Getting back in the groove yesterday with the Wednesday Walkers group hike.
I thought we were going to do the standard Philseco loop, but my hike mates had other ideas. We left the road and headed up into the hills on a path I hadn’t visited for at least a couple of years. Oh well, nothing wrong with a little climb-it change.
I do enjoy getting out for these walkabouts and hope I’ll be able to continue doing them well into the future. Having Scott back out with us is quite the inspiration in an “if he can do it, I can do it” kinda way. I also get to steal some of his photographs!
The other side of my pleasure coin is lifting a bottle or ten of beer when the sun is almost done for the day.
Swan took the evening off, so I was on my own. I decided to start things off with a visit to one of my old haunts, Cheap Charlies.
As I’ve mentioned before, Cheap Charlies defies their name by charging a whopping 250 pesos for a single lady drink. That’s a bridge too far for me (the max I pay is 200). I told my waitress they should offer a “Cheap Charlie lady drink” — just soda with no alcohol. She just laughed, but I think they’d make money on that deal.
One of the reasons I chose to start at Cheap Charlies was to get some grub from the excellent restaurant downstairs, Foodies.
And since I wasn’t buying lady drinks, I treated the girls to a bite to eat:
After departing from Cheap Charlies, I paid a visit to the Alaska Club. Owner Jerry is out of town, but the music was good, and I enjoyed my beers there. Bought my waitress a lady drink (150 pesos) and tipped the dancers 50 pesos each.
I did my nightcap next door at Wet Spot and shared drinks with fellow Hasher Beth (BF’s Wet Spot) and my regular waitress, Irene. I ordered a banana split to go from the Sit-n-Bull waitress and was surprised when she returned and advised me that they were out of ice cream. How does that happen? Oh well, I made smoothies instead when I got home.
And that’s how I filled those Wednesday hours.
Meanwhile, things must be really heating up in the USA because what seemed like an almost innocuous post I made on Facebook caused more lefty head explosions than usual.
I was sadly surprised to hear from a dear friend I used to work with, telling me I should post photos of all the school kids murdered by white men with guns. Um, that’s apples and oranges, and what has race got to do with it? Oh well, as I’ve said numerous times, no one’s mind is going to change through arguments on social media.
From Facebook memories today is this photo that was posted eight years ago by a bartender I knew in Pyeongtaek.
It is now January 2017 in the LTG archives, and I had some health issues during my trip to the Philippines that I might have been lucky to survive. When I made it back home, nebulization became a daily feature in my life. I was eventually diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), my reward for smoking cigarettes for twenty-some years. I had quit a couple of years earlier, but the damage was done. I still have occasional flare-ups, but I haven’t needed my nebulizer or oxygen tank for several months now. Fingers crossed!
In today’s YouTube video, the Filipina Pea takes us home to her province (Leyte) to meet the parents. It’s the life I see here all the time, especially on my rural hikes. As I said after my first visit to the Philippines, I’ve never seen a poorer or a happier people.
Hopefully, these won’t piss anybody off:
Yeah, another one of those boring posts. It’s better when you are living it, trust me!
Nice walk.
Gary is getting down under this fence that wasn’t there the last time we passed this way.
Are landowners casual about this sort of trespassing? Or is this not trespassing despite the new barrier?
The other side of my pleasure coin is lifting a bottle or ten of beer when the sun is almost done for the day.
I hope it was closer to “a bottle” than to “or ten.”
I went with the chicken quesadilla and was pleasantly surprised by its meaty goodness. I hereby declare it the best quesadilla in town.
Looks good… but are there hidden onions?
Oh well, I made smoothies instead when I got home.
I’d like to see a homemade banana split.
See, sometimes drinking leads to a cure.
What errors do you see in that meme?
Kevin, trespassing is situational. I wouldn’t invade someone’s personal fenced-in space, but we were taking the back way into a subdivision in that photo. I wouldn’t have climbed the fence, but then we saw that the bottom bar had been removed and there was a dirt path leading to the street. It seemed to be an unofficial back entrance, so we took it. The guard at the front gate didn’t say anything when we exited.
Yeah, that’s the low and high end of my beer intake range. I’m usually somewhere in the middle.
I didn’t look for onions and don’t recall tasting any, but I’m not onion-averse, so it didn’t matter either way.
Shit, I didn’t think there was going to be a test! Here’s a first glance look at that stupid meme:
(in chronological order)
Don’t capitalize “psychiatrist.”
I’d make three sentences into one: Put a semicolon after “it” and a comma after “scared.”
A comma after “week”
A comma after “it”
A comma after “later”
Don’t capitalize “eighty”
A comma after “visit”
A comma after “year”
Capitalize “And” in the quote
Well, now I have another headache.
Don’t capitalize “psychiatrist.”—yes.
I’d make three sentences into one: Put a semicolon after “it” and a comma after “scared.”—No comma after “scared”: use a semicolon. Otherwise, it’s a comma splice. But really, if those three sentences are the ones I think they are, they don’t need to be fused into one sentence. They’re fine as they are.
A comma after “week”—yes.
A comma after “it”—yes. And after “needed.”
A comma after “later”—yes. And de-capitalize “psychiatrist” again.
Don’t capitalize “eighty”—yes.
A comma after “visit”—yes.
A comma after “year”—okay.
Capitalize “And” in the quote—yes. Start of a new sentence, not a continuation of a previous sentence.
So the moral of the story is that there are a lot of comma and capitalization idiots out there. I’d add that the final en dash (–) should be an em dash (—) with no spaces on either side of it, but I wouldn’t expect you to catch that one since we haven’t gotten to punctuation on Substack yet. We’re currently marching through adverbs.
For what it’s worth, and we’re getting really technical here, en dashes are for numbered intervals while em dashes have several functions, including marking dramatic pauses.
• Read pages 40–60.
• I told you a thousand times—Don’t open that coffin.
But this is where I have to confess to my own sloppiness: I almost never use en dashes for numbered intervals. I always use hyphens because I’m lazy, and no one notices.
en dash: Read pages 40–60.
hyphen: Read pages 40-60.
Remember not to use hyphens/dashes if you start your interval with the word “from.”
WRONG: He was president from 1861–1865.
RIGHT: He was president from 1861 to 1865.
If you use “from,” you have to use “to.” Otherwise:
• Read pages 40–60.
Kevin, so, do I get a B-minus?
Grade grubber. All the bad students are.