh area. Sometime during my regular 1 1/2 hour drive, the storm came and went. It was very localized, hitting a small section east of Pitt the hardest. By the time I got home, the storm had already passed. In the span of about 30 minutes, $10 million in damages was done and many people were hurt.

Anyway, we got our power back on late on Saturday night (some hard-hit areas won’t have any electricity until tomorrow). We still have a roof over our heads. Some other people aren’t so lucky. Although it still pisses me off that I missed the fight on Howard Stern (Stuttering John won the fight by the way), it’s times like these that make you thankful for the basic things in life.

Zoe knows her shapes! While eating at Eat N Park, Aileen starts drawing a circle on Zoe’s activity paper (the mat thingie that fastfood places give to kids), and Zoe blurts out excitedly “circle”. Aileen then makes a heart shape, and Zoe says “heart”. Then it was a triangle, then a square, then a star! It was so amazing – Zoe seems to be picking up things really fast for a 2 year old kid. For example, when the daycare teacher said that she was going to get Zoe’s jacket (to get ready to go home), she said “I’ll get it!”. She also knows how to sing her “ABC”s, but needs help after getting to the letter “G”.

I know people say that daycare isn’t a good thing for kids, but seeing Zoe develop rapidly like this convinces me that it has it’s good points.

Site Update: I uploaded some pictures from our visit to Heinz Field (home of the Pittsburgh Steelers) and the Pittsburgh Folk Festival in our gallery. You can check them out here.

BTW, thanks to Eugene for the tip on what might be the best deal of the year! If this goes through, a lot of people may have some instant vacations in the next few months.

Just found a great site for online Lego-Lovers. Obviously, I can’t seem to get motivated to do any serious work today so I’m going around the net searching for inspiration. Here’s LegoDu –

Other stuff that went on this weekend:

• We went to an estate sale on Sunday and bought some junk (literally). I got a nice vintage wood-cabinet Panasonic AM/FM radio (see above for a picture), circa late 1960s-early 1970s, for $3.00 and it still works well. The audio on this thing was what really surprised me the most though. It sounds great, especially for a one-speaker radio. It also has an external speaker output (a mod) that I can use to connect it with my old Cambridge Soundworks speakers. This will serve nicely as our kitchen radio for the new house.
• For any NBA fan, this past weekend’s games were like a dream come true. First off was the Celtics amazing come-from-the-dead win over the Nets, 94-90. Then the next day was the Lakers last-second win (courtesy of Robert Horry aka Will Smith) over the Kings, 100-99.
• Aileen and I took the adulthood responsibility plunge and got life insurance policies from the Knight of Columbus. Life insurance is such a morbid business… it’s basically the insurance company betting that you won’t hit the farm until they make some money off of you. And you also only get to use it when you die. Maybe I should just use the $100 a month and put it on the lotto…. at least if I win, I get to use it on myself.
• Aileen cooked a s**tload of delicious pancit bihon yesterday for her co-workers at the hospital, but I only got to eat a small plate of it. What’s up with that?
• Got to watch Training Day (Denzel Washington was excellent in this one, but it was a mediocre movie), From Hell (so-so movie with an interesting subject… as is usually the case, the book is much better), and some episodes of Sex & The City (hilariously funny as usual… can’t wait to watch the rest of it) .

Memorial Day Weekend 2002

It’s another start of the workweek for me after the nice, long and very restful weekend. It’s SO depressing to have to come back to work after having a lazy respite like that, but I’ve got bills to pay…. so I just need to suck it up!

It was a very uneventful weekend (since Aileen was on-call for part of it), unlike our Niagara Falls trip last year. One interesting thing we did do was attend the Pittsburgh Folk Festival at Heinz Field, where the Philippines was represented by a small, but popular food booth manned by the FAAP people. The food stall’s most popular dish was the delicious barbecue and the lumpiang shanghai (too bad there was no lechon or pritchon). Other represented countries in the festival were Germany, Ukraine, China, India, and others.

As a newcomer to the Steel City, it was pretty refreshing to see some Filipino faces and to talk to other people (besides Aileen) in the Filipino language. I’ve lived in this beautiful city for a couple of months now, and Aileen’s been here for almost a year, but we hardly get to meet any Pinoys in the area. The only one I’ve actually formally met is an attending physician at Aileen’s hospital (who happens to be a classmate of my mom at UST). It’s really quite a change from our environment in the Philadelphia area (King Of Prussia to be exact), where you can find dozens of Pinoys, and that’s only in the circles we’re in. I find it strange that Pittsburgh, which is very culturally diverse (judging from the large amount of interracial relationships we see), has a small number of Filipinos – around 200 in all from the estimates of the FAAP folks.

I guess if there’s something that I miss about King of Prussia (besides the awesome mall and Cheesecake Factory), it’s the Filipino friends that I have over there. I just don’t get to hang out with anybody in Pitt the way I did before. Not that I’m a racist and will only mingle with my own kind. I’d hang out with almost anyone as long as you’re not a bore, but there’s just something about the way you relate to each other if you’re both Filipino. You laugh at the same “babaw” jokes, discuss the same Philippine showbiz news and crave for the same kare-kare and lechon. There’s also a certain satisfaction I get when talking with a Pinoy in Tagalog – especially when you’re talking about somebody. Tsismis, in other words. The great thing about doing that here is that nobody else understands you and you’re free to criticize anyone, even if they’re sitting right next to you. In other words, masarap mamintas (Aileen’s a champ at this) dito sa States!

Anyway, it was fun to attend that festival even if just to meet and talk with some other Pinoys. We hope to get more involved with the community here and make new friends.

Oh My God…. have you ever seen anything freakier than this picture below? It’s from Liza Minelli’s wedding about a month ago. It looks like a modern-day version of the Adams family. This is not a Photoshop job, folks…. sadly, this is the real thing.

Counting down the minutes til the weekend…… in the meantime, I’ve rediscovered the joys of playing Bejeweled (thanks to Aileen). It comes in real handy for boring days like this one.

Also, it’s not true that I won’t admit to Aileen “selling” this house to me. She did convince me! I was kinda set on the other one we looked at (because of different reasons), but she ultimately convinced me that it was the better one of the two. Kinda gives you an idea of what our marriage is like eh?

I’m not exactly looking forward to packing and moving all our stuff in! Masochism is not exactly my kind of thing. I do agree that it would be nice to come home to a cozy house instead of a cramped apartment.

I liked this house the first time we toured it. Edu would never admit it but I changed his mind into liking this house better than the other one we were looking at. I’m just hoping our furniture would look good here :)…

We terribly need a crash course in house repairs (not that this house needs any right now). Edu’s starting to watch those home improvement TV shows :). He’s starting to look a bit like Martha Stewart these days.

For anybody who’s wondering, below is a picture of the house which will be Casa De Francisco by the end of June. It’s a 4BR/2.5 Bath house with a big kitchen and a good-sized backyard. We can’t wait to move in! It’s going to be a very nice change from living in a cramped apartment. Zoe will finally have a yard to play in, Aileen will have more rooms to decorate and I’ll have a larger space to put in my home theater equipment.

Click on the image below for more pictures.