My Canon PowerShot A710 IS
A month ago, I bought a new digital camera, a Canon Powershot A710 IS (Image Stablizer). You might have recalled I also bought a Canon Powershot A530 last June for a Boracay trip that never materialized. So why buy two cameras in a span of 4 months? Well I gave my old Canon Powershot A530 to L. Deprived of a digital camera for more than one year, L begged to have a new camera because it’s her last year in Ateneo. I thought “L has learned her lesson so maybe it’s time to give her a digital camera”.
At the height of her blogging days, she had quite a collection of digital gadgets to enhance her blog entries. Unfortunately L seems to have a jinx with digital toys. I love L very much. Sadly, L just hasn’t been lucky with anything containing “electronic chips” for the past two years. Let me count the ways:
1. For her 18th birthday, I bought her this nice camera phone. Two months after, the phone drowned as she slipped into the shallow waters of Tali Beach. She wanted to capture the breathtaking sunset. The dumbest thing one can ever do when a cellphone gets wet is to turn it on. Naturally, the battery will cause a short circuit, I told L. “Just remember to remove the battery when this happens and dry the phone”
2. Her Sony Cybershot digi cam together with her Panasonic Digital Camcorder w/ Still Mode/MP3/Voice Recording were stolen as she played a video game in the Power Plant Mall. She had placed the bag on the floor and was too preoccupied blasting away the enemies in the video screen . Little did she know that her bag was already snatched just a few feet away from her.
3. A sympathetic reader donated a part of the cost of a new digital camera, a Canon Ixus 430 in 2004. L used her savings and I pitched in the rest to buy this new camera costing 35,000 pesos in 2004. It was expensive because a 4 megapixel camera was a new thing back then. Barely a year after, she vacationed in San Francisco. As she toured one of San Francisco’s aquariums, she slipped and the contents of her handbag fell into a pond. Her handbag’s zipper was not zipped and the camera fell off head first . What did she do? She picked her camera and turned it on. ugh, read number 1 above. Don’t turn on a wet electronic gadget.
There are a lot more. I cannot even fathom how her CPU’s motherboard ended up in smoke.
My family is moving to our new home in the Pasig-Markina sometime next year. It’s an exciting move and something to look forward to. One of the things that I will miss in Makati are the array of Cable Broadband Internet providers and free wi-fi hotspots. I just realized how fortunate Makati residents are when it comes to broadband providers. I have been spoiled by 
My 41 year old baby brother in Missouri (I still call him baby brother because I took care of him) wants me to be his wedding coordinator for a church [tag]wedding[/tag] in the Philippines. My brother and his wife did not have a church wedding 14 years ago due to financial challenges. Now that he is a successful neurologist, he dreams of a marriage with God’s blessing. He has indeed been blessed through the years with 4 lovely children, a lucrative medical parctice and a devoted wife. I told him that weddings in the Philippines is not the same as it used to be. I started to look around for wedding fairs. The last time I attended a wedding bazaar was in 2004 for Lauren’s debut plans. Just looking at the prices for photography, venue, catering , cake and other perks for Lauren’s debut could easily cost 150,000 pesos ($2,500.00) at the least. My daughter dubbed it “