Daily Report: Away From My Desk

I worked 90 minutes this morning. I figured it was actually a perfect representation of what the future of my job will look like, based on the proportion of different types of work I got (speech rec. with good and fair authors, plus regular transcription). At the end, it looks like there will be a slight reduction in pay — about 10% to 15% — using speech recognition. (The 99% of transcriptionists who were slower typists than me will see either no change or an increase in their pay... so it's not a scam or anything. It's just a leveling of the playing field whereas before I had a big advantage in earning ability.)

At noontime, Epril and I went and joined all the other filipatriate couples (that's my new invented word for couples consisting of a Filipina and expatriate, jot it down somewhere) at Kingston Lodge for their weekly roast beef dinner. We sat with Andy and Layla, Nelson and Shiela, and Chris and Rhea. Epril decided to take a break from roast beef this week and instead ordered pancit. She paid the price when her lunch finally arrived after everyone else was finished with theirs.

After that, Epril went out shopping at Gaisano Mall while I stayed at home.

There is a new alcoholic beverage being sold in stores that is a strawberry-margarita-flavored drink. It tastes vaguely similar to the Thai wine cooler "Spy Pink" actually. It tastes quite a bit like a strawberry margarita, but not quite. I sat around with my blender and tried to mix the drink in with tequila, triple sec, and lime juice to see if I could come up with a proper-tasting strawberry margarita, but couldn't coax enough strawberry flavor out. (I also tried using the strawberry lambanog instead of tequila, and that worked a little bit better.) I might try to use it accentuate the flavor of the bitter little strawberries that they sell here in The Philippines. Bob McCrea and I are dedicated to making good strawberry margaritas here... while lacking all of the fundamental ingredients except tequila.

I got to the very end of my Ratchet & Clank game and found that I didn't have enough bolts to upgrade my weapons to beat the evil emperor... so I'm stuck. Instead of going back and getting more bolts, I'm moving on to Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation 2).