Brian's blog

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While silver is selling for $10.50, and gold’s selling for $800-$830, this is a prime time to buy precious metals. Dominic assures us that the prices will skyrocket in the next few years. You could get a ten-fold return on an investment in silver. I recommend GoldMoney.com. Check it today. Precious metals are a safe haven and a wise investment.

I couldn’t be happier to hear the cacophony of a dozen dogs angrily barking at each other nearby. Sounds as if I’m in a kennel. People don’t discipline their dogs here; they only feed the noisemakers. If you get e-mail from me at 3 a.m., I’m surfing the internet while dogs bark enough to prohibit sleep.

For months, Dominic and I have heard crawling, scratching and gnawing sounds above our ceiling which suggest that large rodents are in the crawl space between our ceiling and the floor of the unoccupied apartment above us. When moving across the ceiling or scratching in place above my desk, they sound like large claws – not bear claws, but not tiny field mouse claws, either. »→

This morning I took Rose* and two of her neighbors to Baguio City to eat lunch in a Jollibee restaurant and ride rental tricycles and a pedal boat in Burnham Park. I have wondered in previous outings if a pedaled boat would be preferable to a rowed boat, so today we went to the concessionaire who had royal blue-and-yellow pedal boats and row boats. I picked an open-top boat. »→

When we arrived in Manila in March, we got 40.25 pesos per dollar over the counter. Since then, the United States dollar has been grossly devalued by the wanton printing of funny money by the Treasury Department. Nonetheless, I have observed weekly in the newspapers an increasingly favorable (for me) dollar-to-peso exchange rate. The past several days we have seen an interbank exchange rate of 49.7 -49.9 pesos per dollar. Today a dollar buys 50 pesos.

My purchasing power has increased, and ten percent of the Philippines’ economy is U.S. dollars sent from Filipino expatriates back to the homeland. These days, the dollars transmitted from foreign lands to relatives back in the Philippines can buy one-fifth more pesos than they could in March! »→

I couldn’t be more happy to hear a drunken man bellowing on the street several meters away while dogs fight 80 meters away in the other direction. Monterrazas Village is so unnecessarily noisy, though it was described as a quiet neighborhood. I plugged noise-canceling, in-canal earphones into my iMac to listen to music. But I could still hear all the caterwauling. (sigh)

I found FreeRice.com, a website committed to ending hunger. Advertising sponsors pay the UN World Food Program for our participation in an online vocabulary game. For each word shown in turn, click on one of the four given possible definitions or synonyms. Every correct answer gains 20 grains of rice for the poor, donated by the sponsors. »→

I walked down to Baguio Gold to see the family and take the girls back uphill so that we could get a jeepney ride to Baguio City. On Thursday, the sisters had expressed in riding tricycles in Burnham Park, so I said that I’d take them today.

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