I’m still out and about, filling in those hours in the usual ways, but I’m always glad for the opportunity to do so. Many others haven’t had my good fortune and can no longer get out and about. My time will come, but for now, I’m feeling blessed.
As is our custom, we did our Sunday Sweets Street Stroll to start the morning. I made a video of the stroll through the first neighborhood. I still need to improve my situational awareness regarding the direction I’m pointing the camera—I turn my head but forget to capture what I’m looking at. Here it is, for better or worse:
Here are some other photos I took along the way:
Next week I’ll video the second neighborhood we visit for your viewing pleasure.
Swan spent some time in the afternoon with her clan at the family compound in Matain. At beer o’clock, I headed for our regular Sunday rendezvous at Red Bar. I didn’t bring an umbrella and almost regretted it, but I arrived just before the skies opened up.
Manager Cliff wasn’t around, and the vibe was different with an empty “backslappers’ table.” On the plus side, I was given control of the music selections (and volume) and, for some reason, decided to play one hit song from every year I’ve been alive to hear it. I started in 1955 and made it through twenty years before it was time to move on to the next bar. While I was engaged in my DJ duties, a delivery from Foodies arrived, so we placed an order for our table: the usual chicken quesadillas for me, pancit, and chicken fingers for the gals.
We opted to make Rum Jungle our nightcap venue. Our regular waitress, Chu, had taken the night off, but Mercy—the gal who beat me in the 9-ball tourney last week—filled in nicely. It turns out she was the champion that night, so it felt good to know I’d lost to the best.
I just wasn’t feeling like expanding my drinking window last night, and wimped out a little after 8 p.m. Hey, knowing when to say when is a good thing, right? I did enjoy a homemade strawberry-banana smoothie before calling it a night and hitting the hay.
Facebook memories took me back in time this morning:
Ah, what’s life without memories. Keep ’em coming!
Speaking of which, from the November 2022 LTG archives, I am back home after my week in Cambodia. When I made the decision about where to spend my retirement years, Cambodia was a close second to the Philippines. The language barrier was the deciding factor. In this post, I reflect on how much I enjoyed my stay in Phnom Penh but ultimately felt that I had made the right choice about where to live.
Today’s YouTube video is about proposed changes to immigration law regarding long-term stays on a tourist visa. I’ve been using a tourist visa since my arrival in 2018. The only caveat is that I have to leave the country at least once every three years. That hasn’t been a problem for me, except during the COVID scamdemic, when I had to get vaccinated in order to come back home. Anyway, if the law changes, I might have to leave the country once a year, which is doable but a pain in the ass. Still, the Philippines is more lenient with visas than other countries I’ve looked at, such as Vietnam and Thailand. We shall see, but I’m too old and settled in my ways to make a permanent move.
Here I go again:
And on that note, I’ll say so long for now and get ready to go Hashing.
As a special treat, we’ll do what I was doing last night: playing a hit song from every year I’ve existed. Here’s one from 1955: