Costume season
All you parents worrying about where to get Philippine national costumes for your kids for the Buwan ng Wika celebrations at their schools, look no further.
The snapshot above is from my daughter Maia’s Buwan ng Wika (National Language Month) Celebration at her school. Maia (second from right) is wearing a Tausug formal dress called the Biyatawi. The biyatawi is a blouse made of plain material like satin and is ornamented with tambuku (gold or silver filigree) on the breast, shoulders, and cuffs. It is usually worn with sawwal (loose trousers) of silk or brocade. A habul tiyahian is either slung across the shoulder or allowed to hang on one arm.
Of course, for this outfit we went to the tried and tested Echague Bazar in Quiapo, which I wrote about sometime last year, after we discovered it while looking for where to buy United Nations costumes.
The costume Maia is wearing cost around PHP400.00. There are cheaper versions of this costume, but we picked this one out because of the finer quality compared to the less costly set.
Teachers looking for their own Filipiniana costumes should look no further as well, because the Echague Bazar also sells adult size costumes. Click through to my other post so find out how to get to the Echague Bazar.
Compatibility
One of the things we had to do for a recent client was a gallery and slide show of their organizations photos.
Pretty straightforward, yes? They were running wordpress and all I needed to do was find a suitable plugin that would provide the Gallery feature which would probably have a slideshow module as well.
That’s what we thought too, until we realized that the mysql database on the client’s server was of a lower version than what the wordpress plugin required. Since we did not have administrator access to the server, we could not effect an upgrade to the mysql database. And the client was clueless as to how to request it.
And when we coached the client into telling the host that we needed an upgrade, the client was told to wait until the host was ready. We’re still waiting.
In the meantime we relied on Google’s picasaweb slideshow feature to provide the required gallery and embedded slide show.
Dressing for success
… is something that I never really got to master until now.
The intricacies of formal dressing have always been lost on me, for shame, granddaughter of a fashion designer, niece of an acknowledged fashion plate. However, give me urban clothing and I can raise the guts to go anywhere, even into the middle of a formal ball — that is, if they let me in in the first place.
The thing is I’ve never really been comfortable with wearing clothes that limit my movement. I’m not exactly an active person, but being a mom for a time meant that I had to go into places that might make me show more than I’d care to if I had been wearing skirts and stuff. But put me in clothes that I am comfortable in and my level of confidence builds up, no matter what situation I’m in.
Black Friday
Black Friday is the discount shopping day that follows American Thanksgiving, which is always on a Friday. Retailers promote Black Friday as the day to start shopping for Christmas. Black Friday is often advertised with “Christmas Sales” as well as “Thanksgiving Sales.”
The word “black” in Black Friday refers to the term “in the black” meaning making a profit. Today, Black Friday is not an important source of profit to retailers, but is important in driving traffic in to stores. Lots of retailers mail special Black Friday circulars to consumers, announcing deeply discounted items in the hopes that consumers will visit their store on Black Friday.
However, the Black Friday that comes to my mind is the Steely Dan song:
When Black Friday comes
I’ll stand down by the door
And catch the grey men when they
Dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I’ll collect everything I’m owed
And before my friends find out
I’ll be on the road
When Black Friday falls you know it’s got to be
Don’t let it fall on me
and while totally inauspicious compared to the one first mentioned, I’m starting to think that I’m bound for the latter one …
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