Daily Report: Fish Fry

Not too much going on today. I've bitched to Landlady Maggie (as Landlord Jumz is out of town for 2 weeks) about the fact that my house has no water. She sent some guys over today who puttered around for a while. Don't know if they fixed things or not. We can put water into the cistern on the roof and it will provide the house with water... but whatever we don't use immediately will drain out in 3 or 4 hours. Since central Jasaan always runs out of water from about 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., that means that once the cistern is empty, it stays empty for the rest of the day... at least until mid-evening.

Epril went in to CDO today to pick up some Star Trek DVDs for me, and Ednel went with her and bought some cream dory fish (about 120 pisos per kilo) to do a fish fry for me. I really can't stand the fish that Filipinos regularly eat, which is the small, highly smelly breeds of fish with grey to brown to dark red flesh. Cream dory is a catfish with very nice white meat.

Anyway, Ednel made some beer batter cream dory fried fish for lunch, and everyone thought it was quite good. I found it to be only so-so: When cooked, cream dory doesn't become flaky like a proper cod, but instead becomes a bit more mushy or crumbly. Oh well. I've heard parrot fish is another good option. We'll try that next. (And your fish suggestions in the comments are always welcome.)

I was watching a program on Discovery Science about brewing beer. Apparently it's a pretty popular home hobby. I thought since I like beer so much, that might be fun — assuming that home brewing is legal in The Philippines, which I don't know. I went online and looked at prices. You can buy a complete home brewing kit for under $200... but the price of the ready-made ingredient packages are $40 (not including the cost of getting them to The Philippines), and only yield about 20 liters... so about $2 per liter. Too expensive: A liter of San Miguel beer only costs $1.10.

It was off to bed a bit early so that I could be up for the World Cup game between Germany and Spain at 2:30 a.m. Steve came over and watched it with Susan and Epril and me. Very good defensive game, and I think that the right team (Spain) won.

I won't be getting up at 2:30 a.m. to watch the Uruguay-Germany consolation game on the 10th, but obviously the finals between Spain and The Netherlands will be a big event that none of us will be missing.