just won the lottery

i won a dvd through an internet raffle!

As promised in the previous entry, I would break the blogging silence for the occasional good news of winning the lottery—guess what, I have won the lottery. but before you go clogging up my inbox asking for a portion of the win, I don’t believe that’s possible. coz what I won is a dvd of the movie Funny HAHA. Ain’t no $81M but it’s good news nonetheless coz a win is a win is a win. Plus it seems like an interesting indie movie. And I was never good at raffle contests so winning on this one is quite a boost for the raffle luck self-esteem.

and free belgian fries too!

Aside from the DVD and the free TiVo which I also won recently, which is sitting quietly unused right here beside me in the office waiting to be sold on ebay or craigslist, I also got a nice coupon yesterday for a free order of Belgian fries with choice of dip. Was trying to spend the whole weekend locking myself up (in Starbucks, and the NYU library) to work on the upcoming NL trip book but the social animal in me wanted to get its dose of human interaction. And so, I passed by the Pomme Frites store yesterday to pay those Filipino folks a visit. And for an order of regular Belgian fries, of course, which they once again supersized to large without me asking.

Ended up staying there for at least 3 hours. Which was pretty good. Had a nice chitchat with the folks in the middle of them serving their hordes of customers (and talking about them in Filipino). Even found myself serving a can of coke to one of the customers. Well, I had to earn my hanging out there somehow.

Was good conversation. Learned more about the folks. Talked about plans. And was even asked for a little bit of advice—Eric is torn between staying here, trying to earn for his family back home and coming back home and being with his wife and his 2 kids (which will be 3 come December). Normally I’d say stay here for the experience (which he is enjoying a lot) but it of course gets tricky when there’s family “issues” involved so I don’t think I ended up saying anything definite. Rey was quite funny too. He has his family here but might need to go back to the Philippines in a few months. He was on the phone talking to his mamasan friend in Japan—think just-bought-him-a-laptop-mamasan mamasan. He was sharing his funny fries store stories too. Like this one time when they were talking about this annoying customer in Filipino only to realize that the customer was Filipino and understood what they were saying after all. Oops. Tataetae. Anyway, we’ll probably go out on one of their days off soon. Should be good.

That’s it for now. Back to my little island. The book is going to be done soon. And I’m quite happy with it so far–discovering creative bones I never thought I had.

Til the next lottery win! Or book release. Il jointman signs off with yet another preview of Spreek Je Filipijns?.

safe haven spread for upcoming book, spreekje filipijns