Friday, March 12, 2010

Have you read "Vince's Life: The Wedding"?!


Weddings have been filling up my world lately, even in the books I'm reading! I just finished Vince's Life: The Wedding. It's the last book of the Vince's Life trilogy and, OMG, guys, you gotta gotta read it! I am sooooo in love right now. I am sooooo happy with how the story turned out.

Actually, I didn't know how the story was going to turn out because things were happening so fast and you never really know what's going to happen next and you're just sitting on the edge of your seat, turning the page as fast as you can because you're just dying to know how it's going to end! Ahhh, that Vince Teves, he really knows how to make girls hang on to his every word!

Get your copy of Vince's Life: The Wedding now. Available at all bookstores nationwide. I'm trying to get an interview with Vince, by the way! He's just very shy right now. Maybe if y'all buy his book and The Wedding makes it to Powerbooks' Best Seller list again, he'll grant us all a chat!

SPOILER ALERT IN COMMENTS SECTION. DO NOT LEAVE A COMMENT UNLESS YOU'VE READ THE FINAL BOOK!
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Thanks for the blog love!

I've been telling you guys about my house in the newly revamped Female Network but I failed to mention that FN has included Topaz Horizon in its list of Blogs We Love! I know my screen cap is tiny but I swear to you that my blog is the very last on its list (it's alphabetical!) so do visit FN if you need convincing!

This blog also made it to All Women Stalk's list of 7 Best Blogs By Women. Wow! And I'm the only Filipina there! I feel like it's my birthday, people!

Thanks for the love. Now I have to make sure this blog gets better so your acknowledgment won't go to waste!
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

We bought these instead

The home plan this year was to buy a new sofa. The sofa we have is from Vince's days as a bachelor. When we got married, I had it reupholstered and it now looks like this:


Thing is, when Vince bought the sofa from Our Home in 2002, it cost him just P10,000. When I had it reupholstered in 2007, it cost me P12,000. Vince thought that was ridiculous (but, hey, it looks much better!) so he's been bugging me to approve the purchase of a new sofa. The problem with the current situation is my husband's taste has vastly improved--Our Home just doesn't cut it anymore so he's been lusting for the contemporary sofas in BoConcept. Starting price for sofas in Bo's? P120,000! So I've been saying, "No, no, no!"


But the last time we visited Bo's, he fell in love--and I kinda did, too--with the Largo sofa above (the one we saw was a dark gold). It's this plush comfy sink-in-heaven sofa that also came with a price tag that was just unbelievable. Unbelievable! But... we decided to buy it anyway! Then the rising costs of my pregnancy and the realization that the baby will be one expensive critter made us rethink the sofa. So... good-bye perfect sofa!

Feeling very deprived is not a good feeling, however. So we logged onto Amazon and bought these instead:

Olympus PEN EPL-1--the camera Vince has been wanting to buy since we found out about Jelly Bean!

We bought it with the Panasonic LUMIX pancake lens, too.

Then Vince just had to buy this horrible thing: the BioShock 2 Big Daddy plush doll. It really gives me the creeps!

And I just had to buy these fantastic books:



I'm so excited for my books! They're all hardcover editions--and they're huge books! I can't wait! And, yes, they're for me, not for the Jelly Bean. Not to worry, if the Bean is anything like us, it will be devouring the books in the library in no time!

We used Johnny Air to have the stuff shipped here. We bought from Amazon before, you see, and the package of books Vince bought ended up in the post office some 20 weeks later. When we got it, the package had been tampered with and the books had been definitely looked through. So much for security.

But when I used Johnny Air to buy a few pairs of shoes, the shoes were delivered to the New York office in 3 days then to the Megamall office in 12 days, totaling 15 days from purchase to delivery. My package was also untouched. Fast and secure!

I'll give a report as soon as the stuff arrives--I'll tell you guys if the gadgets especially arrived safe and sound. Chuvaness told me that Johnny Air can be trusted absolutely (she buys her cameras from Amazon and uses Johnny Air, too!) so we're really keeping our fingers crossed that things will go well with our delivery. If so, then good-bye shopping malls!

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Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Behind-the-scenes at Mariel's wedding

So many cute photos from Mariel's wedding so here are more!

The night before the wedding, maid of honor Kai Morales and matron of honor me trooped to Mariel's suite to go over the details of the big day.

Then all of Mariel's friends came by to help with the souvenirs. We all had to fold boxes for the candy bar and guests can just scoop all the candy and chocolate they want into the boxes!

Next morning was bright and sunshiny! Vince and me at the hotel lobby, gathering with all the other guests to board our coasters that will take us to the church.

Outside the church, we wait with Kai. It's breezy in the shadow of the cathedral but inside, ooh wow, it was hot!

The reception was held on the beach. This is my first beach wedding! It's very relaxed and happy. What I really like about Mariel's wedding was it still looked so fabulous! A lot of beach weddings I see in magazines are so... blah. 

Gorgeous guests: photographer Monica Barretto, Martha Stewart Weddings Philippines editor-in-chief Tata Mapa and makeup artist Marie Calica.

I really should put all these nice pics in a USB stick and plug it into our unused digital frame that we got for free when Vince bought his computer monitor last year. Yep, we have a really nice digital frame that we aren't using! But with all the pics I have now, I think it's time to fire it up.

Oh, for more on Mariel's wedding, click here and here.

Photos by Monica Barretto.
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Monday, March 08, 2010

Welcome to my new readers!

Blogging for this new year is off to a good start. My visitors are steadily increasing. Hooray!

Here's Nuffnang's report for the last 2 weeks, an average of 518 unique visits a day:

Here's SiteMeter's report for the first three days of March, an average of 535 unique visits a day:
March 1
March 2
March 3

So I'm basically averaging 530 readers a day, and these days the daily visits are actually at 600+. That's a pretty good number, considering that just a little over a year ago, I had about 100 readers. It sure took me a while to get those readers, though! Here's what I did:

1. Make an interesting blog! Good grammar, correct spelling. Lots of photos. Fun topics!
2. Leave good comments on other people's blogs. None of that stupid "Hey, great blog" and "Love your blog" and "Care to exchange links?" nonsense.
3. Promote on Facebook!

Oh man, that was a lot of work and I really just started promoting Topaz Horizon around October 2008. So that's about a year of hard work. Now I usually just do Step 1 because if you make a good blog, people will come back for more and maybe they'll like it enough to tell other people about it.

Thanks for reading, old friends! And to the new folks coming around recently, I hope you like what you read and come back soonest!
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