tarte tatin

When Moleskine came out with its Peanuts series, I had to restrain myself from blowing almost $100 on notebooks, since Moleskines are quite pricey.

I settled on owning just one—one which I have not used because I haven’t found anything special for it yet.

After Snoopy, Moleskine came out with the brightly-hued Pac-Man (the 80’s video game, not the boxer), and while I found it cute, it wasn’t for me.

And then I found this in my inbox today:

Exupery’s Le Petit Prince meets Moleskine.

Look how lovely! Moleskine retains the signature childlike drawings of The Little Prince and incorporates it into the front page—in color, too. I’m still waiting for the day when Moleskine decides to include its pages into the limited edition fun by printing on them too, but that’d probably be too costly.

The Snoopy series came with stickers, Little Prince comes with pop-up cards.

The globe comes with the regular-sized notebooks, while the 3D landscape comes with the bigger ones.

Moleskine’s Little Prince is available for pre-order online at Moleskine Asia but will be available locally at National Bookstore in April.

I blame it on the Swatch I snagged at the Hong Kong Airport.

Now I can’t seem to stop Googling watches.

I even created a board just about watches on my Pinterest (a site you should check out, it’s awesome!).

Tonight, while I was procrastinating Googling the pink Swatch skin I saw last weekend, I saw this:

The pink Swatch I want.

I only know Jeremy Scott from his cute Longchamp Le Pliage collaborations, but these are pretty cute:

The yellow lightning bolt looks nice paired with MAC’s Wonder Woman collection Pam was raving about here, here and here.

I hope this Googling watches thing won’t turn into another obsession.

I only went to Tiendesitas to accompany Pia who needed to buy medicine for her dog, Anke.

He wasn’t even in my plans. Why would he be? I already had four at home.

But he had the most unusual eyes—they were wide and light brown, the color of pancake syrup.

Still, I hedged. I told myself, “Maybe if they gave me a discount, I’d consider it. They probably won’t, so that’s that.”

I said to the guy, “I’ll take him if you knock off five thousand from your asking price.”, thinking they wouldn’t, so I’d be safe.

Except they did. Still, I wasn’t sure. I gave them a five-hundred peso deposit, figuring it was an amount I could bear to lose if I went home and shed the puppy lust I was momentarily experiencing.

I went back that weekend, to see if I still liked him.

And that’s how I found myself bringing home a toy poodle on Valentine’s Day 2008.

He looked like he had a beard, and he was almost named Seth Rogen…or Rabbi because of it.

We were stumped for names. I wanted something tough and manly—something to belie the fact that he was actually a little furball no bigger than two joined fists.

A UFC match came on and a fighter named Tank Abbott came on.

Tank. It suited the scrappy little pup.

And so Tank it was.

At four months, he suddenly ballooned, living up to his name. I found myself the dubious owner of a toy poodle and had instead a miniature poodle on my hands. (“Pray he doesn’t turn out to be a regular-sized poodle!”, laughed the vet.)

Tank did not meet my expectations. I expected to get a poodle I could fit in my purse, I ended up with a ten-pound dog who only fits in duffel bags. I was told he would grow up to have very nice teeth, I ended up with a dog with a severe underbite that gave him a weird expression:

Even though he ate eats through a lot of my stuff, I’m glad I decided to go back for him two years ago.

Even Grace agrees with me.

Grace really loves making banners. She’s awesome.

How Grace got Tank to ride in a bike (upright!!), let go, and snap a photo, I’ll never know.

Happy anniversary, Tank! Love from your crazy dog lady owner.

Over drinks last Sunday, the topic of Catholic guilt was brought up in reference to doing the nasty—how some gals do it with one eye closed in (sometimes faked) ecstasy while the other closed in abject guilt because of the “thou shalt not diddle if you’re not wearing a ring and fed a hundred people chicken” lessons drummed into our heads since birth.

I apparently lack this guilt thing…maybe because I was too busy reading Nancy Drew under my table when this was being discussed during religion classes.

I do have deadline guilt though.

I can’t blog when I know I owe someone words.

Because I really should be utilizing these words somewhere else instead of here.

Now I have blog guilt too. If my blog were a kid, it’d be wearing a stinky diaper with sticky snot running down one nose and chocolate smeared all over his face.

I was feeling a little lot crappy today (no thanks to you, Aunt Flo), and I really had to drag my butt off the bed to shower and get dressed.

Since I was going out to work today, I had to tame my hair into some semblance of order, so I ran mousse through my damp hair.

I was so out of it that I didn’t do this in front of a mirror and I just scrunched and finger-combed.

Of course, when it was time to go to work, that was when I decided to take a look in the mirror just to make sure I didn’t have any foreign objects stuck to my face.

And that’s when I saw my crusty, flaky hair.

It looked like I had stumbled on the tail end of a porn movie and I was on the receiving end of several happy showers (forecast: heavy drizzles with a chance of jizz).

Moral of the story: do not mousse your hair without a mirror.

I have no one to blame but Koko for this.

Last December, she asked me to look for cute Disney printed red envelopes for her —you know, the ones used to put money in for good luck and handed out. They’re called “ang pao” or “am pao”, I’m not really sure which term is the proper one, but they kinda sound like that, so let’s just call it red envelopes.

I thought they would be easy to find in Hong Kong, but apparently there are also red envelopes meant for weddings, and it was tricky because I couldn’t distinguish between the characters meant for “happy sex life” (haha) and “may you have shitloads and shitloads of money forever” (the more poetic version, at least).

It was a good thing my Dad had it in his itinerary to hit all the groceries and food markets we passed by because I finally found a small cardboard shelf at Jason’s in iSquare on Tsim Sha Tsui.

Oh em squeeeee!! I didn’t know they were going to be so adorable. Of course I had to buy for myself, even though I wasn’t going to be giving out red envelopes. Plus, they’re too cute to give away (although Koko gave me one with money inside too, whee, thanks!!! :D).

So here’s my virtual red envelope of cuteness wishing you health, wealth, hot sex lives, happy and healthy doggies and all the good things in life.

Happy New Metal Rabbit Year/Happy Metal New Rabbit Year/Happy Metal Rabbit New Year!!!