A Sunday Retreat And More

Bellarmine Freshmen had their retreat today, and it was a long one. It started at 9am and ended at 9pm. Yes, 12 hours. Now, what can they possible talk about for 12 hours. But it looked like they had a great time. And I drove Jake, Coby, and Nick this morning.

When I got back, I tried to watch TV. I made sure I set the alarm in my phone to go off at 11:15 so I can prepare for mass, in case I dozed off. And yes, I did fall asleep. There must be something with the Lazy Boy chair I sat on. No matter what time of the day it was, if I sat on that chair and laid my back against it, within 30 seconds (maybe less), I was asleep.

I heard mass at 12:30pm, then had a late lunch with the wife. We were choosing between Pizza Antica in Santa Row, or the new Isla restaurant (serving regional Filipino food) in Newark. I figured that the drive to San Jose, plus the possible long wait for a table at Pizza Antica wasn't worth it, considering that it was already almost 2pm and that we were both hungry, too. Isla seemed the lesser evil, or so we thought.

Isla was packed. Looked like every Filipino in the Fremont-Union City-Newark area was there. Since they just opened a couple of weeks earlier, it was a bit chaotic. The people sitting the guests didn't know what they were doing. It appeared like we waited longer than we would have had had we gone to Pizza Antica. It was almost 3pm before we got seated. The wife and I thought that the wait was worth it because we loved the food. More about it in a separate post.

From there, I dropped off the wife at home since she had some errands to run. I did, too. I proceed to Sunnyvale, to Kings Academy, and picked up the Bay to Bay apparel I ordered a couple of weeks earlier. On the way back, I did a quick stop at Safeway. Then, it was back home.

A little past 7:30pm or so, I turned on my HF radio to check in to the Mabuhay DX Net on 40m (conducted Sundays 7:30 PDT on 7.181 MHz). The band conditions weren't good and the stations that would normally come in strong barely made it above the noise level. It's either the Net was cut short or they never had one because no one can be heard. With bad band conditions, there wasn't any point in staying on the air. So I turned the rig off.

The boys were picked up by Coby's parents after the retreat. The mom actually offered to bring the boys in the morning since I was up late the night before picking them up from the Haunt excursion. I said I didn't mind driving in the morning, but asked if she wanted to pick them up in the evening instead. The boys were hungry so they got something to eat. And I had my late dinner of LOs (leftovers) as well.

Jake got home past 10:30pm. After a while, it was time to call it a day.

Note:  Author wishes to acknowledge Yelp for the photograph used in this post.